Roger McNamee: ‘It’s bigger than Facebook. This is a problem with the entire industry'; The Observer via The Guardian, February 16, 2019

Alex Hern, The Observer via The Guardian; Roger McNamee: ‘It’s bigger than Facebook. This is a problem with the entire industry'

"Mark Zuckerberg’s mentor and an early investor in Facebook on why his book Zucked urges people to turn away from big tech’s toxic business model

Roger McNamee is an American fund manager and venture capitalist who has made investments in, among others, Electronic Arts, Sybase, Palm Inc and Facebook. In 2004, along with Bono and others, he co-founded Elevation Partners, a private equity firm. He has recently published Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe...

Is this a Facebook problem or a Mark Zuckerberg problem?
 
It’s bigger than Facebook. This is a problem with the entire internet platform industry, and Mark is just one of the two most successful practitioners of it.

This is a cultural model that infected Silicon Valley around 2003 – so, exactly at the time that Facebook and LinkedIn were being started – and it comes from a specific route.

Silicon Valley spent the period from 1950 to 2003 first with the space programme, and then with personal computers and the internet. The cultures of those things were very idealistic: make the world a better place through technology. Empower the people who use technology to be their best selves. Steve Jobs famously characterised his computers as bicycles for the mind.

The problem with Google and Facebook is that their goal is to replace humans in many of the core activities of life...

Do you think there’s a version of history in which we don’t end up in this situation? 

The culture into which Facebook was born was this deeply libertarian philosophy that was espoused by their first investor, Peter Thiel, and the other members of the so-called “PayPal mafia”.

They were almost single-handedly responsible for creating the social generation of companies. And their insights were brilliant. Their ideas about how to grow companies were revolutionary and extraordinarily successful. The challenge was that they also had a very different philosophy from the prior generations of Silicon Valley. Their notion was that disruption was perfectly reasonable because you weren’t actually responsible for anybody but yourself, so you weren’t responsible for the consequences of your actions.

That philosophy got baked into their companies in this idea that you could have a goal – in Facebook’s case, connecting the whole world on one network – and that goal would be so important that it justified whatever means were necessary to get there."