Careless People

Read this after everyone made a lot of noise about it earlier in the year. I don’t know what I expected; pretty much everything in the book confirms exactly what I thought things were like at Facebook. They’re all weirdos and they’re all so self-absorbed they hardly notice when they enable all sorts of awful things elsewhere in the world. No second-order thinking but it’s okay because they’re all fabulously wealthy.

I was swept up a little bit during the first third. I want to hustle in the name of my ideals so bad. But maybe that’s just me being a Man In Tech, or maybe just wanting to be back in my twenties and having made different decisions, which who doesn’t want that.

The last quarter or so felt muddy, almost like Wynn-Williams had to shoehorn in all of the horrible global politics that Facebook did during Wynn-Williams's tenure. And they did a lot of horrible global politics: cooperating on election interference (although: no mention of Cambridge Analytica), building tools for spying in China, the Rohingya genocide (a single chapter called "Myanmar").

The whole thing makes me glad I’m no longer on Facebook; anyway off to WhatsApp to tell all my family that I’ve posted another book review