Reviews and Comments

There are no big reveals in this book for anyone who is well informed and critical of big tech, but I guess it's good that someone documented details about how hypocritical Sheryl Sandberg is with her white feminism and what an absolutely soulless, self-centered creep Mark Zuckerberg is? Also, more power to anyone publicly exposing their sexual harassers.

On the other hand, this book reminded me of people with those ridiculous "I bought this Tesla before Elon went crazy" bumper stickers. Sarah Wynn-Williams comes across as, at BEST, horribly naive about the most basic facts of capitalism, and she actually seems to see herself as some kind of soft power hero. She admits that when she first started working at Facebook she was stunned by the idea that corporations have no other interest than growth. And her unshakeable, uncritical faith in liberal internationalism is just cringey.

The worst parts to me weren't anything about Facebook, but when Wynn-Williams herself offers the exact kind of clueless, self-centered white Euro-American commentary that she criticizes FB execs for. She brings up the Zika virus only to make it all about herself and refers to "traveling to all these weird places" (cool, tell us how you really feel).

Finally, there's no takeaway. There's no critique of big tech other than how awful the people running it are and how they're accountable to no one. Wynn-Williams leaves open the possibility that these companies could somehow be good if only the right people ran them. The book is interesting as a workplace memoir about working close to top management at a FAANG company, but it's very weak as a supposed "cautionary tale."

There is kind of a lot going on in this book. It reads like Ryan Murdock wanted to put together everything he had written and learned about his time living in Malta. The first half is sort of an expat memoir, but angling to be amateur anthropology -- it's mostly generalized cultural observations based on a few interactions, news stories, and a few academic references. This part made me squeamish because he gives it the veneer of authority of researched reportage or popular writing based on scholarship, but it's not. It's essentially anecdotal.

The second part focuses on the work and assassination of Maltese investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, who was killed by a car bomb in 2017. Murdock had had some contact with Caruana Galizia and written for her blog, so, after he relocates to Germany, he is drawn into Maltese investigative journalism by others in that community. This part of the book devolves into a detailed chronology of events in the investigation of Caruana Galizia's killers. Here Murdock loses the more compelling thread of Malta's culture of corruption and impunity.

Given how difficult it is to find popular writing about contemporary Malta in book form, I found this to be a worthwhile read, but as with all expat perspectives that aren't fully based on rigorous research and well-established journalistic or scholarly methodologies, I would take this with a grain of salt.