6 ms·

Big Tech's Big Defector: Roger McNamee

67 points by mitchbob 7y ago

umeshunni 7y ago
Perhaps Peter Thiel is a bigger defector, but too 'eccentric' for the New Yorker's politics.
- majormajor 7y ago
  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.
weixiyen 7y ago
#tethics
mindgam3 7y ago
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.
- majormajor 7y ago
  When was that? Large sections of the article are about his being anti-Zuck (by name). (In, granted, a PR-happy way - book, tour... but still.)
  - mindgam3 7y ago
    April 2019. See link below for context. To your point: being anti-Zuck in public is a transparent ploy for attention if you're not anti-Zuck in private. https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/roger-mcnamee-facebook-terrible-america https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/roger-mcnamee-facebook...
    - retsibsi 7y ago
      What do you mean by 'in private' here? The criticism in your other comment seems to be based on things that he said at a public or at least semi-public event.
      - mindgam3 7y ago
        In private meaning directly to Zuck, who he claims is his friend. His stated unwillingness to confront Zuck directly means that his entire public narrative is grandstanding at best.
- bertil 7y ago
  > “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.)
  - mindgam3 7y ago
    > Hasn’t Mark said in public...? I don’t know, has he? Citing a source would be constructive as I’m not aware of Zuck saying anything publicly about McNamee ever since his PR stunt kicked off.
  - Rapzid 7y ago
    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 7y ago
      Probably some other social network would have swallowed the world instead. MySpace?
- LMYahooTFY 7y ago
  So despite referring to him publicly as an authoritarian, you want him to tell you that he hates him? What about the parts of the article where McNamee is, according to the Brian Barth, persuading powerful people to rally against every surveillance capitalist.
creed98 7y ago
Roger will need to provide equal if not more fight than exponentially-increasing in power Zuck if he wants to tame the beast. Zuck is not a guy that goes to play in rockshows on weekends. We are dealing with a maniacally focused ceo focused on bringing Facebook to the very last indigenous jungle tribes of our planet. Protect your children
firasd 7y ago
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.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/14/opinion/tech-backlash.htm...
- harry8 7y ago
  So is the anti-big-tech policy really genuinely unpopular with voters as you're implying or does it trigger the backlash from Big Tech? Like for example facebrick adjusting their algos to promote say, anti-Warren content. How would we know? It seems to me like most people support Warren's anti-big-tech stance in principle or they don't much care. Not many outside of the bubble seem to be genuinely opposed to it and it's a quite esoteric argument as to why it would make things worse (maybe a true, valid and legitimate argument, - but not the sort of thing that takes on support organically without a bit of push - can we see that push?). Then there's the obscenely large amounts spent by big tech on lobbying in washington and PR in the media and in places like right here. Do any of us really believe big tech isn't paying for PR here at hacker news? Whether the PR is working is a different question. Whether there is a lot of pro-big tech opinion, much of which I share, here organically is a different question - and yes there is. The only thing that would prevent paid PR here is if hacker news has no impact and paid PR could not influence and this was known, as far as I can see. Separate to the venture capitalist owners interests being served by mods, which of course happens and there's nothing intrinsically wrong with it, either.
  - majormajor 7y ago
    > It seems to me like most people support Warren's anti-big-tech stance in principle or they don't much care. Not many outside of the bubble seem to be genuinely opposed to it and it's a quite esoteric argument as to why it would make things worse (maybe a true, valid and legitimate argument, - but not the sort of thing that takes on support organically without a bit of push - can we see that push?). I think the reason Warren could lose ground talking about Big Tech is pretty straightforward - it's a way less generally compelling, personally-broadly-relevant message than her other key issues, and so a distraction. Less a pure negative, but an opportunity-cost net negative.
wyxuan 7y ago
This feels like the most recent episode of silicon valley...
- stuxnet79 7y ago
  Relevant video for those curious about specifics -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfRUQh_EHoQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfRUQh_EHoQ
ggm 7y ago
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.
wrnr 7y ago
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 7y ago
  *bomb You may have written about bill of materials enough that BOM is in your autocorrect.
  - wrnr 7y ago
    When i do write a bill-of-materials it's less cheap then your point.
  - asveikau 7y ago
    Or they store a lot of utf-16 and need some byte order marks.
nightsd01 7y ago
Tethics!
peter303 7y ago
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.
forgingahead 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

67 points by mitchbob 7y ago

umeshunni 7y ago

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

majormajor 7y ago
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.

weixiyen 7y ago

#tethics

mindgam3 7y ago

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.

majormajor 7y ago
When was that? Large sections of the article are about his being anti-Zuck (by name). (In, granted, a PR-happy way - book, tour... but still.)
- mindgam3 7y ago
  April 2019. See link below for context. To your point: being anti-Zuck in public is a transparent ploy for attention if you're not anti-Zuck in private. https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/roger-mcnamee-facebook-terrible-america https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/roger-mcnamee-facebook...
  - retsibsi 7y ago
    What do you mean by 'in private' here? The criticism in your other comment seems to be based on things that he said at a public or at least semi-public event.
    - mindgam3 7y ago
      In private meaning directly to Zuck, who he claims is his friend. His stated unwillingness to confront Zuck directly means that his entire public narrative is grandstanding at best.
bertil 7y ago
> “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.)
- mindgam3 7y ago
  > Hasn’t Mark said in public...? I don’t know, has he? Citing a source would be constructive as I’m not aware of Zuck saying anything publicly about McNamee ever since his PR stunt kicked off.
- Rapzid 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    Probably some other social network would have swallowed the world instead. MySpace?
LMYahooTFY 7y ago
So despite referring to him publicly as an authoritarian, you want him to tell you that he hates him? What about the parts of the article where McNamee is, according to the Brian Barth, persuading powerful people to rally against every surveillance capitalist.

creed98 7y ago

Roger will need to provide equal if not more fight than exponentially-increasing in power Zuck if he wants to tame the beast. Zuck is not a guy that goes to play in rockshows on weekends. We are dealing with a maniacally focused ceo focused on bringing Facebook to the very last indigenous jungle tribes of our planet. Protect your children

firasd 7y ago

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.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/14/opinion/tech-backlash.htm...

harry8 7y ago
So is the anti-big-tech policy really genuinely unpopular with voters as you're implying or does it trigger the backlash from Big Tech? Like for example facebrick adjusting their algos to promote say, anti-Warren content. How would we know? It seems to me like most people support Warren's anti-big-tech stance in principle or they don't much care. Not many outside of the bubble seem to be genuinely opposed to it and it's a quite esoteric argument as to why it would make things worse (maybe a true, valid and legitimate argument, - but not the sort of thing that takes on support organically without a bit of push - can we see that push?). Then there's the obscenely large amounts spent by big tech on lobbying in washington and PR in the media and in places like right here. Do any of us really believe big tech isn't paying for PR here at hacker news? Whether the PR is working is a different question. Whether there is a lot of pro-big tech opinion, much of which I share, here organically is a different question - and yes there is. The only thing that would prevent paid PR here is if hacker news has no impact and paid PR could not influence and this was known, as far as I can see. Separate to the venture capitalist owners interests being served by mods, which of course happens and there's nothing intrinsically wrong with it, either.
- majormajor 7y ago
  > It seems to me like most people support Warren's anti-big-tech stance in principle or they don't much care. Not many outside of the bubble seem to be genuinely opposed to it and it's a quite esoteric argument as to why it would make things worse (maybe a true, valid and legitimate argument, - but not the sort of thing that takes on support organically without a bit of push - can we see that push?). I think the reason Warren could lose ground talking about Big Tech is pretty straightforward - it's a way less generally compelling, personally-broadly-relevant message than her other key issues, and so a distraction. Less a pure negative, but an opportunity-cost net negative.

wyxuan 7y ago

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

stuxnet79 7y ago
Relevant video for those curious about specifics -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfRUQh_EHoQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfRUQh_EHoQ

ggm 7y ago

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.

wrnr 7y ago

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 7y ago
*bomb You may have written about bill of materials enough that BOM is in your autocorrect.
- wrnr 7y ago
  When i do write a bill-of-materials it's less cheap then your point.
- asveikau 7y ago
  Or they store a lot of utf-16 and need some byte order marks.

nightsd01 7y ago

Tethics!

peter303 7y ago

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.

forgingahead 7y ago

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 7y ago
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?

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]