
Big Tech's Big Defector: Roger McNamee - mitchbob
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/02/big-techs-big-defector
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firasd
His whole deal is about the 2016 election. While it exposed legitimate issues,
I suspect a lot of anti-Zuck/'techlash' sentiment will die down if a Dem is
elected next year.

In fact I suspect even now the Techlash is overstated. Elizabeth Warren spent
the month of October going after Zuckerberg and meanwhile lost her front-
runner status in the polls. Anti-Big-Tech talking points may be red meat for
journalists, but average Americans don't care all that much. (Based on this
survey, Tech is still the most trusted industry sector:
[https://www.edelman.com/trust-barometer](https://www.edelman.com/trust-
barometer))

PS. An article about this: [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/14/opinion/tech-
backlash.htm...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/14/opinion/tech-
backlash.html)

~~~
antielectronite
I think one reason journalists are having a moral panic about tech is that a
lot of them seem to have a very unhealthy twitter addiction, which clouds
their view on the impact social media has on society.

A lot of media people seem to spend ~8 hours tweeting almost everyday, which
is obviously unhealthy but not indicative of how most people use "big tech".

~~~
CriticalCathed
Replace twitter with facebook/instagram and there you go. People spend hours
and hours a day on there.

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mindgam3
Big defector, my ass. He doesn’t even have the cojones to call out his old pal
Zuck. McNamee is merely profiting from the techlash to get his name out there.

Source: went to see him speak at Stanford. Asked him myself during live Q&A,
if Facebook is so evil and must be stopped, why doesn’t he call out Zuck for
terrible leadership given that Facebook culture and business practice comes
straight from the top? His answer, direct quote: “well, he and I are friends.”

If this is our big defector, we’ve got serious problems.

~~~
bertil
> “well, he and I are friends.”

Hasn’t Mark said in public that he didn’t remember McNamee, that he was barely
invested early on in Facebook and left when they switched business model?

(The whole “You know what’s cool, a billion dollars?” and refusing Yahoo!’s
offer was actually a big internal shift that ostracised a lot of early
employees and investors.)

~~~
Rapzid
Imagine all the trouble we would have been spared if Yahoo purchased Facebook
and ran it into the ground with the rest of its portfolio.

~~~
emiliobumachar
Probably some other social network would have swallowed the world instead.
MySpace?

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umeshunni
Perhaps Peter Thiel is a bigger defector, but too 'eccentric' for the New
Yorker's politics.

~~~
majormajor
The New Yorker has written about Thiel more than a few times...
[https://www.newyorker.com/tag/peter-
thiel](https://www.newyorker.com/tag/peter-thiel)

I don't see that it would be necessary to include him in this profile of
someone else, this is less about the Palantir sort of "surveillance tech" than
the Facebook sort.

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forgingahead
Journalists and their corporate bosses are having a moral panic attack about
"tech" because BigTech directly competes with them for ad dollars and mass-
market influence.

This is nothing more than that -- through that lens, you can understand and
predict all that mainstream "journalists" will advocate and push for with
regards to tech.

 __Edit -- the larger panic that is afflicting "journalists" is that BigTech
enables the masses to finally speak out. The pushback is against this actual
cacophony of voices and opinions, finally set free from the old-school
guardians of thought and society.

~~~
LMYahooTFY
That's a frankly ridiculous way of dismissing the entire content of the
article without actually addressing it in any way.

If tech companies can map out your behavior for the rest of your life with
>95% accuracy, what does that do to the world?

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wyxuan
This feels like the most recent episode of silicon valley...

~~~
stuxnet79
Relevant video for those curious about specifics ->
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfRUQh_EHoQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfRUQh_EHoQ)

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nightsd01
Tethics!

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wrnr
The director of the Manhattan Project Robert Oppenheimer went on a public
speaking tour to apologising for his part in creating the atomic bom. It was
Von Neumann who cynically remarked that: One cannot apologise for something
without also first claiming it as one's own accomplishment.

Wether is the atomic bom or Facebook, I am sure they would have existed
without their conscientious defectors. There is something much stronger at
play, be it nuclear fusion in physics or information asymmetry in economics.

I share in the concern of McNamee and Oppenheimer, but Technological Humanism
often leaves us with impossible technology and bad business.

~~~
SlowRobotAhead
*bomb

You may have written about bill of materials enough that BOM is in your
autocorrect.

~~~
wrnr
When i do write a bill-of-materials it's less cheap then your point.

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peter303
Frankly I dont respect investors as much as engineers and scientists who
invent clever technology. The latter add things to the world. The former just
push money around. Yawn.

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ggm
My grandmother never said, but could have said "if you have nothing nice to
say about somebody, maybe its better to say nothing" but actually, she was
quite willing to call it as she saw it. I'm struggling to see good things to
say about the people here. Money corrupts.

