San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Taking on tech
Jeremiads about big tech steering us wrong are the new black. Recent works from activists, academics, polemicists and techies have contributed toward a flourishing genre. But a wealthy investor making a pile from Facebook, then finding religion sounds a bit, um, rich.
In “Zucked,” Roger McNamee winces at the memory of his introduction to Mark Zuckerberg. It was 2006 and he played the grizzled industry elder to Zuckerberg’s tyro. Beware suitors bearing mucho cash, he intoned. Stay true to yourself.
If he was expecting a high-five or
“hell, yeah!” he had another think coming.
Like the interminable latency of an app struggling to load, five agonizing minutes elapsed, during which Zuckerberg struck sundry postures from Rodin’s “The Thinker” before he responded, McNamee recounts. Awkward? It was excruciating. But it turned out they were on the same page — Zuckerberg wasn’t for selling Facebook — and the encounter marked the beginning of a bounteous relationship: McNamee hooked Zuckerberg up with a friend named Sheryl Sandberg to help turn Facebook into a business; Zuckerberg cut McNamee into Facebook’s early funding rounds. McNamee bowed out of his informal advisory role in 2009, but retained sufficient goodwill that when he emailed “Zuck and Sheryl” in 2016 with a hunch about Russian mischief, they replied promptly, if only to fob him off with a VP.
“Zucked” chronicles McNamee’s move into open breach with Facebook: digging into its ransacking of user privacy, agitating for congressional action, huddling with George Soros to prep him for a speech at Davos calling for big tech to be brought to heel.
Thus, it can be read as an account of the adventures in activism — very 2019 — of a rich guy. But, written from the perspective of an ex-evangelist steeped in industry lore, “Zucked” lands crucial insights into how a firm that seemed a force for unalloyed good — connection with one another — became a scourge.
From 2012 to 2017, Facebook went on a tear, McNamee writes. “The company experimented constantly with algorithms, new data types, and small changes in design, measuring everything. Every action a user took gave Facebook a better understanding of that user — and of that user’s friends — enabling the company to make tiny improvements in the ‘user experience’ ... which is to say they got better at manipulating the attention of users . ... Before long, Fakebook’s surveillance capabilities rivaled those of an intelligence agency.”
The prospects for reform from within are remote. The simplicity of Facebook’s business — “a product and … monetization scheme” — have concentrated power in the hands of Zuckerberg and Sandberg. Both are concerned chiefly with avoiding splatter from scandals on their personal brands and heedless of criticism, writes McNamee.
This and the neologism he minted for the title of this book hardly augur well. How can we un-Zuck ourselves? McNamee prescribes governmentsupported
“civicallyresponsible social media” and regulation, including the possibility of “breaking up Facebook and Google.” If this sounds drastic, it’s all in how you frame it: “In the realm of technology, what will we give up to protect democracy?”
Our relationship with technology has “inverted,” he concludes — we’ve become its tools. Harking back to Steve Jobs’ formulation of the computer as “bicycle for the mind,” we must restore “human-driven technology.”
The same preoccupation with reasserting human control over technology animates Douglas Rushkoff’s “Team Human,” a trenchant take-back-the-web manifesto retailed in 100
mini-essays. Rushkoff ’s take: We’ve become enmeshed in the inhuman logic of a system arranged for the convenience of artificial intelligence and outsize profits for the few.
Exhibit A in his argument is currency, not crypto but the tokens exchanged among medieval merchants — a lubricant to trade that promised to spread the wealth before nobles co-opted the idea with a centralized currency and restricted access to commercial activity by royal decree.
This sounds far removed from Facebook, but the dynamic — the possibility for human agency and empowerment squelched by elite power grab — has played out in new media since, writes Rushkoff; for instance TV and radio, conceived for connection and education, but captured by advertisers and propagandists bent on “instrumentalizing” our attention to convert us to their agendas. Then came the internet. Rushkoff was a cyberpunk, and he writes ecstatically of the early web: “We were witnessing the first synaptic transmissions of a collective organism attempting to reach new levels of connectedness and wake itself up.”
But the dot-commers crashed the scene. Where “hippies and hackers” saw “Gaia,” Wall Street carpetbaggers eyed online real estate to unlock shareholder value and remade the web in the image of TV, turning it into a “shopping catalogue.”
Hope flickered anew for the web as “conversation space” in the early days of social networking, but companies devolved from “delivering people to one another … [to] … delivering people to marketers.
“The primary purpose of the internet had changed from supporting a knowledge economy to growing an attention economy.”
“We shape our technologies at the moment of conception,” Rushkoff adds, “but from that point forward they shape us.”
“Team Human” traverses the New Age antecedents of Silicon Valley’s “transhumanist movement” and the plot arcs of “prestige television,” among other subjects. Rushkoff is a supple thinker, unafraid of flights of lateral thinking — here’s a fresh take on resurgent nationalism as an offshoot of the binary on-off dichotomy of computers: “The yearning for boundaries emerges from a digital media environment that emphasizes distinction . ... This logic trickles up to the platforms and apps we use. Everything is a choice . ... There are no in-betweens.”
But, Bernie to McNamee’s Hillary, Rushkoff sees the taproot of our ills as a metastatic capitalism that views “people ... at best [as] an asset to be exploited, and at worst a cost to be endured.” Thus, “Team Human” is a radical critique — Rushkoff has little truck with “technosolutions that are radical in every way except in their refusal to challenge the underlying rule set of venture capitalism or the extreme wealth of those who are making the investments.” Yet it’s also conservative, extolling the age-old communitarian ethos behind the web. By reconnecting with this, Rushkoff writes, we can fortify ourselves against the depredations of big tech.