Faceboook and the Internet wild west: 2019 book "Zucked" challenges social entreprise and national governments.

Roger McNamee, the author of the unfortunately titled but important 2019 book "Zucked: Waking up to the Facebook Catastrophe " is in as good a position as anyone to know why it's time to end the wild west that the Internet soon became. following its now naively, albeit understandably, aspirational "nerd"-beginnings. In Zucked he nails the adolescent techy dreams that propelled Facebook founder and colleague Mark Zuckerberg and other privileged young entrepreneurs to metaphorically surf their way to massive fortunes by exploiting the regulatory vacuum that online enterprise long enjoyed. Privileged personal data was sold or used for market validation tasks. Beyond insider details about foreign election interference and privacy violation that were undoubtedly what made this book a must-publish item  for major publisher Penguin, McNamee offers serious proposals for what to do about the problems he exposes. It is for this reason that he has been invited to provide give expert testimony to both Canadian and US governments. In some sense  for governments the challenge is easy in that they must clearly impose greater constraints, both financial and structural on online development ne enterprises like Google, Twitter and, of course Facebook. 

But for social enterprise, the challenge emerging from the Facebook "catastrophe" is more complex. This is because 21st century social enterprise has been the beneficiary of the same unregulated online space that facilitated the rise of Facebook - low/no start-up costs and little case-history, let alome law, about what is socially acceptable and what is not. Social enterprise must preserve its space for innovation that fills gaps in our still "neo-liberally" dominated political culture, while supporting the need to curb predatory license. The best current  option, since governments are usually slow and reluctant actors is to promote alternatives to corporate entrepreneurialism. One such is that of the platform coop  movement championed by Trebor Scholz, described elsewhere in this blog. Towards the end of McNamee provides useful suggestions of existing utilities like non-tracking  search engine DuckDuckGo to facilitate readers' benevolent instincts.

This is a key book for Internet and available from this blog's founder, Libra (libra@web.ca) 
for a non--Amazon status boost.  Stay tuned to this blog for more about the challenges of social enterprise in a time of neoliberal cynicism.