The impression in these pages is that although the harm that Facebook can inflict on the world - on the workings of governments, on the nature of privacy and free speech, on individual contentment - is only beginning, that harm is also more or less here to stay: Instead, McNamee is mostly resigned, even in his outrage. If mega-corporations like Google or Amazon didn’t in fact rule the world, a book as damning Zucked would spell the end of Facebook.

McNamee retails all of Facebook’s more egregious public failings (always in the book small, terrifying words like “public” crop up to remind readers of Facebook’s near-infinite ability to conceal its worst actions), draws connections that even sharp tech-watchers may have missed, and comes to conclusions that are scarcely softened by the author’s penchant for referring to Zuckerberg as “Zuck” and Facebook’s repellant chief officer Sheryl Sandberg as “Sheryl.” The nomenclature might be classic Silicon Valley egalitarianism, but it’s only window dressing: this is a brutal, almost oppressive exposé. In only a handful of years, Facebook has become in effect one of the most powerful countries in the history of the world, a country without borders, without any fixed laws, and with a vast slave force at its disposal. He’s known most of the principals since they were little more than children he’s followed and often predicted the evolution of the technologies involved, and he knows in intimate detail what he calls Silicon Valley’s combination of “relentlessness and hubris.”Īll of that expertise is brought to a boiling pitch in McNamee’s new book Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe (an unfortunate choice of title, since sophomoric wordplay ill serves this profoundly serious subject), which traces first the author’s personal history and then the well-known origin story of Facebook, which sprang from Zuckerberg’s undergraduate days at Harvard and began its life as “Facemash” and “The Facebook” before blossoming into the behemoth that today defies - and subverts - governments, flouts international law, keeps nearly 2 billion users hooked on its platform, and touches the lives of nearly every human on Earth in one way or another. Roger McNamee, a thirty-five-year Silicon Valley insider and the guiding hand behind a slate of successful Internet ventures, is ideally placed to write a definitive Jungle-style clarion call about the history, inner workings, and enormous dangers of a social media monster-company like Facebook.

Zucked up