Conversations with creators and thinkers who are charting the way forward in a tech-saturated society. Tech, community, video games, and whatever else is next.

Also available as an MP3 podcast. More info at our Podcast Central page.

May 6, 2019: Roger McNamee, author, "Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe"

Listen to this show:  Pop-up player!

This week: Roger McNamee, author, "Zucked"

SIGN UP for this Friday's movie night: Killer Robots Movie Night at WFMU

- - -

SIGN UP for this Friday's movie night: Killer Robots Movie Night at WFMU

Silicon Valley investor Roger McNamee was an early advisor to Mark Zuckerberg in the early days of Facebook. McNamee's new book "Zucked" tells the story of his disillusionment, then horror, as Facebook created a "catastrophe" for users, and democracies, around the world.

Links to Roger McNamee:

• Twitter: @Moonalice

• Book site for 'Zucked'

• I Mentored Mark Zuckerberg. I Loved Facebook. But I Can't Stay Silent About What's Happening - by Roger McNamee (Time magazine, Jan 17, 2019).

• ‘Mark Is an Authoritarian’: A Facebook Investor Sounds the Alarm About the Company He Helped Build - Roger interviewed in New York magazine, Feb 2019.

• A former social media evangelist unfriends Facebook - review of Zucked by Evgeny Morozov in Washington Post, Feb 2019.

Other tech news:

• Facebook Faces a Big Penalty, but Regulators Are Split Over How Big (NYT, May 4): "A fine far above $7 billion appeared to have strong agreement, according to one of the people. Staff members and commissioners also began talking about making Mr. Zuckerberg personally liable, meaning that he could be named as a defendant in a future case."

• "Well this has been a fun journey," posts Kevin Roose (Apr 30), referring to Zuck's 2010 pronouncement that "the age of privacy is over," followed by Zuck's announcement last Tuesday at F8 (on Apr 30) that "the future is private."

• As one Twitter user put it, "It's easy to say 'the future is private' after spending years hoovering up user data, defiantly defending the social graph, and creating moats through questionable (at best) behavior with that data. It's a luxury to lock things down once you have everyone inside." And as NYT's Mike Isaac put it, "it is so jarring to hear every product leader at facebook be so relentlessly on-message about Privacy Privacy Privacy after years of espousing the opposite in every public opportunity."

• But really all you need to know about F8 is what Pranav Dixit pointed out: "Nobody on stage at the Facebook event showed any remorse, looked sorry, or apologized for the company's terrible year. When Zuckerberg admitted that their record on privacy wasn't very good, he was giggling like a naughty school boy like it was *funny*."

• Below: ladies and gentleman, Silicon Valley leadership:


...see also Jack Dorsey Is Gwyneth Paltrow for Silicon Valley (NYT, May 2): "no community has embraced Mr. Dorsey as their guru more than the fasters, who spend days on end just not eating. Mr. Dorsey’s very public endorsements of this movement have led to criticism that he is endorsing eating disorders."

- - -

• Sign up for this Friday's movie night: Killer Robots Movie Night at WFMU - Friday, May 10 in Monty Hall.

- - -

Check out techtonic.fm for recent Techtonic interviews and Little Slice of Tech Pie segments.

PODCAST: Subscribe to the Techtonic podcast