I do think on some level she might have entered with good intent. What I don't understand and wish she had been honest about is how she went to a place where she's sending emails while delivering a baby. Why she decided to MOVE to Palo Alto because she could "tell" Zuck wanted her to /3
A friend said that I should highlight how many times her husband should have left her and I'm halfway through the book and I've counted at least half a dozen. She became everything she criticizes in the book in really short order and never explains why and that is the more interesting story IMHO /4
Because maybe Zuck was born Zuck, IDK. But IMHO institutions do two things - select for workers like themselves. But also remake workers into people who believe into the institution.
The book would have been stronger if it had paralleled her descent into an immoral person with the immorality from above instead of focusing on covering her ass. / end
Yes, like The Godfather but with hoodies
I read it, but when I was done, I clicked just about every box on StoryGraph for content warnings. I expected some of them but not chapter after chapter of detailed medical trauma.
I agree with this. I loved a lot about that book but the author was so complicit and just keeps saying ‘I needed the health insurance!’ Took away so much of her credibility
I'm enjoying the book but the author is trying to walk a fine line and not always succeeding. I get that she is trying to seem relatable and excuse why she is still there, but after a few stories of comical mixups it seems less like she is a mislead idealist and more like she's a little dumb, maybe?
I think I like it because OF COURSE these are the kinds of people who work for Facebook.
That sounds like a very interesting book and the one she should have written. Wonder if her editors suggested something similar…
Totally agree. That would have been a much better book. There were only so many times I could believe her staying at fb ONLY because she needed health care - um, guess what? Other, non evil jobs provide health care. You're actually greedy and like being adjacent to power.
Absolutely. There is a great passage in The Gone-away World that describes this phenomenon in a haunting way:
As Upton Sinclair said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
An article once described Zuckerberg as a 'wax doll, cursed into being' and now that is all I see.
Would it be interesting, though? In my experience, the vast majority of people in most institutions will endure quite a lot to succeed or survive within the framework they find. It's much rarer for people to reject the culture and suffer the consequences of it.
tbh i found the narrator's messiness interesting! my take was that she doubled down bc she knew they needed someone smart on global policy. (also why she spends so much time on her struggle to create the role.) a bit savior complex-y but it didn't bother me bc comes w territory of the memoir genre
I think she did try to explain it some. A combination of "I can fix him" but 'him' is a company and fear over losing her ability to live in the US, particularly when she was pregnant, if she lost her job. But yeah. Definitely not exculpatory.
Yeah but that comes years in.