A short review of "careless people" by Sarah Wynn-Williams
Heya! So, we read Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams for the book club this month!
So, as is tradition, I'm gonna review it!
First of all, I really liked the book! The prose was really solid, and in general, there was a really nice narrative throughline, the whole thing didn't just feel like a bunch of unrelated events from Sarah Wynn-Williams life, despite the fact that that's, kind of what the book consists of. With these sort of biographical books, it's very easy to make something that's overly boring, or feels very disjointed, since, well. Peoples lives tend to be pretty boring, and it can be quite hard to figure out which parts to focus on to provide a compelling reading experience, and which parts to cut out.
I was also suprised at just how bad things were over at facebook. Sure, I was aware that they're evil and don't respect privacy, but I just kind of assumed that their main goal was just kind of making lots of money by collecting data, and ignoring morality in the process. But over the course of the book, facebook leadership repeatedly makes decisions that are not only incredibly evil, but also really stupid business decisions. Like, for example, having basically zero developers assigned to the myanmar version of their app. Or risking getting their own employees arrested so Mark Zuckerberg can post an "inspirational" post to their facebook page that would also led to themselves getting further incriminated in an ongoing lawsuit. It gets to the point where, if this was a fictional parody of silicon-valley culture, I might have critiqued it for being too over the top and on the nose with its parody.
Anyways, I don't really have too much more to say on this one? Facebook is evil. That about sums it up i think. I knew that before, but now I know they're even more evil than I thought.
7/10, good book. Go read it if you feel like getting angry at facebook.