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Roger McNamee is a US fund manager and venture capital investor with investments in Electronic Arts, Sybase, Palm Inc. and Facebook. In 2004, along with Bono and others, he co-founded Elevation Partners, a private equity firm. He recently published Zucked: wake up to the Facebook disaster.
What is your story with Facebook?
I am a technology investor since 1982 and a technological optimist until very recently. I met Mark Zuckerberg for the first time in 2006, at the age of 22 and at the age of 50. Even then, it was already obvious to me that Facebook would be as successful as Google at that time, which was spectacular. He had broken the code for the two things that had historically damaged all the companies in the network: he had demanded an authenticated identity and had provided real privacy control.
I thought it was a resounding success. So I met him and before he said anything, I told him that I was afraid that someone was trying to buy the company they had to pay a billion dollars and everyone was going to tell him to take the money. And I said, look, if you believe in your dream, I hope you will tell them no.
It turned out that the reason he came to see me was that a company had offered a billion dollars for Facebook and everyone had told him to accept it.
He wanted a chief of the operation and I suggested Sheryl Sandberg and I persuaded her to meet Mark. He sold it to the company and they became a team.
When did you realize that things got worse?
In January 2016, I saw things emanating from Facebook groups apparently badociated with the Bernie Sanders campaign. The material they spread was uniformly inappropriate, it was misogynistic, it was misinformation.
And then, a month later, I saw a report that Facebook had kicked out a company that used its advertising tools to gather information about people interested in Black Lives Matter and sell that data to police departments. It was a mbadive violation of civil rights and quite horrible.
Finally, I contacted Mark and Sheryl with an opinion article that I wrote, in which I suggested that there was a systemic problem with algorithms and the business model that allowed bad actors to hurt people. innocent. They responded very politely, but hinted that what I saw was isolated and that they were busy with it.
So when I decided that I better understand exactly what happened. I met Tristan Harris, a Google design ethicist, who talked about what he called "brain piracy," a term he invented to describe the persuasion technologies used by the internet platforms that allow them to develop habits in the minds of the people who use them. products. These habits evolve into dependencies, and this situation makes [users] vulnerable to manipulation.
Like a thunderbolt, it made me understand what had potentially influenced the elections in the United States and potentially Brexit.
Is this book the culmination ofSome efforts?
No, it is only the next step. We stayed for a while then, kaboom, the Observer and Carole Cadwalladr told the story of Cambridge Analytica and that changed everything.
We would have hit the drum [but] the angle of privacy was the first that really [hit] the house, with everyone, and everything has been transformed.
That's when I started working on the book, and the concept was very simple: you can only do a lot with a small team of people who walk around and meet in small groups. So we had to find a way to expand the message. What I was really trying to do was use my personal story to help people understand what matters so that new information can be interpreted in their own way.
I thought it was not a technology story. It's not a business story. This is a story of everyone. This is a disaster we all face, and we do not necessarily have a vocabulary, because the business model created by Facebook and Google is something we have never seen before.
They were very busy manipulating the attention to make you spend more time in [their services]. And it's a very dangerous business model for society. It's bad for the mental health of the people who use it. It's terrible for democracy. It completely destroys any sense of privacy and undermines the entrepreneurial spirit in the United States, because these companies essentially choose one industry at a time and disrupt it so as to destroy the old without replacing it with something equal value.
What was the reaction of this book on Facebook?
What surprises me the most is that no member of Facebook has contacted me since February 2017. I know Sheryl since 2000 and she is one of the most politically savvy and equipped executives exceptional. And the idea that they would not touch the critics is amazing. It is so damaging for them to be so closed to criticism.
The problems are not isolated. They are systemic. They are linked to a business model that has worked extraordinarily well for investors and horribly for everyone else. Failure to recognize that moderation would have been a better long-term strategy for society will ultimately be very expensive, as governments around the world have no choice but to give up.
Is this a problem of Facebook or a problem of Mark Zuckerberg?
It's bigger than Facebook. This is a problem for the entire Internet platform industry, and Mark is just one of the two most successful practitioners.
It's a cultural model that infected Silicon Valley around 2003 – exactly when Facebook and LinkedIn were created – and it comes from a specific route.
Silicon Valley spent the period from 1950 to 2003, first with the space program, then with personal computers and the Internet. The cultures of these things were very idealistic: make the world a better place through technology. Give people who use technology the means to be themselves the best. Steve Jobs has characterized his computers as bikes for the spirit.
The problem with Google and Facebook is that their goal is to replace humans in many fundamental activities of life. If you think about what they do with artificial intelligence, three markets have proven to be extremely lucrative: getting rid of white-collar work; Tell people what to think with filter bubbles – that's what Facebook does; and recommendation engines that tell people what to love or consume.
Any list of things that make us who we are includes these three characteristics. Our work, our beliefs and our pleasures are part of what makes us human. And to remove them and give them to a computer seems to me rather the opposite of bicycles for the mind.
Do you think there is a version of history in which we do not find ourselves in this situation?
The culture in which Facebook is born is this deeply libertarian philosophy adopted by its first investor, Peter Thiel, and the other members of the so-called "PayPal mafia".
They were almost alone responsible for creating the social generation of companies. And their ideas were brilliant. Their ideas on how to develop businesses were revolutionary and extraordinarily successful. The challenge was that they also had a very different philosophy from previous generations of Silicon Valley. Their idea was that the disruption was perfectly reasonable because you were not really responsible for anyone except yourself, so you were not responsible for the consequences of your actions.
It's this philosophy that has inspired their companies in the idea that you might have a goal – in the case of Facebook, connecting the whole world on a network – and that this goal would be so important that it would justify all the necessary means to achieve it.
You said that Brexit was an awakening. Why was it?
I never thought that there would be an asymmetry in the way advertising works. That to attract attention, you want to appeal to that [Tristan Harris] calls "the lizard brain", things that cause indignation and fear. Things that essentially create a perception of reward. These things, when you put them in advertising, can really be bad for democracy. Suddenly, a neutral centrist idea only arouses very little interest on Facebook, where extremely extreme and emotionally charged ideas are viral.
There is evidence that in the United States, Trump campaign messages have reached 17 times effective range per dollar spent compared to Clinton's messages, which is an incredible advantage.
With Brexit, because of the shocking result, I had to ask myself: did Facebook play a role? Because clearly Facebook had been part of campaign promotion strategies. And it was also clear that in one case you had a message loaded with emotion and in the other, a very neutral message. So it was a very good test of this issue. I did not have the data, so I did not know. But the badumption came to mind and, in the context of the other things I had seen, triggered more alarms.
Can you see Facebook changing on issues like this without being forced to?
Tristan and I worked very hard to share our message with Facebook people in a way that they could accept. After two years, I'm skeptical about anyone's ability to make Facebook make these changes internally.
I am afraid that we have no longer reached the stage of stimulation by external stimuli. This is why I stress the role that users of these products must play in removing all or part of their attention and in their voices heard with government decision makers to impose a regulatory change.
Zuckerberg argued that the disadvantages of Facebook are the same as those of the Internet. Do you think that is true?
No. There was an old definition of chutzpah: a child who kills parents and who asks thanks to the court because he is an orphan. That's what we're talking about here. Internet is like that because Google and Facebook have done so. To Mark's credit, Facebook has been a spectacular success on its own terms, but we must not forget that these are the conditions of Facebook.
• Zucked: wake up to the Facebook disaster by Roger McNamee is published by HarperCollins (£ 16.99). To order a copy, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK postage from £ 15 (online orders only). Minimum Phone Orders £ 1.99
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