A year ago, renowned investor Roger McNamee <\/a> had much of Silicon Valley baffled.<\/p>\n McNamee had made his name as a tech investor in the \u201980s and \u201990s before co-founding the private equity firm Silver Lake Partners, then co-founding the venture capital firm Elevation Partners with singer Bono.<\/p>\n A musician himself, McNamee had taken to spending more and more time playing with his band, Moonalice<\/a>, and performing in other gigs across the country. Yet suddenly, he was seemingly on every media outlet<\/a>\u00a0after writing a 6,000-word\u00a0piece in Washington Monthly that outlined his growing concern that Facebook\u2019s business model was increasingly dangerous, to both the U.S. economy and our democracy.<\/p>\n Given that McNamee had been an advisor to Mark Zuckerberg early in the company\u2019s life and profited from an early investment in the company, reporters wanted to know exactly what he saw as the problem \u2014 and he was happy to tell them. He saw bad actors on Facebook <\/a>. He saw data being scraped and sold and he saw disinformation campaigns. He was frustrated, he said, and users needed to get frustrated, too. He\u2019d tried to talk privately to both Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg \u2014 who he says he helped connect with Zuckerberg years ago \u2014 and they treated his concerns not as a legitimate threat to their users but as a PR crisis. When he wrote them again, he was passed along to other executives at Facebook who similarly, politely, gave him the brush-off.<\/p>\n Facebook might have hoped McNamee would disappear after his media tour. Instead, he sat down and began writing a book, \u201cZucked,\u201d which hits bookshelves, both real and virtual, today. The reason, he told us in a sit-down late last week, is simple. Facebook \u2014 and Google \u2014 grow more dangerous by the day. And while he might not be the right messenger to convey why, someone has to do it.<\/p>\n \u201cI may be the wrong messenger, but I don\u2019t see a lot of other volunteers at the moment,\u201d he told us, going so far as to say that he thinks the boards of both Google and Facebook have \u201ccommitted malpractice\u201d by remaining steadfastly quiet while one scandal<\/a> after another<\/a> has grabbed the headlines<\/a>, then dissipated into the background<\/a>.<\/p>\n For what it\u2019s worth, we read the book and we recommend it to anyone interested in Silicon Valley\u2019s rich history. It also provides the clearest understanding we\u2019ve read to date of why Facebook sprang into existence when it did, and why it has flourished in ways that are unprecedented, economically and politically. \u201cThey dominate the public square in every place where they operate, and there has been no election that put them in power,\u201d notes McNamee \u2014 and no accountability, either.<\/p>\n The book is a useful reminder, too, that we do have power as users, and that the ways that we\u2019ve begun changing our collective behavior is beginning, and can continue, to impact these companies, the reach of which we\u2019ve never before experienced and are still grappling to understand. In our chat, McNamee further suggested it would be powerful for Facebook employees to organize for once against the company\u2019s policies \u2014 or, in many cases, the dearth of them.<\/a><\/p>\n