Steven Levy is Wired's editor at large. The Washington Post has called him "America's premier technology journalist." His previous positions include founder of Backchannel and chief technology writer and senior editor for Newsweek. Levy has written seven previous books, and his work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Harper's Magazine, Macworld, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, The New Yorker, and Premiere. Levy has also won several awards during his thirty-plus years of writing about technology, including for his book Hackers, which PC Magazine named the best sci-tech book written in the past twenty years; and for Crypto, which won the grand e-book prize at the 2001 Frankfurt Book Fair.
One of the Best Technology Books of 2020—Financial Times
Praise for Facebook
“Steven Levy is the founding guru of technology journalism. Few
other writers can harness both access to top figures and critical
insight informed by decades of reporting on Silicon Valley. His
Facebook book will be a blockbuster, a penetrating account of the
momentous consequences of a reckless young company with the power
to change the world.”—Brad Stone, author of The Everything Store
and The Upstarts
“Exhaustive and well-paced history of the tech
giant . . . Levy’s narrative is richly detailed,
thanks to interviews with Facebookers past and
present. . . . Levy’s account of Zuckerberg’s
abbreviated Harvard tenure and Facebook’s early years feels fresh,
with plenty of color that reminds you the HBO show Silicon Valley
did not have to reach far for its satire.”—NPR.org
“Comprehensive and captivating history.”—The Wall Street
Journal
“Levy writes with verve . . . [he] is able to trace
the origins of the Cambridge Analytica scheme to Facebook’s
disregard for the privacy concerns of the first
users. . . . In discussing the development of the
News Feed and advertising, Levy foreshadows the future misuse by
rogue actors, including Russia’s Internet Research Agency, the
group charged by Special Counsel Robert Mueller with interfering in
the election. . . . [He] doesn’t shy from asking the
tough questions.”—The Washington Post
“The social-media behemoth Facebook comes across as an idealistic
but also shady, exploitative, and increasingly beleaguered entity
in this clear-eyed history. . . . Levy had extensive
access to Facebook employees and paints a revealing and highly
critical portrait of the company as it wrangled with charges that
it violated users’ privacy by sharing their data with advertisers
and political operatives, and served as a vector for manipulative
fake news, pro-Trump Russian propaganda, and hate
speech.”—Publishers Weekly
“Steven Levy’s all-access Facebook reflects the reputational swan
dive of its subject. Levy is the dean of tech writers; Facebook’s
brass gave him the run of the C-suite. The result is evenhanded and
devastating.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“Fresh, up-to-date, and insider-ish.”—The Economist
“Respected tech writer Levy (In the Plex, 2011) presents the
definitive story of Facebook. . . . Given unfettered
access to Zuckerberg and the company during the last three years,
Levy is able to illustrate how the company developed under the
influence of Zuckerberg’s acknowledged
hypercompetitiveness. . . . This absorbing book will
inspire important conversations about big tech and privacy in the
twenty-first century.”—Booklist
“The value of this book lies in its putting together all the pieces
of Facebook’s privacy troubles, algorithms, and the Cambridge
Analytica affair.”—Library Journal
“Steven Levy, who reported [on Facebook] over three years, is one
of the best writers about tech, period. His access—through the
company and around it—is impressive.”—The Information, February
Book Club Pick
“I highly recommend this . . . It is probably the
best read on a high-tech big wig that is changing history that I’ve
read in a long, long, long time. I heartily and highly recommend
it. Bring some popcorn with you when you read it.”—Neil Cavuto on
Cavuto: Coast to Coast
“[Levy] consistently demonstrates how he’s driven by the facts
rather than by any philosophical or political agenda. And that’s
exactly why, once Levy has layered on so many new facts about
Facebook, its principals, and its various lapses and betrayals,
piling on the details from hundreds of interviews, putting all the
pieces of every part of Facebook’s story into one place, his most
evenhanded conclusions are still damning. . . . What
all Facebook’s critics, and the tech industry’s critics, will have
in common is this: Going forward, we all will be citing stuff we
learned from Levy’s Facebook: The Inside Story.”—Reason
“Levy portrays a tech company where no one is taking responsibility
for what it has unleashed. . . . The book closes
with a recognition that Facebook is bulldozing ahead with new
innovations—from Facebook dating to its Libra digital currency
project—while Zuckerberg continues to shrug off any ethical queries
about his past behavior.”—Financial Times
“In Facebook: The Inside Story, Levy turns his massively insightful
gaze to the trajectory of Facebook from its birth, its dizzying
growth, and its embattled present, when its reputation is
extensively scarred. . . . All in all, Levy capably
takes us into FB’s office, and into the mind-sets of its engineers.
He does so in a brilliantly readable narrative. Indeed, Levy’s
expertise at narrative nonfiction—the use of scenes, dialogue, and
other techniques, to create a story on the page—is ample, and it
shows in the smooth and pacy flow of this book; as does his ability
to go beyond bits, bytes, and balance-sheets to map the mind-spaces
of the techies behind Facebook, their ambitions, creative impulses,
greed, and desire to succeed. . . . One of the
(numerous) merits of reading this book: it makes you think about
how your online self and networks are sculpted, at least in part,
by people sitting continents away, in what ways, how the online
self is grafted onto the flesh-and-blood one, and how the online
self is manipulated, tweaked, even exploited. Take a bow, Steven
Levy.”—MoneyControl.com
“Wired editor Steven Levy uses tales from Zuckerberg’s early life,
pages from his handwritten journals, and encounters with company
execs to add texture and color to the familiar Facebook origin
story. He creates an intimate portrait of Zuckerberg’s competitive
nature and goals and how they have informed the company’s zealous
pursuit of growth over the last decade. It’s a timely probe into
the tech company’s motivations around data privacy, disinformation,
and corporate responsibility.”—Mashable
“Steven Levy charts the novelty, the thrusting, and the hubris of
Facebook, which in many ways reflects the personality of its still
wholly dominant founder. He presents some extraordinary facts in a
racy and riveting mainly chronological narrative.”—The Critic
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