Zucked, by Roger McNamee

RATING

2 stars

N/A = good but not on the scale

1 star = perspective supplementing

2 stars = perspective influencing

3 stars = perspective altering

SHORT SUMMARY (272 words or less)

This book is packed with a lot of information.  It starts by discussing the history of tech startups in Silicon Valley and moves to a commentary on Facebook’s economic incentive systems.  The author’s main thesis is that Facebook should be regulated as a monopolistic platform.  The argument is partly based in historical economic and legal jurisprudence and partly based on corporate morality.  McNamee, an early FB investor, believes that FB’s economic incentives, namely user engagement and online advertising, encourage keeping users on site and using psychological tricks to do so.  That’s not really new, advertisers have been doing that forever.  The author’s argument is more rooted in the size and scale of impact that Facebook has, and that FB is essentially being used for social manipulation by anyone who can pay the right price.  McNamee talks about his views on how FB affected major geopolitical events–the 2016 US Presidential Election, the Brexit Vote, and the genocide against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar.  His view is that FB and other platforms create filter bubbles for their users and echo chambers reenforced through exploitation of base human psychology.  Bad actors use these tools to create false narratives and opportunities for outside entities to influence large numbers of people through misinformation.  For McNamee, the combination of these pitfalls and FB’s vast reach and ostensible operation as a publishing platform lend itself to regulation.

It raises compelling anti-trust questions.  I don’t know where I fall on it, but I think at the very least, it would be interesting to see how existing anti-trust frameworks (and historical precedent) could be adapted to evaluate monopoly power in silicon valley.