Jens Finkhäuser reviewed Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams
Must read, but carefully.
5 stars
The thing I wrote in my last comment remains throughout the book: it reads as if the author is very naive. Or if the narration is incredibly carefully edited to make it appear so. I'm still unsure which it is, exactly.
But the books is still very much worth a read. With the legal scrutiny its gotten, it'll be difficult for there to be outright falsehoods contained within, at least not the kind Meta's lawyers will care about.
So if you take the happenings at face value? Then from my own perspective as someone who knows some of the tech industry, it's not revealing may new things. There are more details, things that take the news stories and put them into a different perspective. It's very much worth it for that alone.
What makes it so interesting to me that i can't shake the feeling that it …
The thing I wrote in my last comment remains throughout the book: it reads as if the author is very naive. Or if the narration is incredibly carefully edited to make it appear so. I'm still unsure which it is, exactly.
But the books is still very much worth a read. With the legal scrutiny its gotten, it'll be difficult for there to be outright falsehoods contained within, at least not the kind Meta's lawyers will care about.
So if you take the happenings at face value? Then from my own perspective as someone who knows some of the tech industry, it's not revealing may new things. There are more details, things that take the news stories and put them into a different perspective. It's very much worth it for that alone.
What makes it so interesting to me that i can't shake the feeling that it serves a purpose other than whistleblowing.
It starts with the fact that the chronology of this story is all over the place. It jumps between the different time periods of the author's work at Facebook, and quickly jumps back, making it seem events are connected immediately when they're years apart.
It turns out that the plot lines the book follows are more thematic. The theme of careless manipulation of politics. The themes of various relationships. And so forth.
Each theme is then laid out in ways that give the appearance of progressive worsening of the situation at the company. And while there is clear evidence of that, there are also episodes revealing plenty of telling moments early in the author's FB career.
This supports this sense of the author's naivety. Her insistence that she started with idealism, and FB contained possibilities. While this isn't something I doubt as such, when it's part of a development that, when laid out in honest chronological order, has red flags from the start, it's a hard sell. Because one has to reconcile that with the image of a woman who convinced Facebook to give her a job they didn't think necessary, and who is on a first name basis with some of the 1%.
So. It makes me suspicious.
But it don't know what exactly of.
The best I can think of that would make for this mixture is that the author wants the reader to believe her relative innocence so much, she's willing to obfuscate and mislead.
But strangely, it makes it seem more believable. Because we all want to be the heroes of our own stories. This reads like the edit the author made to her story to make her complicity acceptable to herself.
That's worth reading.
