SjoerdJun 5

#CarelessPeople, first impressions (1/?)

6 pages in I am already not at all convinced by how she distances herself from any responsibility for the behaviour of the company she was an extremely senior figure of, in charge of a particularly consequential strategic area

Show threadSjoerdJun 5

#CarelessPeople (2/?)

55 pages in, she keeps saying that the people around her at the top of Facebook were so very smart, but to me they sound like they were very high on their own supply. show don’t tell, please, and while you’re telling “smart”, what you’re showing is a group of people drinking lots and lots of kool-aid. including quite prominently you yourself.

Show threadSjoerdJun 5
(I am starting to suspect this book wasn’t written for me, was it 😅)
Show threadSjoerdJun 6

#CarelessPeople (3/?) when she goes to Myanmar to get the junta to unblock Facebook and they tell her they block it because people are using it to foment ethnic hatred and she’s like “meh, please just unblock us”; I am not getting a sense that she herself is significantly more caring here.

Oh wait, she cared, about potentially being fired if her employer would find out she was pregnant before she had fixed that situation.

Show threadSjoerd
#CarelessPeople (4/?) “I hate myself for being part of this”, she writes on p. 91 out of 380. 🙄
Jun 6 at 9:49pmWeb
Show threadSjoerdJun 6

#CarelessPeople (5/?) the very first “realisation of how little they care” (p. 118), is literally exclusively a realisation how little they cared about *her*.

This book should have been called “People Who Didn’t Care About Meeeeeeeeee”, really.

Show threadSjoerdJun 7
#CarelessPeople (6/?) about the first time a genuinely serious international policy (her field, remember) issue comes up, regarding China, she concludes the chapter with a trivializing (and possibly racist) punchline about a “red flag” 🙄
Show threadSjoerd6d ago
I’m at the point where this book is starting to hang with me even when I’m not reading, making me anxious these ghastly people will soon be entering my dreams 🤢 should either get this thing over with quick, or lay it aside I think
Show threadSjoerd5d ago

#CarelessPeople (7/?) I honest to god thought, from her tone of indignation at how awful everyone around her was and what a destructive company it was, that she had had the final straw in the previous chapter, but this anecdote concludes with “For years afterward, anytime there are…”

years??? you knew all that, and you stayed, not for a few months for a no doubt very lucrative exit strategy, you stayed for YEARS?

Show threadSjoerd4d ago

#CarelessPeople (8/8) ok I give up. I made it this far but I honestly can’t get myself to add another word of this toxicity to my brain, which is waiting to be replenished with important books, like “Where’s All The Community? Aboriginal Melbourne Revisited” that is waiting for me on the library reserve shelf.

I don’t need to know how she absolves herself from responsibility for Myanmar. How she acts as if it was all anyone else’s responsibility but hers. Or how she acts, as she does with Brexit, as if it all happened elsewhere, in a place that has nothing to do with her.

Friends don’t recommend this book to friends. #bookstodon

Show threadSara-Jayne Slocombe (she/her)4d ago
@slevelt Yeah, this is how I expect my reading of that book would go, if I persevered as long as you did. I'm glad it's out there, for the people who need it, but I can accept that Facebook's a terrible company without reading it.
Show threadbookandswordblogJun 7
@slevelt so less "The Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie" than a White Russian memoir about how peasants are awful except the ones who helped them over the Caucasus?
Show threadGiflianJun 6
@slevelt kinda enjoying your hate-read commentary tbh
Show threadibkJun 7
@giflian @slevelt I agree. I had no desire to read what I assumed would be an autohagiography, but having someone else do it for me is great!
Show threadGiflianJun 7
@ibk @slevelt well, in my case I listened to the audiobook sometime last year, but listened with a bias towards trusting her version of events because of my history in the SF tech industry. So I am enjoying the tea but also feel a bit sheepish