We walk past the Hongasandra metro station that’s been newly inaugurated by the Prime Minister. Hitting the road from the left is a canal from which wafts an unearthly stench, clogged with the filth of the city. Flanking the canal on one side is a medical college. On the other side across the road is the metro station. At times the canal regurgitates its garbage onto the pavement creating an unsightly mess that we sidestep. People walk to-and-fro, accepting this irrational juxtaposition as a completely natural part of their life.

Further ahead there are people setting up fruit stalls and selling tea. One woman has finished serving people lunch and is squatting on the sidewalk as she scrubs her dented pots and pans. She flings the dishwater on the sidewalk without bothering to see if it splatters on pedestrians like us who need to jump out of her range. Down the road is the ICICI bank. Next to the bank is a sawmill where trucks bring in tonnes of rosewood to be turned into wooden slabs. Apparently this high-scale operation isn’t profitable enough to pave the muddy front yard which looks like an ocean of yogurt after the afternoon’s rains.

We pass walls plastered with movie posters and advertisements that promise to make you pass any exam, from class 10 to degree courses. Next to them are hastily pasted flyers offering immediate cash on your credit cards, and job offers for pickers and packers who would be paid 14,500 a month ($163 as I write this) along with meals. The pavement has been dug up at one spot creating a gaping abyss, and there’s nobody around to explain why. We bypass the hole to reach our regular stall, order two teas, and wait with folded hands as the chetta makes tea for us. Mangy dogs trot past us, and I comment on the sudden uptick of rabies in the city. My friend (whose wife is a doctor) tells me what he recently learned: that the rabies vaccine doesn’t guarantee safety against rabies. Complete protection needs something called immunoglobulin injections which most hospitals don’t have, so they just inject the vaccine and hope for the best. Now I have one more cause of impending death to worry about (and if you live in India, so do you). A fat rat leaps out of the cracks in the sidewalk and scurries into the tea shop. After the initial shock at its appearance, we chuckle and revert to talking about the revenue projections of the business we’re running. The tea is served, we drink it from glass tumblers, pay a pittance, and walk back the same way as the metro passes overhead.

Back inside our brightly lit air-conditioned office with our Macbooks and Dell Monitors and carpeted floors and revolving chairs, we forget the chaotic world that exists outside, until it’s time to go back home. A fifteen minute tea-break outside our office is an adventure that takes us out of our comfort zone every day. Yet this is life for most Indians. Our glass-ensconced existence is the anomaly, and for most people in India, our luxurious workday is inaccessible though they can see it from the outside.

And yet, somehow, peace prevails. Despite living in one of the most visibly unequal regions in the world, there’s no revolt, no clamor, no blood on the streets, and such incidents when they do happen are usually just minor annoyances that interrupt the major annoyance that is living in India. For the most part, nobody minds. Why?

When they can see the riches around them, why do they tolerate it? Why don’t they crawl out from their catastrophes and finish us off? Why don’t little men emerge from manholes and attack the cars? Why don’t the maids who squat like frogs by kitchen sinks pull out the hair of their conscientious madams who never give them a day off or pay them as much as they pay at least the drivers? Why do the poor tolerate the rich?1

In other words, why isn’t a Parasite or White Tiger happening all the time? This is what Manu Joseph wants to find out in his book: “Why the poor don’t kill us.”

The short answer

When Manu asks why the poor don’t kill us, it’s tongue-in-cheek. The real question is how people are able to see wealth around them and resign themselves to living lives of utter penury. His question is specifically about people in extreme poverty, something he defines as “ancient people living in modern times.”

To illustrate this, he tells the story of Majhi, a man who loses his wife at a hospital in Orissa. When the hospital refuses to lend him a van, Majhi just picks up his wife’s corpse and starts walking home accompanied by his crying daughter. His home is 42 kilometers away. He stops occasionally, catches his breath, then picks up the body again, and keeps walking. This lasts for 12 kilometers until a good samaritan ends up giving him a lift. This is a story that could have happened 300 years ago. That it happened in the 21st century is what’s mystifying.

Yet there’s no dearth of stories like this: throughout the book, Manu packs ample anecdotes to convince us that scenes like this are commonplace, and having lived in India, his stories are amusing to me but not particularly surprising. The question persists: Why do the poor put up with this iniquity? How does this section of Indian society “accept its lot” and stomach this misery? Why is there no revolution?

The short answer is – revolutions don’t work the way you think. Revolutions aren’t initiated by the poor against the rich. They are crusades launched by the top 2% against the top 1%. When millionaires are dissatisfied with billionaires, when cultural elites are annoyed at being displaced by the nouveau rich, when the person in second place needs to regain relevance from the person in first place, that’s when they nominally take up the cause of the poor and agitate them into action. And this sometimes works and might even end up changing the world for the better. But reform is a collateral effect in a power struggle where the poor are just cannon fodder.

Society changes when the second rung of the social power takes on the most powerful. Usually, this second rung is the old elite. When they become the underclass in a new world, they try to restore the balance of power through a moral class, chiefly in the name of the poor. It works.

The long answer

If that was the entire story, the book would have been the length of a blog post. But along the way, Manu asks other seemingly unrelated questions that are interesting in their own right:

• Why are politicians so successful despite failing to create any social change?

• Why are moneylenders despised so much by their customers, and why do they dress austerely despite being billionaires?

• Why do the poor hate their neighbor who is slightly better off but admire Ambani’s multi-story house? (A Girardian idea)

• How was Aadhaar such a massively successful project and why did activists attack it despite its success?

• Why was education the last hope for the poor, and why is this hope receding?

• Why has right-wing politics become appealing over the last few decades?

By answering each of these questions with a stand-alone essay, he scaffolds his larger point – how we think the world works is very different from how it actually works. Each chapter starts with a compelling thesis and then takes you on a journey that combines personal anecdote with journalism. His decision to use stories over statistics is an intentional one. It works, because these are stories you would tell your friend over tea, who would probably have a heated argument with you, but now the idea at the heart of the story is in the mainstream and it’ll find its way into culture.

The ideas themselves are eccentric at times. Consider this idea for example: Indian cities are disgustingly ugly but this ugliness is what protects them from revolution. Mindless expansion and lack of planning has created living spaces that are eyesores. But what if this aesthetic degradation is an anesthetic that reassures the majority of Indians that they aren’t being left behind? Yes, they’re living miserable lives, but so is everyone else – what difference do your millions make if you have to wait in your BMW alongside a moped on a road with potholes waiting for the signal to turn green?

“Most nations try hard to look richer than they are; India, in plain sight, is a lot poorer than it is in reality. This municipal ugliness of India conveys to the poor that the nation belongs to them, that it has not left them behind.

India’s politicians and people have worked together to make Indian cities among the most unliveable and ugliest places on Earth. It is as though the poor have voted their politicians to power to ensure India is not so enjoyable to the rich.”

It’s a weird idea but that weirdness sticks, and you start seeing it everywhere when it starts to explain things you took for granted. For example, it explains why gated communities and societies are such an attractive idea to my generation. Fixing public infrastructure seems like a hopelessly daunting task for millennial and Gen-Z Indians. Instead they perceive the solution to be to create a microcosm their own by retreating into housing societies, pockets of beauty with access to amenities that shut out the unpleasant reality of a broken world outside.

The experience of being super-rich in India is one of the most overpriced things in the world. In the best areas of London or New York, you pay a premium for what the city offers, and what the city offers is available to everyone. In India, it is the opposite. The city is the problem, and you pay to shut it out, along with most Indians of your ilk.

If that’s the case, it explains why our air-conditioned office space and its haphazard surroundings can coexist with no contradiction. India is fragmenting into orthogonal worlds where each class lives blissfully inside its own mirage. The friction hasn’t gone away. It’s just hidden better now, and it’s always simmering under the surface.

What this book is and what is isn’t

For all it’s brilliance, the book’s ambitions are modest. It doesn’t intend to incite revolution or to solve the problem of poverty with an overarching thesis. The one solution it gives to create a more equitable society at the end of the book is so absurd that it’s almost laughable: Tip more. The idea is that tipping voluntarily will create a cascading effect that exchanges money and goodwill between the haves and the have-nots. Though it has changed my mind about tipping, I don’t see how that’ll fix our air quality or open potholes.

What the book does accomplish very well is to simulate the experience of living in India and articulate that experience without being judgmental about it. Manu brings his training as a journalist to bear on each story he tells: His coverage of the Gujarat earthquake is as grounded as the story of his lunch with one of Kerala’s richest gold barons. Early on he tells a story about the infiltration and invasion of housing societies by the working class, causing the homeowners to squirm in discomfort that their territory is being encroached. But then he flips it around in another story to show Gurgaon’s real-estate boom, told from the perspective of pastoral landowners who turned obscenely rich overnight.

His vignettes are the literary equivalent of RK Laxman’s Common Man taking a walk through a Mario Miranda cartoon. He’s a fly on the wall visiting commonplace scenes that compose the Indian experience and reporting on them through a lopsided lens.

The end result is an empathetic articulation of what it means to live in a country of contradictions. Whether you’re rich, poor, or somewhere in between, to live in India is to intuitively lane-switch between different worlds that all coexist seamlessly in perfect disorder (as writes here: “Life in India is a series of bilateral negotiations”). To capture that paradox with language, sensitivity, and lived experience is a difficult task but this book manages to do that in a way that could make you feel seen. I don’t know if that was the intent with which the book was written, but that’s how it worked on me.

This is Manu Joseph’s first non-fiction book. Those familiar with his fiction might see echoes of themes from his novels. Take this excerpt for example, about the danger of stories and storytelling in politics, and why a good story will always win over the truth:

Why is it that a majority of the nation that lives in conditions worse than some animals in New Zealand, wastes its political energies on issues that [don’t matter]? Why don’t people riot for air-conditioned transport and water and electricity and free schools more often that they riot for useless abstractions? Some powerful forces are at play. The fundamental nature of stories and storytellers, too, are responsible.

A story is a very corrupt thing. A story is not an event; a story is an interesting event. And herein lie all our problems. What is interesting in a story is not essentially what is important in life. At times the two do meet but that is rare.

This is why politics is the way it is, and why democracy itself is doomed in the long run. Clarity is often inconvenient, while misunderstanding is a pleasurable massage of prejudice.

This monologue is essentially the condensed argument that holds together his novel “The Illicit Happiness of Other People” (which I loved a little more than the other one, Serious Men)2. To readers who enjoy his fiction, “Why the poor don’t kill us” is like a supplementary text that provides commentary on his fiction.

But one of the problems with this book is that it sometimes indulges in the power of a good story itself. Sometimes it asserts a thesis with such conviction that the reader wouldn’t pause to check if the truth could be different or if there are other alternatives. Manu recounts the time he interviewed Nandan Nilekani about the Aadhaar project – a massive technical and sociological achievement – and it’s clear that he’s deeply appreciative of the project. But while he recognizes the potential problems with Aadhaar, barely a few lines are dedicated to its criticisms, and they’re ultimately waved away dismissively. He says Nilekani was:

“not so sure about making Aadhaar mandatory for opening bank accounts or getting mobile phone service. [He said] ‘I’m not so hung up on that’.”

Except this is exactly what happened in reality! Aadhaar is slowly becoming mandatory for everything from Tatkal train bookings to LPG cylinder refills. There is no critical discussion of how good intentions can devolve into problematic structures. (I still think Aadhaar is a great idea, it’s the selective argument I had a problem with)

Similarly, Manu takes a contrarian stance that Facebook’s Free Basics program would have been a net positive to India. He claims that net neutrality was a lofty liberal ideal for a country where millions did not have access to any form of internet and asks: “A limited internet offered by one corporation, especially Facebook, was a corruption of the very idea of the internet. But wasn’t all this technicality subordinate to the fact that the poor have a right to some internet?“ But this “some internet” theory has a problem: In India’s neighboring country of Myanmar, Free Basics did roll out “some internet” to millions of poor people and the lack of guardrails in this free version supposedly played an important role in instigating the Rohingya massacre (as per journalists). Facebook’s lax handling of a basic product that only “poor people” used was one of Facebook whistleblower Sarah-Wynn Williams’ confessions in her memoir Careless People, which I had reviewed here:

Despite these flaws, the book isn’t politically biased. There is no clear stance between liberalism or conservatism or even idealism, but rather a dark hybrid of cynicism and pragmatism that forms the amoral “chalta hai” sensibility where anything goes. Consider wry observations like this for example:

The great actor Kamal Haasan told Tamils, if you accept bribes, ‘You will only get a thief as your leader.’ But the logic of Tamils has always been that they would get a thief anyway, so why not share a fraction of the booty.

There is no judgement in that observation, but there isn’t any hope either. It’s a shrug throwing hands in the air, as if to say, “That’s India, and I’ve seen it long enough to know not to hope for change.” Depending on how weathered you are by life, the book might come off as clever and amusing (as it did to me) or deeply offensive in its irreverence. Manu doesn’t pick a clear side in the political spectrum to root for – he takes shots at both the Left and the Right in equal measure – but what he tries to do is see why the world is the way it is, and explain why the pendulum swings from Left to Right in cyclical fashion.

Ultimately, that act of observation might be a more useful activity than taking a stance in itself. Because the task of a writer is not to solve the problem but to state the problem correctly.

If it isn’t apparent yet, I’m a fan of Manu Joseph’s writing. The first time I cracked open Serious Men, I was both awed and overjoyed that this kind of writing existed – prose that captured the poetry of Indian vernacular without devolving into cartoonish onomatopoeia. It gave me the confidence that I could write the way I talk and get away with it, though I had work to do to get there. I was convinced that I had discovered a subversive artist way before the market and expected everyone I knew to be talking about him soon.

It’s been eight years since then, and I know only one other guy who’s read Manu Joseph: my friend who introduced me to Serious Men in the first place. I haven’t revisited those novels because over the last 5-6 years, I’ve felt disillusioned returning to books I used to love and discovering that I didn’t like them any more. But after reading “Why the poor don’t kill us,” I feel like reading Serious Men again.

If you’ve never read anything by Manu Joseph before, this book is a great introduction to his bizarre universe of provocative ideas in bite-sized essays. If you’re already familiar with his writing through his novels and Mint columns, this book will be a fun ride. And if you’re offended after reading this book or have recommendations for other books that are similar to Manu’s writing, please let me know in the comments.

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Epilogue: Some quotes I liked

The book has some lines and paragraphs that really hit the spot. These were my top 15 favorites (some paraphrased and combined):

1. The poor in a rich country are like a bitter Reddit page trapped inside Instagram.

2. If there is anyone who wishes you well, wishes you quick and sustained prosperity, and a very long economic life, it is your moneylender. Because he expects the return of his principal. But then it is the nature of people to imagine friends as well-wishers and moneylenders as people who wish ruin. The fact, often, is the inverse.

3. Hours after the Indian government introduced its own tablet computer, as though in tribute, Steve Jobs died. There were no other omens.

4. Every four years, the world organizes a great festival to insult India. No other nation is more humiliated at the Summer Olympics than India… The very existence of Indian athletes of global calibre is not because of India, but in spite of India.

5. If you want to make Indians laugh, show them what Europeans call a ‘buffet.’ Even at a high-end hotel there, the spread is so small it would fit into a single Indian glance, which by nature is sweeping.

6. It is remarkable that Aadhaar and Al-Qaeda mean the same thing, which is ‘foundation,’ and it is even more remarkable that its neurotic foes have missed this tweetable fact.

7. The best measure of a nation’s wealth is the standard of living of its poor.

8. People dislike wisdom if they dislike the mouth it comes from. Many political ideas of ordinary men and women are shaped by their dislike for their spouses.

9. I enjoy reading the plans of the minister for road transport and highways – how very soon road travel from Chennai to Bengaluru would take only two hours. I did try to point out to him on Twitter that right now, Bengaluru to Bengaluru is two hours.

10. Most good people are just those who are afraid of being seen as bad.

11. If you are not in competition with a migrant, you are analysing the wrong migrant. Find the migrant who is your rival and you will suddenly realise you are not so noble any more.

12. All elites are like parents – conservative at home, where the stakes are high, and liberal elsewhere, an abstract place that is not as important as home.

13. Articulation of the conscience is a beautiful invention of the intellectual class. This expression is not chicanery; there is something deeply honest about it. Yet its primary function is to let words and confessions and good thoughts compensate for hard sacrifice.

14. Indians have always struggled to understand melancholy that does not have an earth-shaking reason. In their pursuit of grand reasons for their sorrow, India’s affluent often find the wrong grand reasons – like marriage, parents, capitalism, and caste. The fact is, many actual reasons for melancholy might not have any gravitas. Like insect bites, gut bacteria, bad food, sloth, boredom, and getting influenced by mad men philosophers.

15. The super-rich across the world face a general problem with capitalism, which does not serve its true masters well. There are no real products for them. They must shoot themselves to space or sink to ocean depths to see and feel something the rest of the world cannot. Overpriced bags, isolated giant silo-homes, and 100-metre-long yachts, too, might be just outlandish expressions of the fact that even though money can buy happiness, there is no kind of happiness in the market that only a lot of money buys.

Sarah Wynn-Williams, born in New Zealand, surviving a shark attack as a teenager, working as a policy lawyer and a UN diplomat is obsessed with Facebook. She creates and pitches a job that doesn’t even exist, and when the top brass at Facebook see themselves as a tech company, she imagines it as the global superpower it could become some day. She flies across the world introducing world leaders to Mark Zuckerberg who comes to see her as a friend and writes her thank-you notes. Even while delivering her first child, Sarah is thinking about her child (That child’s therapist is going to make bank some day).

And then, 11 years later, Sarah gives this statement at a hearing chaired by Senator Josh Hawley:

My name is Sarah Wynn–Williams and I served as the director of global public policy at Facebook, now Meta, for nearly seven years starting in 2011. Throughout those seven years I saw Meta executives repeatedly undermine US national security and betray American values. They did these things in secret to win favor with Beijing and build an$18 billion business in China.

After working at Facebook for seven years, Sarah throws Facebook under the bus, writing a memoir that portrays Facebook as an amoral machine run by careless people who only care about power and profits. Facebook retaliates by placing a gag order on her and threatening to make her pay $50,000 for each time she mentions Facebook in a “disparaging manner”. Despite all their attempts to suppress her from speaking, her book becomes a bestseller.

How Sarah went from Facebook’s darling to Facebook-enemy-number-one is what the book Careless People is about.

Facebook wanted profit, not power, but it got both

Meta – which now owns Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, and a bunch of other companies – is one of the most powerful companies in the world, and even in the history of the world. If you’re young, you probably don’t remember a time when it was an exciting novelty that let you reconnect with old friends or chat up dates.

Sarah came from that world but she sensed where Facebook could go. She didn’t see it as a tech company restricted to America. Facebook proposed a mission of “connecting the people of the world” and Sarah trusted that they actually meant it. But even Sarah’s first meeting with Facebook shows a crack that lies at the root of this book – Sarah is interested in Facebook’s potential as a global force for good while Facebook’s leaders are interested in its ability to make money. To her credit, she isn’t naive. Sarah suggests that by appointing her as a director of global policy, Facebook will have an easier time expanding to other countries. The only reason she gets the job is by appealing to their profit-making motive, but she believes that once she’s inside, she’ll get to influence Facebook’s direction.

That seems like an honorable motive but it’s also the hardest thing to buy about the book. Sarah is shocked that these out-of-touch billionaires aren’t as relatable as she imagines them to be, and their duplicity bothers her. What we get in the bargain is juicy gossip and an inside view about how deals are done in the backrooms.

There’s a scene in the middle of the book where Sheryl Sandberg, the COO, is meeting the Irish Prime Minister at a time when the European Union is tightening its restrictions on tech companies, and they want some country to be a privacy watchdog. Facebook is at the highest risk, and Ireland is at risk if Facebook leaves because Facebook makes Ireland rich by using Irish shell-companies to avoid taxes. So they both need to do something about it. The Irish Prime Minister suggests something like this: “Pretend to the media like we are giving you a hard time about privacy and audits. If the European Union thinks we’re strict, they’ll give us the job of supervising you. Once we get the job, we’ll let you do whatever you like.” The two shake hands on it and don’t write it down.

But Sarah is in the room where it happens. There’s so much in the book that I can’t cover here or don’t want to cover because she tells the story so much better!

This fly-on-the-wall vantage point is what gives Sarah insight into underhand dealings in the upper echelons of the world. From Xi Jinping to Barack Obama, from riots in Indonesia to dealing with the junta in Myanmar, Sarah is Facebook’s touchpoint for dealing with political power. She writes in the prophetic tense of predicting that something would go South even as she’s in the middle of it, giving every encounter an ominous feeling: “I was happy about my deal in Myanmar, little did I know that…”

And when things begin to collapse, it isn’t that surprising. You’ve seen Facebook being smeared in the news for inciting riots or selling data to enemy countries or influencing Presidential elections. Facebook sees it all coming and chooses to do the wrong thing at every juncture. Mark Zuckerberg goes from being coder to CEO to celebrity to kingmaker, and he even imagines himself as President, restructuring the company so that he can take a break if he wants to campaign. World leaders want to take selfies with him and curry favor when they know that Facebook is an important tool to winning elections.

But since Sarah shares every dorkish detail about him, he looks like a petulant wannabe. I wonder whether Mark Zuckerberg can ever trust anyone again. Does he stay up at night wondering which employee is planning to betray him next? Does he imagine people laughing at him behind his back? Or is he going through their Whatsapp chats and planning the next move? All he wanted was to be liked, smh.

People on the inside, people on the outside

A running theme in the book is the difference between what people say and what they do. What they claim to stand for vs the decisions they take under pressure.

Sheryl Sandberg, the COO, is a high-performing leader and a champion of women’s rights in the workplace on the outside. But in private, she chews up her hairstylist, yells at subordinates, and suggests things that are borderline sexual harassment. She uses company resources to promote her book and treats Directors like her personal assistants. Yet nobody turns against her because they know that keeping her happy gets them personal favors.

Mark Zuckerberg is a different beast. You’ve seen Jesse Eisenberg play him in The Social Network, you’ve seen him become a meme, a podcast guest, and a social villain.1 This book’s version of Mark oscillates between ruthless sociopath and autistic goofball. From Sarah’s assessment, Mark is an unrelatable nerd who is desperate to be liked. He sings karaoke, plays Catan, reveres tyrannical Roman Emperors and wants to eat authentic bluefish Tuna while flying in private jets, renting out mansions, and living in prefabricated bubble houses when they travel abroad. He wants to dominate meetings with political leaders, but he can’t even wake up before noon for a meeting with the Colombian President.2

However, this insistence to make Mark look bad is one of the weak points of the book. Think about it – when I pick up a book named “Careless People”, I’m already expecting to be shocked, disgusted, and repelled by the people at the center of the book. Sarah plays into that schadenfreude by twisting every innocent thing that Mark does into something awkward, unrelatable, or heartless. Why is it wrong for a CEO to want to eat tuna or sing karaoke? She’s so obsessed with what Facebook could have been and why it isn’t going according to her vision that she doesn’t do enough credit to the fact that it’s incredible that something like Facebook does exist in the first place. That Mark built a technological empire and that he’s still growing it actively gets no mention. The trashing actually made me sympathize with the guy a little.

But there’s no denying that these people at the top are a little bit… mental.

For example, when they’re planning to go to South Korea, they all have arrest warrants in their name because they broke the Korean government’s laws. But they think the government is bluffing. How can they test the waters before landing in Korea? They decide to send a junior ahead to see if the government really has the guts to arrest someone. This scapegoat isn’t even addressed as a person. They just refer to them as “a body” for arrest. Luckily, he isn’t arrested.

But here’s the crazy thing – when this strategy works out, they even institutionalize it. In India, the Facebook office is being raided by the police so often that they appoint an ex-police captain to handle “arrest situations.” His job is to just get arrested and go to jail when there is a problem.

This dehumanization is a persistent theme in the book. When Sarah has a baby, she is expected to do the job of mothering invisibly without mentioning it at the office. When a contractor has an epileptic fit and is bleeding on the floor, the colleagues around her don’t even notice, saying “she’s not part of Facebook.” When China asks Facebook to hand over data and ban problematic people, Facebook’s concern isn’t about censorship – they happily comply with China – but about what it will say at the senate hearings. They practice mock questions, write answers, edit the answers because they reveal too much, and figure out how to lie just enough without getting caught.

By the time I’m following Facebook’s targeted advertising to teenage girls with body image issues, or how an unwillingness to translate Facebook’s website into Burmese is causing a genocide of hundreds of thousands of people in Myanmar, I’m already sick to my stomach. For all her flaws with moralizing, Sarah is an incredible storyteller who puts you right in the middle of a scene, whether it’s a crisis control situation during a riot or a board meeting in Silicon Valley or an ICU where she’s bleeding out. The only humanity in this dehumanized environment flows through her.

Weaponizing memoirs

So here’s my problem with this book. I really, really enjoyed reading it.

Yet, at every turn, I knew that Sarah wasn’t saying the complete truth. She was saying just enough to shock me into disgust for the overlords of Facebook and trying very hard to portray herself as a saint.

It’s not hard to empathize with Sarah. She’s one of the few people who cared about Facebook retaining its moral core, as even her documented emails and letters show, and she’s a survivor and an outsider who fought her way through all of this by literally creating a job that didn’t exist and then making it one of the most important parts of Facebook. She somehow met a hectic schedule while dealing with pregnancy and motherhood and sexual harassment and sexism (five separate issues, all of which I’m unlikely to ever deal with. So good to be privileged).

Yet, the problems are as much with what she doesn’t reveal as what she does. All of Facebook’s leadership is up on display. Every decision of theirs that went wrong is scrutinized and dissected by Sarah, with her commentary on what should have been done differently. Yet I don’t know about a single major decision that Sarah herself took and messed up. There’s no real vulnerability here because she’s scared of the hit the story will take if her character is called into question.

A story needs a vulnerable protagonist to succeed (this book is a story after all, even if it really happened), and she inserts “mistakes” to build that persona. But her mistakes are always of the foible variety – she types an email in the delivery room (“Am I a bad mother?”), she mistakenly stays in the wrong hotel and arrives late for a meeting (“I’m such a klutz”), she takes responsibility for a public event gone wrong (“I botched such a huge event”), and lectures Mark about strategy (“I’m so stupid that I gave advice to my boss”). But none of these was a conflict of values that went against what she stood for. She never falters in her agenda for a moment… and that’s a little hard to believe?

I’m a reasonably calm guy. Yet there are times where I’ve had meltdowns and done stupid things that hurt people. Those are the things I wanted to see from Sarah’s life.

There’s also the question of the timing of the book and the manner she left Facebook. Sarah realizes this herself. She knows that as the reader is flipping the pages, they’re also wondering, “If she knew Facebook was this bad, why didn’t she just leave?” Sarah brings this up herself whenever she faces a dilemma. The first time she thinks of leaving Facebook, she’s pregnant and needs stability. I can understand that. Then the baby is born, and two years pass. Nothing has changed and Facebook is still the same morally depraved company it was (why not leave?). The next time she feels like leaving, she says “I messed up something in my Visa application procedure. Now I’m reliant on Facebook and can’t leave.” (At this point, I’m like “Okay…?”) And before I know it, Sarah is stuck with workplace toxicity again and her reason for not leaving is “I was pregnant. Again.”

Finally, she doesn’t resign from Facebook. She’s fired.

It’s her life. She gets to choose or leave from a toxic workplace. But if I had to empathize with her reasons to not leave Facebook, it was hard to ignore that she did have a choice on many occasions and chose not to take it for whatever reason – stability, a need to maintain a standard of living, health. Since she’s making her moral superiority the basis of criticizing everyone else at Facebook, maybe she felt compelled to justify not leaving. But here’s the thing, if she had said, “Hey, I know I could have left Facebook at any point, and I chose not to because I valued my stability more than doing the right thing,” that might have worked better for me. Having to judge “who was right” at every point took me away from the more important point – that we live in a world where companies are entitled to demand the most absurd things from us and that there are employees who will choose to satisfy these demands in a circus of sycophancy. It’s the system that is broken.

I thought I was reading too much into it until I saw the Senate Hearing I mentioned at the top. Sarah truthfully repeats everything about Facebook’s collusion with China in the hearing and its targeted advertising to teenage girls. But a huge part of her book was criticizing Facebook for getting Donald Trump elected into office and what a bad result he was for the world. She conveniently omits even a passing mention of him to the Republican senator who is questioning her with his own agenda. She conceals some things to have the opportunity for other things to be heard, and I wonder if she did that with the book.

Does this take away from the point that this is a wild ride of a book? No.

It’s an incredible story and I admire her courage for speaking against one of the most powerful and ruthless entities on the planet. I’m not sure I could do anything remotely close and I highly recommend reading it. But if you do read the book, I’d suggest you read and watch the other side’s take too. Reading the book won’t change anything. Facebook will continue to sell our attention to the highest bidder and when I’m done writing this article, I will have the hard decision of choosing between Instagram or Whatsapp when I open my phone. But at least I know how exactly I’m being screwed over, and that gives me some satisfaction.