matty_joe319 's review for:

Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams

4.5

challenging dark informative reflective medium-paced

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What a doozy. This isn’t my usual pick of genre; usually hearing about this much relevant political strife on my daily walk would drive me into a panic attack. But something about hearing how childish, incompetent, and, dare I say, careless these leaders are was somehow comforting and cathartic. Sarah does a great job of laying out her 7ish years with Facebook both chronologically and categorically. The issues she deals with inside the company and around the world are explained objectively and clearly, and I learned more about tech companies, 2010s history, information privacy, and world politics than I was ever expecting to (it’s more interesting than it sounds, I promise). The stories and interactions speak for themselves, without the author having to shoehorn them into some grandiose metaphor or point she’s making, and she ends with a clear call-to-action, still trying to fight for what’s right in the face of despair. Lastly, and most importantly, if you weren’t already convinced to read this book, Mark Zuckerberg really REALLY doesn’t want you to read it, and it feels good to do something that would upset such a morally bereft man-baby. I hope Sarah Wynn-Williams gets everything she deserves, and I hope Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Joel Kaplan, Eliot Schrage, and the many other careless people leading the tech world get what they deserve as well.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Blood, Medical trauma, Sexual harassment, Colonisation, Injury/Injury detail

Moderate: Genocide, Gore, Hate crime, Misogyny, Rape, Sexism, Sexual violence, Violence, Medical content

Minor: Torture, Police brutality, Trafficking, Religious bigotry, War

most genocide-related and sexual-violence-related content deals with describing atrocities committed in the Rohingya Genocide in Myanmar. Most medical trauma-related content is in the first chapter, related to an animal attack. The rest of the book is relatively free of mentions or descriptions of violence.