Katherine Losse

I'd give this book a four for content and a two for likability, so that's a solid three, I suppose.

This is a profoundly cynical book. To read it you'd think that Losse was the only person working at Facebook in its first five years who had a soul at all. She projects a lot of feelings onto other people, without ever showing any real understanding of a person who isn't her. To be totally fair, Losse's book did kick off a series of critiques of bro-centric startup culture, and that's valuable - but she doesn't have any particular insights other than "this is bad" (which it definitely is).

Her critique of Facebook's mission is almost worse, not because I don't agree with it, but because of her unilateral preference for "real life" over digital interaction. As someone who basically grew up online, despite being only a few years younger than Losse, and who's still more comfortable with online interaction in some spheres, Losse's critique is a little too heavy-handed for my tastes.

Overall an interesting book, but one I think would have been more interesting if I'd read it when it came out rather than now, a couple of years later, when it seems like a tired rehash of all the things I know it inspired.… (mais)

Engaging, depressing account from an early Facebook employee, with heavy emphasis on the rich white boyness of it all. She doesn’t use the word “microaggressions,” but the enterprise was designed to remind people constantly who was important. Losse’s background in Baltimore, and her love of The Wire, suggested comparisons to her that the boys she worked with didn’t make—for example, she noticed that black students tended to use Facebook “more socially and conversationally” than white students. This difference had technical implications: there was a bug that affected the inboxes of people with over five hundred messages; white people’s accounts rarely generated that bug. The system broke when the use was other than expected—just as film optimized for white skin doesn’t perform as well with dark skin. That’s external/customer-facing, but the internal operations were a good sign as well, like when the female employees were all given T-shirts with Mark Zuckerberg’s face on them (adore him!) while the males were given versions of the clothing he wore (be him!). Losse deemed the Harvard guys paradoxically clueless about “the very things they claimed to know most about: money and power…. They assumed everyone had the same chances in life, the same easy path to wealth, where knowing just a little more about gadgetry than everyone else went a very long way.” They still wanted to live in the original site Zuckerberg coded, where they got to judge girls’ hotness and codify everything—in a way that kept them on top. All in all, an infuriating read.… (mais)