shanen's Journal: More about the evil corporate cancer Facebook

Chaos Monkeys by Antonio Garcia Martinez is intellectually agile, engaging, and annoying. Mostly his personal story about a couple of years working for Facebook, but also quite revealing about what is wrong there and how Facebook is making the world a worse place, not better.

Unfortunately I don't have or want to have the time to do a proper and comprehensive review of the book, so... I'm going to try to summarize the main problems and reduce by many page-linked reactions to numbers associated with the proper buckets.

The central internal conflict of the book is about the use and abuse of personal information. Sometimes he's arguing that the collection and public availability of personal information are good things, or at least harmless, (Pages 318, 324, 326, 361, 382, 424, and 489) and other times he gives examples of the why they are bad (Pages 180, 284, 318, 324, 356, 363, 376, 382, 433, 457, 484, 489, 498, and 507), often when he is collecting and using other people's personal information against them for his manipulative negotiations. I think it often comes down to questions of partial information as related to personal freedom, which seems to call for a citation of my mnemonic pseudo-equation on the topic:

#1^2 Freedom == (Meaningful + Truthful - Coercion^2) Choice{~5} â (Beer^4+ | Speech | Trade)

Too bad no one seems to understand or have interest in that, but as it applies to this book the key is mostly in the "Meaningful" and "Truthful" terms where data is fed selectively to reframe and distort reality and manipulate people. (And that calls for treating lies as negative truths, which now makes me wonder if I should revise it for an explicit negative term or go into the ontology of lies... (My own mental agility always lacks focus? (Get back to the book!)))

The copy editing was quite good and the only potential errors I noticed (in a bothersome way) were a couple of commas. Maybe they were really just leftover Oxford commas from longer lists that had been cut down to two items in the editing? (Pages 435 and 484.)

There were also many places where he tossing in ideas that seemed quite insightful. Agility? Or just stuff he got somewhere and didn't bother to cite the source? (Pages 49, 272, and I'm sure others.) Not sure how many of the "catchy" chapter titles should be included in this bucket, though he sometimes included citations in footnotes or explanations in the text. Overall he is quite well read, perhaps in several languages.

Many places have a kind of apologetic tone and it often felt he was trying to avoid sounding defensive, though in many of those places he acknowledged that he felt like he was on the wrong side in some way. Ranged from "criminal mindset" to "innovative thinker" with various flavors of "thought leadership". (Pages 52, 73, 137, 256, 320, 325, 356, 413, 452, 480, and 498.)

Interesting and enjoyable book. Sort of the opposite of this quasi-review, eh? Sorry, but apparently I've stopped caring much about readers and just trying to focus on clarifying my own thinking. My personal priority is on the reading side, where I enjoy the flow sensations and the sense of completion as I finish a book. However I'm sure this review also suffered from interfering thoughts from Facebook by Steven Levy, which I finished recently and which pushed me into reading this one, and from Stolen Focus by Johann Hari, which I'm already about halfway through and which covers a lot of the same territory. Even worse, these days my main feeling about solutions is "We can't get there from here."