Is Facebook Zucked? | Roger McNamee

Most people do not realize the degree to which the choices that they're making are being influenced by people that they're not even aware of, and how, when you're going to s- the search results on Google or to your news feed on Instagram or Facebook, they're not picking things that you like so much as they're picking things that they believe they can monetize. And this is a really important distinction, because what they're doing is they're creating a data voodoo doll. Tristan's ... It's a great phrase Tristan came up with, "data voodoo doll." They're gathering data. We think we give them a little data. The thing you have to understand is that data that we're giving them, that's a vanishingly small percentage of what they have, because in real life, we touch electronic systems all over the place. Every time we use a credit card, every time we go to the bank. Any medical thing generates a digital record. Our phone tracks where we are in real time. Any time we send an email on or to a Gmail or Microsoft email account, when we use a shared online application like Google Docs or Office 365, there's a digital trail from all these things. And all of that data is available to Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, and they create this data voodoo doll, and every time you do a search, every time you look at your news feed, you have to, in your head, realize, "Oh my God, these guys are using that data voodoo doll to manipulate the choices that are available to me."

My Facebook reach is declining by the second after I've had Professor David Carroll first and now Roger McNamee joining me on Modern Wisdom. Roger, welcome to the show.

It is such a pleasure to be here, Chris.

Really excited to have you on today. Very timely with the release of The Great Hack on Netflix and this resurgence of interest in Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. Can you tell the listeners who don't know who you are a little bit of background-

Sure.

... about yourself, please?

So, I first came to Silicon Valley in 1982 as an investment analyst, right before the personal computer industry began. And I was lucky enough to be part of the most important firms investing, first in public tech stocks in the '80s, then part of Kleiner Perkins, which was ... became the biggest venture capital firm in Silicon Valley during the '90s, the heyday of the internet. I was in their office the day that Marc Andreessen brought in the idea that became Netscape, the day that Jeff Bezos brought in the idea that became Amazon, the day that Larry and Sergey brought in Google. I started a firm with Bono in 2003 called Elevation, and in 2006, a 22-year-old entrepreneur came into my office with a crisis. His name was Mark Zuckerberg. I helped him navigate the crisis, and for a period of three years thereafter was one of his advisors. And that is the context for my conversation with you here today, that from 2006 to approximately 2016, I was a huge fan of Facebook, and then at the beginning of 2016, I started to see things going wrong on Facebook, which really violated my sense of what the company was about. I thought Facebook was a force for good. And it began in the US presidential primaries in the Democratic Party in 2016. It then included issues related to Black Lives Matter, a protest group in the United States, and then Brexit happened in June of 2016. And at that was the point at which I realized that the same algorithms, the same business model that makes Facebook so great for marketers, those same tools could be manipulated and used to undermine democracy. And at that point, I started to realize I needed to do something. I started looking for allies and couldn't find any. I was finally able to persuade a tech blog to let me write an opinion piece about this in September of 2016, and while I was writing it, more news came out, civil rights violations on Facebook, and then our intelligence agencies said the Russians were trying to interfere in the US election. So I sent the draft of the opinion piece to Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, my friends, to warn them. I thought something was really catastrophically wrong with the product, and they were not particularly supportive.