Careless People

Well-written for the most part. Some minor issues in use of tense but I blame the editor. It’s a good inside look at the culture within one of the worlds most influential companies and says a lot about how we measure success as a society. I think the perspective of an outsider from the corporate standpoint (UN background) and cultural standpoint (NZ citizen) is really important for seeing and understanding the harm that Facebook and other growth-at-all-costs enterprises have done to both their employees and customers. I laughed throughout the whole book at the absurdity of it all, then I took away a star because I remembered this is nonfiction and I have to actually do some mental and emotional labor in how I respond to the information within.

Quick read, well written narrative. Stressful story. Everything inside Facebook was worse than you thought.

I was a at best a reluctant user of FB, and my scepticism of tech had probably kicked in before the time frame of this book, but I definitely held that kind of naïve optimism about tech's power for good at some point in time - a thing that in 2025 is already proving really difficult to rationalise in hindsight.

It's not a huge surprise to learn that the big personalities in this book are all dicks, and that working culture in a Silicon Valley tech company is dysfunctional and toxic. It was also good to be reminded just how implicated FB is in genocides and shitty election outcomes. On top of the diss to tech company culture (which I am always here for), Wynn-Williams' personal story is actually pretty killer (almost literally a couple of times) on its own!