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Big Tech's Big Defector: Roger McNamee

newyorker.com

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Re: Big Tech's Big Defector: Roger McNamee

#61

Post by tomc1985 »

firasd wrote: post #8

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 a…

Tech giants are running amok, destroying society and ownership alike. I am so glad we are finally standing up to their modern-day attempts at sharecropping; I want to be a digital landowner and not a digital peasant. Cloud everything and subscription models are downright medieval in their business models.

And that's to say nothing of social media, which is causing society to cannibalize itself

Re: Big Tech's Big Defector: Roger McNamee

#62

Post by Abishek_Muthian »

antielectronite wrote: post #20
firasd wrote: post #8

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 a…

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".

Journalists don't have a choice, social media is the largest medium for consumption of News(or Title?).

For years News has been the least downloaded segment in the Appstore/Playstore[1], there was a chance to revive RSS when the social media got into trouble for fake news, but even that opportunity is lost as Google/Apple has repositioned themselves in the News segment.

[1]https://www.statista.com/statistics/270291/popular-categorie...

Re: Big Tech's Big Defector: Roger McNamee

#63

Post by LMYahooTFY »

mindgam3 wrote: post #5

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 answe…

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.

Re: Big Tech's Big Defector: Roger McNamee

#64

Post by emiliobumachar »

Rapzid wrote: post #41
bertil wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “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.)

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.

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

Re: Big Tech's Big Defector: Roger McNamee

#65

Post by LMYahooTFY »

forgingahead wrote: post #45

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 t…

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?

Re: Big Tech's Big Defector: Roger McNamee

#66

Post by throwaway_se099 »

analyst74 wrote: post #49
jessaustin wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been disgusted by Facebook for at least a decade, so McNamee's very late disillusionment seems a bit silly. He sent Zuck a stern email ten days before the election! I also enjoyed this gem: In protest of the Iraq War and other policies during the George W. Bush Administration, he refused to cut his hair. When President Obama was inaugurated, he celebrated with a trip to the barber. Kudos for being right about Ir…

Bush just invaded other countries, Obama not just invaded other countries, he also was bold enough to accept Nobel Peace award for it. I think Obama is much more bad ass than Bush.

> Obama not just invaded other countries, he also was bold enough to accept Nobel Peace award for it.

I think your timeline is a bit scrambled. Obama got the Nobel Peace (or rather, Not-GW-Bush-Jr) prize in the first year of his presidency, before any foreign interventions that could be realistically ascribed to his policy.

Re: Big Tech's Big Defector: Roger McNamee

#67

Post by mc32 »

AlexCoventry wrote: post #42
mc32 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She’s too much of an ideologue —a bit like Bernie. It’s their way or the highway. So even if Joe is weaker as a candidate he’d be nominated over Warren and Sanders by the party, the people (primary voters) might go with an ideologue. That said, Tulsi is right, most of the party are a bunch of neocons (aside from Sanders and maybe Warren).

What of her policies seem ideologically driven, to you? To me, her policies seem extremely pragmatic.

Medicaid for all for one. Wanting to break up companies rather than regulate first.

Yes, there is a problem with google and Facebook controlling what people see (algorithmic rather than organic) as well as soft and hard censorship, but I’m not sure the hammer of breakup is necessarily the first tool to go for in addressing the issue.

Joe is more pragmatic, but he’s also just skating. Tulsi is more of what Washington needs. No more foreign interventions. Let them fight it out. We’re always in the middle and always get flak and everyone else just sits there and does nothing. Only get in if it’s meaningful to us.

Re: Big Tech's Big Defector: Roger McNamee

#68

Post by pwinnski »

lggdn wrote: post #25
firasd wrote: post #8

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 a…

> I suspect a lot of anti-Zuck/'techlash' sentiment will die down if a Dem is elected next year. If a Dem wins, the media/etc will praise tech/social media like they did after Obama won. Remember in 2008 when the media hailed Obama as the first "social media president". It's amazing how a single election shifted the narrative on an entire industry wholesale. It's like someone flipped a switch and the narrative went f…

It could be, as you say, the difference between "a Democrat" and "a Republican." It could also be the difference between President Obama and President Trump specifically.

It might even be the difference between 2008 and a decade later. Sometimes opinions shift over time, as new information comes to light.

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