#152 — The Trouble with Facebook

This book tells the story of how a small group of libertarian entrepreneurs, including Peter Thiel and Larry Page, hijacked the original decentralized vision of the internet in the 1990s. It details how these firms created a surveillance marketing monoculture, tolerating piracy and promoting opaque business practices. Taplin offers a history of how these companies shaped online life and proposes solutions for artists to reclaim their audiences and reimagine the design of the World Wide Web.

In 'The Filter Bubble,' Eli Pariser discusses the unintended consequences of web personalization. He argues that while personalization makes the internet more user-friendly, it also creates a bubble that prevents users from encountering new and diverse ideas. The book examines the impact of this phenomenon on various stakeholders, including everyday users, scholars, and marketers, and suggests ways to mitigate its negative effects. Pariser draws on interviews with Google engineers, scholars, and privacy advocates to illustrate the complexities of personalized information environments and their implications for democracy and innovation.

In this book, Shoshana Zuboff provides a comprehensive analysis of surveillance capitalism, a new economic order where corporations accumulate vast wealth and power by predicting and controlling human behavior. Zuboff details how this form of capitalism, originating in Silicon Valley, has spread into every economic sector, creating 'behavioral futures markets' where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold. She argues that this system, free from democratic oversight, poses significant threats to democracy, freedom, and human future, and urges readers to take action to protect their autonomy in the digital world.

In 'Zucked,' Roger McNamee provides an intimate reckoning with the catastrophic failure of Facebook's leadership to address the damage caused by the platform. The book begins with McNamee's realization that Facebook is being manipulated by bad actors and his subsequent frustration with Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg's unwillingness to address these concerns. It chronicles the events leading up to and following the 2016 presidential election and the Brexit referendum, highlighting Facebook's role in these events. McNamee, an early Facebook investor and mentor to Zuckerberg, argues that Facebook's practices of invasive surveillance, data sharing, and behavior modification are foundational to its success but highly detrimental to public health and democracy. The book is both a personal narrative and a broader critique of the tech industry's lack of civic and moral responsibility.