Careless Limit

I took easter off of work and found time to read two books. These aren't exactly reviews, but summaries of some thoughts I had after having read them both.

Character Limit

Character Limit by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac tells the story about Twitter and Elon Musks purchase and transformation of the service into X. It reads like a documentary, which I really enjoyed. By page 105, Elon has bought 9.2% of Twitter, and by page 260 the $46.5 billions are transferred. Who owns the service in between those two points is blurry, and Musks "goons" are running around calling shots that are not theirs to call. Rebranding, budget cuts, and layoffs are on the agenda, and in the end everybody seems to have lost. Maybe apart from Delaware Court of Chancery chancellor, and certified badass, Kathaleen McCormick.

Twitter employees, as well as the authors, would often refer to Twitter as the "town square", and how crucial it is to maintain Twitter as the center of public conversation. I am unsure if this is a US-ism, a not-my-country-ism, or a not-my-social-circle-ism, but it's certainly something; Twitter/X has, in my life anyways, never been a "real" place where "real" things happen. Only memes, shitposting, trolling, and the likes.

Nevertheless, the book is entertaining. Also, the authors are on the latest episode of Oxide and Friends, which is not releases as I'm writing this.

Careless People

Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams is a memoir by the former Facebook global public policy director. I am not sure what to think about the book. Being a memoir, it reads very differently than Character Limit and mixes humorous self-deprecating stories with detailed accounts of acts by reckless Facebook execs. I guess I was mainly interested in the latter.

My main gripe is that Wynn-Williams is obvilious that she is complicit. In an eary chapter she tells a story about playing Catan with Zucc and company on his private jet. The others are letting Zucc win, and Wynn-Williams is calling them out on it, quoting herself:

You're letting him win, Dex and Derick. You're enabling it.

I assumed this to be foreshadowing of herself realizing that as a global public policy director, whose job includes setting up meeting with policy makers and heads of states, travelling with Zucc and other key people around the world, and ensuring Facebooks influence over the "real" world, she is also enabling "it". This reflection was nowhere to be found in the book.

While Wynn-Williams distances herself from her colleagues, it seems she was in familiar company. This is best illustrated by two "quirky" stories: (1) when giving birth to her first child she insisted on sending work emails in between her contractions (to her boyfriends protests), and jokes the situation away with how her doctor told her to "press, don't press send"; and (2) that she was tasked to go to South-Korea in order to check if they would jail Facebook execs (who had arrest orders at the time), and having her boyfriend remind her that she had a 9-month old baby at home and so being jailed in a foreign country was a bad idea, to which she agreed.

Careless People, indeed.

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