This is the gist of the book Zucked.

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Companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon have executed their business plans brilliantly in recent years. Through their platforms, billions of people can maintain contacts, find information and buy products faster and easier than before. The founders and shareholders became filthy rich from this. But the platforms often have unintended, serious side effects: they are bad for privacy, health, democracy and the economy. These companies usually do not want to hear about this and do not want to solve it either. What do we do about it, individually and as a society?

Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe (aff.). Author phone number library Roger McNamee has been active for decades as an entrepreneur and investor in Silicon Valley and as a coach and sounding board for entrepreneurs and startups. For example, he also coached Mark Zuckerberg and invested in Facebook. He had high expectations of the platform, most of which have also come true. "The problem, however," says the author, "is the unintended consequences that are more numerous and more serious than I thought."

McNamee describes these problems extensively in Zucked . The author works out in great detail how certain things came about or went that way. For example, how Moore's law (the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles every two years) and Metcalfe's law (the value of a network increases quadratically with the number of users) have helped internet platforms. The same goes for the favorable investment climate before and after the dotcom bubble in the early 2000s, as well as (the lack of) legislation and regulations. McNamee also describes at various points which solutions he has in mind.Photo of smartphone with social media icons on it

The Attention Economy
McNamee goes into great detail about the methods that platforms like Facebook use to attract and retain attention. Many of these methods can be traced back to what Professor BJ Fogg researched in the 1990s, developed in the book Persuasive technology , and taught for many years at Stanford University, in the heart of Silicon Valley. At the heart of this is what Fogg called ' captology ', namely "how computers can be used to persuade people to change their attitudes and behavior".