McNamee Says Tech Poses Existential Threat to Democracy

never sleeps um His book now out in paperback. We're talking about Zucked waking up to the Facebook catastrophe, and he added a new chapter. So he's in our Blomberg Interactor Broker studio. Welcome, Welcome, Jason. I've been so excited about having you here, so congratulations paperback, thank you. And you know, the fun thing about writing a book in the first place is you have no idea. You know,

the goal is not to be wrong. And what happened was in the year to the book came out, I've discovered not only that I was basically right, but there were a lot of things wrong that weren't obvious when

I wrote the book. So in fact, they're they're really four new chapters in the paperbackwork, I too, well, No, it's easy to understand because two of them I rewrote because looking forward, our understanding what we ought to be doing is really really different now, and I wanted to give the readers an opportunity to be part of that.

And so what changed, like what occurred to you as you sort of went back through it for the paperback, what jumped out at you that you felt like, Okay, I've got to get this different, or I've got to get this better, or think of it as I added one chapter that brought the narrative forward, then I added a chapter that essentially said what does all this mean?

And those two are brand new, and then the two chapters on what to do both changed because what we understand now that we didn't before is what Shoshana Zubof the Harvard Professor talked about in her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalists, which is that there is an entire economic constrict that essentially we've shifted the economy from being

balanced on natural resources to being balanced on data. And in that context, every traditional industry is playing catch up to internet platforms like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft, and that that's a really dangerous situation for investors because, let's face it, most of our money is in traditional industries and there's not one out there that isn't being shall we say, at least displaced, if not disrupted, by this man. It's like you were behind me while I was on

a phone call earlier today. Jason and I are getting ready to go down to Miami to cover the Super Bowl, but we're gonna do this power player somewhit with owners of teams and so on and so forth, talking about sports, and I'm like, okay, so what's the biggest change you know, the next air and sports? And they go, it's data, using that data to create individualized experiences and and so on and so forth. But it's data, but it's not

just that. It's also that these forms are increasingly the gatekeepers for every form of media, and even sports is beginning to feel that effect. So when you put all that data in there, there's some benefits from it, but there's also some challenges because at the end of the day, Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft have a lot more data and a lot more experience at using it, and they know more

about the audience than any content producer on Earth. So the NFL, for example, probably knows one percent of as much about its audience as Google does, and in that context, Google has an ability to leverage whatever relationship it has with the NFL to its benefit. But I do wonder, and we talk about this too, that I think initially I'm like, I'm never going to have one of those home devices in my home. I know that they're gonna be able to they're just collecting more data, and yet

we're all buying in increasingly into it. I think the thing that really scares me, and this is the thing that I talked about in the hardback but where in getting to know Shoshanna zoopofy now. But my steeper understanding of it is there this massive marketplace in our personal data. In the United States, you don't have any rights with

respect to your own data. And what happens is that every time you touch the digital world, whether it's a banking transaction or credit card purchase, or an airline ticket or using your cell phone with location and tweets and all that kind of stuff. Anytime you're going around the Internet, that data not only gets collected, it gets sold. And if you're Google and Facebook, the data that you have on your users. Maybe a one or two percent of it comes from their interaction with you as a platform.

Most of it is coming from them tracking relentlessly and then acquiring all this other data. And now there are things we never thought about. You may remember last week there was a story about a company, a startup called clear View AI. They scraped six billion photographs. They took them illegally, in violation of the terms of service of Google, Facebook, Twitter, and others. And they created this application where you can identify anyone based on a single photograph and it doesn't

even have to be a good one. And you look at that and you go, wait a minute, they took those photographs without authorization. Well who else did that? Mark Zuckerbert.

That's how Facebook got started. And there's something about the culture of the tech industry today that what I I try to explain to government people is just like the chemicals industry in nineteen sixty, the medicine business in d and the building trades after the Great Fires, tech is so important to the economy that we can't allow the people who are in charge today to be the only ones who have a voice in policy. You know, the chemical industry. We decided they can't pour waste products like

mercury into fresh water. That's that's just you can't do. And I think you have to have the same kind of approach to tech. We have to sit there and go, I'm sorry, but if you and nabal interference in a democratic election, that should be a crime, not a civil Roger, we have a minute. Then we're gonna bring you back here. So so if you could put one law down there

right now, do it on social media? What would it be so to protect the only three I want to do, But the one for immediately is I want to have a moratorium on targeted advertising for some period prior to any general election, at least seven days. But it's not just political ads. It's all targeting of ads and on all platforms, because voter suppression over Internet platforms is something that happens relatively late in the campaign and you need

to clear some space. The French already have this, Others are looking at it. That's a no brainer. When we come back, i'll talk about the other two things I'd like to do. Roger mcnunee is still with us. He's going to spend a little more time with us, and in these couple minutes we have sort of in this into regnum Roger, I want to ask you, you're here in New York City, what's the culture of sort of New York tech versus Silicon Valley? Right? So, I think

New York tech is really cool. You know, there was a long time when New York tech was you know, people wearing a certain style of clothing and hanging out in hotel lobbies. And a lot of really cool things are going on in New York and I believe it's past that point where you know it's real, and so much what's going on is media related now in the tech world, and New York is the home of media,

and so it is a natural place for that to happen. Plus, I think New York has caught a lucky break and that the culture of Silken Valley has gotten really weird. When I came up, we all followed Steve Jobs. It was this notion that technology was there to empower the people who used it. And you know, I'm a huge believer in capitalism, a huge believer in entrepreneurship and innovation. But Silicon Valley today it's much more move fast, it's

break things. It's it's bro culture. It's very and it's sad because the technology gene now is more predatory, you know, it's this idea of I'm you know, like we were talking about clear of View AI, I'm just gonna steal these six billion photos because nobody's gonna stop me. And

I think we're better than that. And I'm hopeful that in New York, you know, you'll have enough cross fertilization with traditional media culture that the values that come across may not be perfect, but at least they're better than

the predatory thing that is so dominant value. And I'm really hopeful that the value when we wash this this generation of startups out, which surely looks like it's happening now, that maybe we'll get back to something that I can be excited about again, because the problem is the tech.

You are listening to Bloomberg Business Week, Continuing our conversation with Roger McNamee, his book Zucked Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe out in paperback, refreshed, revised some new chapter as he was telling us a little bit about that, And Roger, great to have you still with us, so up to us about what happens next. From a regulatory perspective or what you would propose. You talked about this sort of moratorium around elections, but what else would you do.

So the most important thing for people to understand is there is no solution that comes just from us changing our behavior. We need to have regulation, and the reason we need to have it is that this industry is too important. Tech really matters, and we need it to not do harm, the same way we need the chemical industry not to pollute the water and not to pollute the ground, the way we needed drugs that didn't include quack medicines that kill people. So that's my basic logic,

and I think there are three things to do. First, I want to ban algorithmic amplification. If you think about it, your news feed on Facebook, your search results are not actually the result of things you're doing. They are the stuff that those platforms are putting in front of you to maximize their gains. And the problem is that they want to hold your tension all the time. The best way to do that is to a appeal to flight or fight. Think of that is hate speech, disinformation and

conspiracy theories. We cannot help, but look at it because our native instincts of self preservation require us to pay attention, and so they are pushing hate speech, disinformation and conspiracy theories for profit, and I don't think that should be allowed. I would ban that entirely. The third that I mentioned the algorithm com comiplication. I mentioned the micro targeting, which we want to ban in the weeks before an election.

The third thing is I want to shift the focus of data from controlled by corporation to control by the individual. And the term that you use there is I want to have opt in to using my data rather than opt out. Today, people can do whatever they want, and maybe you can turn it off, maybe you can't. I want the default that they have to ask permission every time they do it. If I take a ride from Uber, I do not want Uber sharing my data with Google

and other people. I do not want them keeping my data and then using it for something else I don't know about. And so at the end the day, those changes really do matter, and they're all completely doable. They are not if you will out aligned with the kinds of things we've done in industries historically, and frankly, they would enable a whole new wave of innovation to happen, which I think is super important. That last point, I

mean that was underneath g d PR in the EU. Right, with that not enough or with that the model GDPR was a great idea as we understood the industry at the time, and in the past year and a half two years, we've come to understand that privacy is just one of four harms happening here. We have the damage to democracy, we have the damage to public health you know, kids and adults, and we have the damaged competition in

addition to privacy. And they all come from this business model of surveillance capitalism, which is why you need to go at the root elements of it, algorithmic amplification, micro targeting, and then the opt out model. And oh, I'm sorry, please no, it's just the thing I would just say to people is that I believe that technology is not the problem here. It's business models. And I don't think the people are bad people. They just have a different

value system. They value efficiency more than anything else, which if you're an engineer makes sense, right, But when you apply that to society, you run up against the basic values of the Enlightenment, which is to say, democracy and self determination. Those are inherently inefficient. If everyone of us were forced to wear exactly the same clothes, that'd be super efficient, but that's totally un american. And if if everybody tells you how to vote, that would be very efficient,

but un american. And my point here is we shouldn't have that. We can have tech coexist with society without doing harm. So I'm curious because you were an early mentor to Mark Zuckerberg, and now you're basically saying, here's this thing you created that has created an awful lot of problems. Do you guys have conversations? No? I wish seriously, if you could sit down with him, what would you say?

I would say exactly what I just said. I would say, Mark, you can be the hero in your own story, because he can do more good by changing the business model of Facebook then he can with a thousand chan Zuckerberg Initiatives or any other foundation. The reality of this thing is that, for whatever reason, there's no one in his immediate orbit who has been able to give him perspective to understand this problem. And the same as true at Google,

it's true at Amazon. It's true it to a lesser degree at Microsoft, and those are the four big players in surveillance capitalism. And again, I would love to talk to Mark, but I last communicated with him on the thirtieth of October when I warned him that I thought there was something catastrophic going on related to democracy and related to uh civil rights. And you know, he got

right back to me. But they were incredibly dismissive. And I spent three months pleading with them privately that this was like the tail and all poisoning at Anson and Johnson, that there's one right answer, and that is to to work with the the authorities to find out what the problem was and do everything it can to protect the people who use your product. And for whatever reason, Facebook

chose not to do that. Just got thirty seconds. How quickly do we catch up on the regulatory side is and and create those you know, like we wouldn't have people taking bad drugs. These things are not going to happen overnight, but they don't have to happen everywhere in the world at once. We can do one piece in many different jurisdictions and get the same effect. These guys are so automated that if you make a change in one jurisdiction, they will implement a global GDPR has had

a profound impact everywhere. It didn't solve the problem because these guys were allowed to control the way people signed up, so they trick them into not signing up. But we can, we can solve this problem, but we gotta get on it. We have to make it an election issue because you can't solve climate change, you can't solve anti vacs, you can't solve gun violence until you get these guys not amp fly dangerous people the messages that get amplified. Right.

What a pleasure. Thank you so much. Roger mcnamick, the founder of Elevation, part of his book Sucked Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe new paperback out February three. Pick it up, read it again. This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Jason Kelly on Bloomberg Radio. I've been so psyched about this conversation. I have to say I've been talking a bunch about it too everyone in the news room, because it's rare that you get to interact with the true sort of multi hyphen it in

a lot of ways. And our next guest surely is that TV Jake's is the chairman of the TV Jake's Foundation. We're going to talk a lot about that. But he is by all accounts, sort of a mastermind, a pastor. He's got his hands in so many different pies. Really great to have you here with us in New York,

So thank you. All right, So tell us about the foundation, because you are going after what I think is one of the most pressing issues of our day, which is sort of filling that gap between people who need to hire folks and folks who want jobs. It's it doesn't get much more complicated or simple than that. You know, it's a very important issue, particularly with the disenfranchise. Whether you're talking about black, brown, or female, they're underrepresented, particularly

in STEM programs, technological programs. The divide is so wide and the technology is moving so rapidly that that though we are at eight percent unemployment right now, we're scheduled to be at if we don't close that divide. With technology, science, technology, UH, engineering and math. We added another component to it from STEM to STEAM because the stats say that when you add the ARCH you are far more apt to get more people involved and it's kind of a gateway UH

into studying technology. So that left right brain. You need it all right, I think to be really successful. Why are we still struggling with this, Bishop Jakes? Because I feel like we know there's a problem them about access uh and equality for everyone in terms of an education, especially for the stam or steam field. Um, why is it still a problem? Because the where's we get it? We know there's a problem. Schools are working on scholarships, but it's still is a problem. The arts have been

underfunded in school. That's one of the problems that we have to face. The other problem is in no part of our labs have we caught up with technology, which is moving so rapidly. Our laws have not caught up

with technology. So that's a real problem. And then when you start thinking about our laws not catching up, our job searchers have not caught up with them, and into the culture and the fabric of people outside of Silicone Valley and pockets of technology, there's an indifference to the subject as if we uh, it's an optional issue, when in fact it is not optional at all, and people who don't get in are going to be left behind in a way that I think is going to be tragic,

and it's going to be detrimental to the country. And so how do you make that case to business leaders, because, as we've seen with something like climate change, business leaders only really engage when they feel like there's an existential threat. Are they sensing that at this point? How do you make the case to those leaders? You know a lot of them, Yes, I know a lot of them, And a lot of companies today are focusing on diversity and inclusion, and so it's not a hard case to make to

them that there is a need to do that. And in many instances the criteria requires that in order to do business, that your boards and that your company be more diversified than ever before. However, there's still a great divide when it comes to how do I get in touch with the people. Great programs are out there, but the people who need to know about the programs don't hear the information. Interesting, so, just because you put something in the Wall Street Journal doesn't mean that it reached

the underserved communities. And so we want to be a liaison and a bridge to help facilitate accessing those talents that do exist in cultivating those that do not. And so how do you how do you get that message out? What's the mechanism that you have to get in there. About thirty thousand members in my church and almost thirty million people on my social media database creates, uh, my own media hub within itself. I just want to say stop right there, because Jason and I are just struggling

with a few thousand people. So we just later on we're gonna talk and you're gonna but that's a great platform, and can I just want to say something you talked about diversity and inclusion. Someone said to me diversity is getting an invitation to the party. Inclusion is being asked to dance, and I thought that is such a telling thing. It's not just about being brought in, but you've got

to be asked to do a significant role, right. It's got to be deeper and and in this case, you may be prepared to do mentoring programs to teach me how to dance, because a lot of people are underqualified for these positions, and we have to rethink how we educate, how we implement, how we mentor how we develop if inclusion is really the goal that we have, and I hope that it is, because we have right now today seven hundred thousand jobs that are available right now in

tech industry that we don't have anybody to feel. And when you look at that and you understand that we have twenty three percent of African Americans are living below the poverty line, then that's an opportunity. It's either either a disaster or an opportunity. So here we are in a political year. Are politicians listening because are we are is that they'll talk about jobs. Is that pool of workers better off today than they were? You know, I

used to think like that. I used to think that it was about the politicians, But I am totally convinced that it is not about the politicians totally. I think they need to have a seat at the table. Four different entities need to have a seat at the table, especially for the African American community. Faith leaders need to be included at the table because we are the gateway to the community. And most CEOs don't understand that they are so afraid of faith because they're in the mainstream world.

They don't understand that the churches up to our community. The politicians do because anytime they want, they're showing up a lot on Sunday. Right up on Sunday just happened to be in the neighborhood. But the CEOs are just coming into an awareness that we can be an asset and a facilitator, that we can market their jobs, that we can do things and they work it. We just got about thirty seconds. Are they reaching out to you

and say, let's fix this. I'm seeing some progress in that regard our Texas or Finders Reentry initiative taken twenty three thousand formally incarcerated and worked them through the system. And we've been partnering with companies like A T and T said down with Randall Stevenson, he gets it. Several others are starting to get it. We just want to be a bridge between those who have the need and

those who have the opportunity. We are just delighted you stop by to see us, Bishop Jakes, and really look forward to spending more time with you and understanding come back to start figuring out how this initiative goes. T. D. Jakes, Chairman of the T. D. Jakes Foundation. As I said, so much more than a multi hyphen it one of the most influential voices certainly across the country.