'Privacy is Power', going live with Roger McNamee & Carissa Veliz to discuss digital surveillance

Today 5pm BST, 12pm ET (in 15 mins!)

We are already living in a surveillance society. This isn’t science fiction or a worst case scenario. Our every move is already being tracked and almost our every action is logged.

But we haven’t even begun to reckon with the far reaching consequences of what this means both to us as individuals and as societies. In the US, it’s information that is already being used to target and surveil immigrants but all of us are vulnerable and it’s an issue that we urgently need to better understand.

The Stasi only managed to collect files on one third of the GDR’s population, chickenfeed compared to Silicon Valley companies have on every one of us.

In order to do so, I’m lucky to be joined shortly by two incredible experts in the field. Join me live at 5pm BST, 12pm ET.

Roger McNamee is long time friend and ally. He’s spent his entire career in the belly of the beast, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who actually introduced Mark Zuckerberg to Sheryl Sandberg.

In 2016, alarmed at what he was seeing online - and particularly what he saw happening in June 2016 during the Brexit referendum in the UK - he tried to raise the alarm, writing privately to Mark Zuckerberg warning him that Facebook risked being used to subvert the upcoming US election.

That warning was ignored and Roger subsequently wrote Zucked, a great book about what Facebook had become and what it’s enabling, and I’ve watched Roger become increasingly radicalised by the refusal of Silicon Valley tech companies to reckon with their harms.

One of the things I most love about Roger is how he champions other people and especially women. He maintains a list of tech experts in every field - most of whom he points out are women - and a couple of years ago, he introduced me to Carissa Véliz, an Oxford academic who had written a book that he urged me to read called ‘Privacy is Power’. It’s an authoritative and far-reaching analysis of Silicon Valley’s business model - data harvesting - and what that really means and how we need to fight back against it.

This event is being organised in conjunction with the Citizens, the non-profit I co-founded that is campaigning and storytelling around these issues. You can find them on Substack here.

If you can’t make it, I’ll send around the a video and transcript later.

Dr. Carissa Véliz

Author of Privacy is Power, Carissa is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford and one of the fiercest voices in digital ethics. She’s on a mission to expose how data is being weaponised — and why we need to shut it down.

Roger McNamee

He helped fund Facebook. Now he’s one of its biggest critics. Roger is a Silicon Valley insider turned whistleblower, author of Zucked, and a fearless advocate for reining in Big Tech’s worst impulses.

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Last week’s Substack Live with Facebook whistleblower Yael Eisenstat & The Contrarian’s Jen Rubin

If you missed this, do catch up here. It was a really fascinating discussion around the so-called ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ and one small (but also hugely consequential) story to come from it, namely the rejection of the clause that would have enforced a 10-year moratorium on US states being able to regulate AI. Yael, a former CIA officer who headed up election integrity at Facebook in 2018 is now at an organisation called Cybersecurity for Democracy and was deeply involved in the efforts to prevent that passing into law.

Jen Rubin fled the Washington Post earlier this year to set up The Contrarian which has become a great Substack success story. I found it especially interesting to talk to her about how their news coverage is unashamedly ‘pro democracy’ and how that’s affects everything they’re doing including their choice of vocabulary (she uses the word ‘regime’ rather than ‘administration’, for example).

You’ll also find clips and a transcript on the Citizens Reunited page below. Thanks to Substack’s AI for capturing me in a particularly gormless expression.

Big Tech & The Democratic Backslide (ft. Jen Rubin, Carole Cadwalladr & Yael Eisenstat)

If you have questions, do drop them in the comments below. I’m hoping that Carissa is going to have practical tips for how to protect yourself as well as what we need to end this extractive and pernicious business practice that we know can and already has been weaponised to profile and attack individuals and groups.