<https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/02/big-techs-big-defector> Roger McNamee started his career in 1982, as a twenty-six-year-old analyst at the investment firm T. Rowe Price. The personal-computer revolution was just beginning. He invested in Electronic Arts (now a leading video-game maker) and Sybase (a pioneering database firm), among others, eventually running one of the most successful funds in the industry. In 1991, he partnered with the venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins, where he listened to pitches for Netscape and Amazon. He invested in those companies, too, and a few years later he co-founded Silver Lake Partners. The businesses in Silver Lake’s portfolio now produce two hundred and thirty billion dollars in annual revenue and employ three hundred and seventy thousand people. In the early two-thousands, McNamee helped create a private-equity firm, Elevation Partners, which invested two hundred and ten million dollars in Facebook in 2009 and 2010, two years before it went public. If the founders of Big Tech were a family, McNamee might be its eccentric uncle. A longtime guitarist who still plays some fifty shows a year, he has toured for more than two decades with an evolving cast of venture capitalists, technologists, and career musicians such as Pete Sears, of Jefferson Starship. On tracks like the stoner anthem “It’s 4:20 Somewhere,” by his band Moonalice, McNamee performed under the stage name Chubby Wombat. McNamee has mentored many of the people who have transformed Silicon Valley. In 2006, when Facebook was a two-year-old company with less than fifty million dollars in annual revenue, McNamee advised Mark Zuckerberg to turn down Yahoo’s offer to buy it for a billion dollars. (It’s now worth more than five hundred billion.) Not long afterward, he encouraged Zuckerberg to hire Sheryl Sandberg. His acquaintances have included Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, who was an investor at Silver Lake. McNamee saw the tech industry as an experiment in creative and profitable problem-solving. He grew unnerved by its ethical failures only in 2012, when Uber came to him for investment capital. He decided that Silicon Valley had changed. “These guys all wanted to be monopolists,” he said recently. “They all want to be billionaires.” McNamee was convinced that Facebook was different. Then, in February, 2016, shortly after he retired from full-time investing, he noticed posts in his Facebook feed that purported to support Bernie Sanders but struck him as fishy. That spring, the social-media-fuelled vitriol of the Brexit campaign seemed like further proof that Facebook was being exploited to sow division among voters—and that company executives had turned a blind eye. The more McNamee listened to Silicon Valley critics, the more alarmed he became: he learned that Facebook allowed facial-recognition software to identify users without their consent, and let advertisers discriminate against viewers. (Real-estate companies, for example, could exclude people of certain races from seeing their ads.) Ten days before the Presidential election, McNamee sent an e-mail to Zuckerberg and Sandberg. “I am disappointed. I am embarrassed. I am ashamed,” he wrote. Recently, Facebook has done some things that are truly horrible and I can no longer excuse its behavior. . . . Facebook is enabling people to do harm. It has the power to stop the harm. What it currently lacks is an incentive to do so. Within hours, both Zuckerberg and Sandberg sent McNamee cordial replies, assuring him that they were already working to address some of the issues he’d raised, and dispatched a Facebook executive, Dan Rose, to talk to him. Rose told McNamee that Facebook was a platform, not a publisher, and couldn’t control all user behavior. Since leaving the investment world, McNamee had been looking forward to being a full-time musician. But Rose’s dismissiveness rattled him. “They were my friends. I wanted to give them a chance to do the right thing. I wasn’t expecting them to go, ‘Oh, my God, stop everything,’ but I was expecting them to take it seriously,” he said. “It was obvious they thought it was a P.R. problem, not a business problem, and they thought the P.R. problem was me.” McNamee hasn’t spoken to Sandberg or Zuckerberg since. (Both declined to comment for this article.) He now refers to Zuckerberg as an “authoritarian.” As Russian election interference became increasingly apparent, McNamee published a series of op-eds—in the Guardian, USA Today, Time, and elsewhere—arguing that the social-media business model thrived on divisive rhetoric: the more extreme the content, the more users shared it; the more the algorithms amplified it, the more ad revenue was generated. McNamee also scheduled meetings with policymakers, investors, and Silicon Valley executives. He and Nancy Pelosi, now the Speaker of the House, had been introduced some twenty years earlier, by the Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart, and McNamee set out to expand his network of Washington contacts. As lawmakers prepared for hearings about Russian meddling, in the fall of 2017, McNamee put together a curriculum for them, which he jokingly called “Internet Platforms 101.” Adam Schiff, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, had been focussed on foreign manipulation of social media, but, in a meeting, McNamee urged him to consider a broader problem—how the platforms were sowing discord among Americans. “Roger was really ahead of the curve,” Schiff said. “Time has borne out his warnings.” McNamee’s zeal for diagnosing problems soon evolved into a mission to devise a solution. He argued that piecemeal regulation would never get to the root of the problem: mining users’ private data for profit. In February, 2019, McNamee published “Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe”—part memoir, part manifesto. He then embarked on a book tour that has turned into an ongoing public-shaming campaign. He has taken his message to bookstores, breweries, high-school gymnasiums, and college campuses. He estimates that he’s made his pitch to more than three hundred audiences in the past year. “I have a hippie value system,” McNamee told me recently. “I’m always going to speak truth to power.” McNamee is not the first Silicon Valley insider to become a critic of the tech industry, but he may be the most strenuous. Kara Swisher, a co-founder of the tech-news site Recode and a New York Times columnist, recalled, “Whenever I would say negative things about Facebook, I’d always get a text or a call from Roger.” Now, she continued, McNamee is “sort of shunned” in the Valley. Last winter, Bill Gates told Forbes, “I think what Roger has said is completely unfair and kind of outrageous. They’re blaming Mark for everything.” Swisher thinks the Valley has been eager to portray McNamee as “off the rails.” As she sees it, “He’s a little wacky, but he’s not crazy. The more they make fun of him, the more I’m, like, He’s one-hundred-per-cent right.” Among some skeptics, however, the profit McNamee has accrued from the technology that he now urges us to renounce makes him difficult to trust. One view of McNamee is that he has the gravitas of a man willing to admit that he was wrong. (“Shame on me,” he told one interviewer.) Another is that, having successfully ridden one wave, he is trying to ride another. [...]