User Profile

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.

The story has a good cadence to it until about 2/3 through where it accelerates to getting its themes across at the expense of coherence. It feels like story was pushed toward publication before it was fully developed. Lots of background questions left unanswered. Poor fictional geography. These would have been permissible but too much psychological complexity is introduced towards the end to ignore them. It’s a decent quick read, but unclear what kind of story this is.