Wealth rocks and people who have it are normal
"She realized she was peering through the bottom of boredom. There was violence on the other side."
During a week so concerned with the destruction of wealth around the world, I ended up reading about rich people and their kooky habits, like having sleepovers with their subordinates and celebrating their massive acquittals by getting caught in a Mediterranean storm on their yacht with a huge mast that’s totally not compensating for anything.
Things I gone done and read
Careless People (2025)
Sarah Wynn-Williams
The most dangerous book of the year.
Careless People chronicles the rise of Facebook/Meta from an insider who’s not allowed to talk in public about it. Sarah Wynn-Williams was close to all of this brutal and hapless internal bullshit that Facebook has been embroiled in since…forever.
First off, the book is excellent. It’s both unbelievable and sadly completely plausible that all of this happened. I don’t disbelieve any of it: the people running Facebook are/were careless, selfish, self-important dipshits.
Is it biased? Sure. There’s a tinge of regret in the way its positioned. It can only be written and read in retrospect. Wynn-Williams at least doesn’t shy away from the fact that she was one of those annoying social media evangelists back around the Arab Spring1 who had slowly changed her mind after ohhh I don’t know, the genocide of the Rhohingya in Myanmar and Facebook’s apparent eagerness to create a super effective surveillance state for China.
If the horrors aren’t enough, there’s the frustration at the complete hypocrisy that Mark “Masculine Energy” Zuckerberg, Sheryl “Sleepover” Sandberg, and this dumbass consistently employ in the name of endless user growth. As Wynn-Williams says in the book (paraphrasing here), their moral compass always conveniently pointed in whichever direction grew Facebook’s user base.
They’re ghouls who bust out that annoying “who? Lil ol’ me?” bullshit every time they fuck up big time (see above: genocide) or target depressed teenagers with ads. The book only illustrates their growth from goofy hypocritical idiots to dystopian hypocritical assholes.
If anyone thinks I’m being harsh, read this book. Social media, and Meta especially, is just another of the big corporate grifts of our lifetime. Wynn-Williams just further reveals how it’s been that way from the start.
Trust (2022)
Hernan Diaz
Hernan Diaz is, quite simply, an absurdly skilled writer. This book has multiple moments, lines, quips that are worth stopping over.
Trust is a complex story and talking about it too much gives away a lot that's best discovered by reading the book. Essentially, it's about a very successful New York financier and his life. What he makes of it, what others make of it, what his life actually entails.
Saying too much more gives away the surprise of the novel, which takes a few different turns right at the moment you’re probably asking yourself is this all this is about? Fair warning, the novel involves a lot of “table setting”, in that it’s broken into four parts and the first two parts are similar (for good reason) but essential to wrap up everything that happens after.
Diaz has an incredibly subtle way of getting under the skin of a not necessarily abhorrent rich person, but of someone who has so greatly othered their self from the world due to their obscene wealth. And the way that that money could be used in life to warp reality, to bend it to whatever he wills.
Furthermore, in this chat with prominent literary interviewer and part-time international pop superstar Dua Lipa, Diaz talks extensively about the themes of the book (he’s consistently blown away by how good of an interviewer Dua Lipa is) and his experience of rejection on his way to this book sharing the 2023 Pulitzer Prize.
The Mysterious Sinking of the Bayesian
Floriana Bulfon. New Lines Magazine.
As I alluded to above, this boat had a BIG MAST. And apparently that’s important after it sunk off the coast of Sicily during a storm that it shouldn’t have sunk in.
This story tiptoes on the edge of conspiracy, but it’s still a really interesting look at the bizarre coincidences surrounding this incredibly affluent person’s death (that person is Mike Lynch, if you don’t know him, just know he was big in surveillance).
But most importantly: HUGE MAST.
This week on The Low Ceiling, we discuss the most perfect 6/10 film about nuclear war.
People might not fully remember but in the early 2010s there was a subset of people who were obsessed social media evangelists, a lot like AI people today, who insisted social media was the future even though it was actively making people more miserable. They weren’t wrong necessarily, they were just fucking annoying.