Toxic Boomerality
Boomers like Roger McNamee remain insistent on changing the world…but not themselves.
The latest episode of Sam Harris’ podcast featured billionaire investor Roger McNamee. He was an early Facebook advisor who has since reversed his support of the company and become its biggest critic. He just published a book called Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe and is currently on a book tour. He was born in 1956, making him thirteen years old in 1969, at the peak of the Peace and Love counterculture movement that has come to define the Baby Boomer Generation.
His critiques of Facebook (and also Google) are the same ones you’ve heard a million times before. They harvest and sell your data to advertisers. They balkanize us into anger-fueled thought bubbles. Their susceptibility to manipulation is to blame for the 2016 election. If you don’t pay for the service you are the product, and on and on and on. These are good, valid critiques, and when he gets around to actually making them, he makes them very well.
But about three quarters of the way through the episode, McNamee acknowledges two surprising hypocrisies. The first is that he still owns shares of Facebook stock. His excuse is that he doesn’t want to appear to have profited from the success of the company by cashing them out now. This is an unconvincing explanation. To put skin in the game, he could sell his shares and give away the profits. Even better, he could use the money to invest in one of many active Facebook alternatives—Diaspora, Urbit, Mastodon, etc—where personal data is not harvested and targeted ads are impossible. These companies were founded to solve the problems with Facebook that McNamee identifies, and investing his dirty millions in one of them would presumably do far more to kill Facebook than his efforts to become a relevant public figure. But Boomers like McNamee would rather tell everyone else how to change the world, instead of starting with themselves.
The second surprising hypocrisy is that McNamee is currently using Facebook advertising to promote his anti-Facebook book. His excuse is that he is using “guerrilla warfare” to fight Facebook on its own platform. This is a similarly lame explanation. McNamee has, after all, appeared on Making Sense (formerly Waking Up) with Sam Harris, a thought leading podcast and one of the most downloaded in the country. He has also promoted his book on many other popular podcasts including Recode Decode, It’s All Happening, and The James Altucher Show. He has had recent op-eds and interviews published in The Guardian, Bloomberg, Fast Company, all linking to his book. Google News is filled with a well-orchestrated mix of “earned” media that is no doubt the benefit of employing an extremely expensive PR agency. Surely these efforts are enough to reach his targets without using the very service he rails against. He wouldn’t sell quite as many books without Facebook advertising, so he just has to use it? He’s like a Greenpeace activist riding in a plastic kayak made out of petroleum produced by the very oil rig he’s protesting.
This brazen refusal to take personal action for one’s supposed beliefs is the trademark of a certain sort of 60s-era Baby Boomer. People like actor William H. Macy who, in a recent interview with Men’s Journal, described Trump as embodying his most despised traits, “Dishonesty. Self-delusion. Lack of character.” Only a week later, his wife Felicity Huffman would be arrested as part of a scandal involving rich Boomer parents paying millions of dollars to fraudulently get their kids into Ivy League schools. In the same interview, Macy said, “I married very, very well. It’s great fun for me to watch Felicity. I love the way she mothers our daughters.”
Or someone like Apple CEO Tim Cook, who pays endless lip service to warm do-goodery and world-changishness while enslaving impoverished workers in China. Or bad man caller-outer Barbra Streisand defending her friend Michael Jackson with “You can say ‘molested,’ but those children, as you heard say, they were thrilled to be there.” Or even Weinstein himself, becoming the primary benefactor of a Clinton campaign built around strong woman-in-the-workplace rhetoric, while privately acting as its primary denigrator.
It’s all talk, no action. An unwillingness to change the world by looking at the man in the mirror. It is giant finger wagging down at us from a glass house on a very high hill in a very expensive neighborhood. “You can change the world!” it cries, while failing to do anything to change itself first.
Certainly all generations have their own unique hypocrisies, and my claim is not that the Boomer Generation’s is worse than any other. My goal is only to characterize their hypocrisy. Listening to McNamee’s empty indignation on Sam Harris seemed like the perfect illustration. It’s such a common picture in today’s world. A Boomer oligarch driven to fits of rage by the 2016 election, scrambling for something, anything to explain it besides the failures of his own contemporaries. It must be Zuckerberg! It must be those damn red dots.
McNamee’s Wikipedia page describes him as a “musician” and features a picture of him playing guitar on stage. He includes his middle name, Burroughs, which also seems contrived to recall the 1960s. He clearly believes in the radical leftism of the 1960s, and I don’t think he is intentionally deceiving us. It’s only that his “I‘d-like-to-buy-the-world-a-Coke” values never amounted to anything more than a reaction against the picket-fence Christianity of the Greatest Generation. They were never codified in any way, besides in fantastic music, tie dye aesthetics, and vague aphorisms like “free love,” “power to the people,” and “no religion too.” Nonetheless, the bums did not lose. The Hippies won the culture war. They are Huffman, Cook, Weinstein, Streisand, and McNamee. These are the illustrations of the most dominant power establishment operating in the United States today, a power establishment that can’t quite accept the responsibility that comes along with its power.
Note that in all the above instances the Boomer in question acknowledged and apologized for their hypocrisy, as if that somehow discharged their duty to stand by the principles they espouse. Saying “I understand that advertising on Facebook is hypocritical, but I’m going to do it anyway because I’m conducting guerilla warfare” is the ultimate empty NIMBY-ism, and I just can’t help but see it as painted in tie dye. I believe victims, unless of course the victimizer is my ‘ol buddy Michael. I believe in integrity, but of course not when it comes to my children. I believe in feminism, but of course not when it comes to me. I believe in data privacy but, you know, not if it means selling fewer copies of my book.
The thing about making 1960s reactivity the core of your value system is that it comes without any commandments. It leads to absurd central policies like Google’s “Don’t Be Evil” or the rallying cry “Fuck H8!” These Boomerish phrases mean one thing and one thing only—at the end of the day, evil is whatever I say it is, and it sure as shit isn’t me.
McNamee, in his Wikipedia profile, is sure to describe himself as a “travelling musician.” His profile picture depicts him as a sort of Jerry Garcia figure, with wispy grey hair, a stoned smile, and a guitar clutched to his chest. Rock and Roll baby, free love, fuck the man, man! He’s still saying it, a half century after the fact, and despite being a billionaire shilling a book lamenting young people he just doesn’t understand.
Listen to an episode of my podcast Not a Huge Fan about Roger McNamee and Toxic Bomerality on iTunes or Spotify.
