Advice in the age of the internet, and a scary as hell Silicon Valley story.
(3 stars) Well, That Escalated Quickly: Memoirs and Mistakes of an Accidental Activist by Franchesca Ramsey
I will be the first to admit that I’m not the target audience for this book. Franchesca Ramsey had always hoped to go viral on YouTube, but never expected it would be for her spoof video What White Girls Say… to Black Girls. When that video blew up, she ended up in the center of a media storm. A big check from YouTube allowed her to quit her job and make her primary focus acting… and responding to trolls on the internet. Ramsey uses this memoir to explain to us exactly how she became well-educated in matters of race, sexuality, gender and other arenas where injustice so often occurs.
“Dealing with white people faux pas as a black woman is tricky: if you get upset, you can be quickly be labeled as the “angry black girl”; if you’re too passive, it seems like you’re give permission, or letting racism slide.”
I really liked the parts where she was educating the reader about how things they do or say might affect others negatively, even without realizing it. For instance, I never knew that the term spirit animal is offensive to Native Americans, or really thought about the implications of using the word “lame” to mean something uncool. She also has an entire chapter about how her tutorials about doing her own natural hair helped others embrace their own. I’m intelligent enough to know that you should never comment on or, God forbid, attempt to touch a black woman’s hair. But I found a lot of the information in that chapter to be very new and interesting to me.
“Privilege—the societal advantages possessed by a group of people based on their race, class, gender, sexuality, or physical ability. This word tends to freak people out because they assume having privilege means they’re a bad person or are to blame for the mistreatment of others. In reality, everyone has some level of privilege, or rather a combination of privileges. Having privileges doesn’t mean you’re rich, have never worked hard, or never had to struggle. It just means that there are some things you’ll never have to experience or think about because of who you are.”
It was the YouTube stuff that made this book drag for me though. Ramsey spends a lot of time explaining various memes or defending her actions on YouTube to her critics. There’s a whole war with another YouTube star that I’ve never heard of — a section which I ended up skimming through. I’m sure that Ramsey’s points are justified, I just didn’t know enough about any of this to really have an interest. I found the sections dealing with social injustice on a broader scale to be much more interesting. That being said, if you are more familiar with the YouTube communitythan this 33 year old mom, you might get more from this book than I did. It’s still worth a read regardless.
(4 stars) Stay Sexy & Don’t Get Murdered: The Definitive How-To Guide by Karen Kilgariff, Georgia Hardstark
Look, this book was a mess. I don’t know who edited it, but the chapters bounced around like crazy, which made it very difficult to figure out how one section was supposed to flow into another. Maybe it was just the audio version, but I definitely had trouble making connections from one piece to the next. That being said, I found the authors charming and interesting and honest, and that led me to enjoy each individual section much more than I did the book when taken as a whole.
“I’m not a shitty person, which really is the point of life in my eyes: “Don’t be a dick and do good things.” That’s my other motto. It has the word dick in it.”
Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark have a podcast called My Favorite Murder — which I admit that I’ve never listened to because I’ve never listened to any podcast. See previous review where I am tragically unhip. However, I do enjoy learning about true crime and I am always here for feisty women talking shit about the patriarchy, so overall, this was definitely a book for me.
“Fuck politeness.” Fuck the way we were socialized. Fuck the expectation that we always put other people’s needs first. And while we’re at it, fuck the patriarchy!”
This book vacillates (wildly, in some cases, see previous note about editing or lack thereof) between talking about social injustice, discussing very real mental health issues that the authors have struggled with, and giving actual legitimate advice on how not to get murdered. There’s also a lot of focus on not blaming victims, which I found really powerful.
“She taught us that the sad truth is, you can’t stay out of the forest because the world is a forest. And it’s filled with predators. If someone is assaulted, it wasn’t because they were careless, irresponsible, or dressed wrong.”
(4 stars) Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou
So every year I go on this business trip for a few days over a weekend in September, and every year I look forward to it because it means a six-hour drive all by myself from one part of Texas to the other. I download a bunch of audiobooks ahead of time, and I practically salivate at the thought of all that alone time. This year, at the very last minute, one of my co-workers asked me if she could have a ride. Although it made me so sad to give up my alone time, I couldn’t think of a good reason to say no (and also, I knew not carpooling would probably kill a sea turtle) so we drove together (which was perfectly fun — I’m not an actual monster). But it meant that my 12 + hours of scheduled audiobook time disappeared, and instead I only got to listen to a few hours of one book over the weekend (when I went on my late night walks to get away from everyone that I work with). All of that to say, Bad Blood: ended up being my sole audiobook for this trip. And while I’m sad that I didn’t get more time to focus on getting through my audiobook backlog (thanks Kindle Unlimited!), it was definitely a gripping and fascinating story to immerse myself in.
Carreyou is an investigative reporter who wrote this book after being tipped off to fraud in Silicon Valley. CEO Elizabeth Holmes, often referred to as a female Steve Jobs, founded a company called Theranos in 2014. It stood to make millions, as investors funneled money into technology that promised to diagnose multiple diseases with a tiny drop of a blood. Major companies like Tom Thumb and Walgreens planned to put it in their stores. The only problem is, the technology did not work. Like, at all.
“A sociopath is often described as someone with little or no conscience. I’ll leave it to the psychologists to decide whether Holmes fits the clinical profile, but there’s no question that her moral compass was badly askew. I’m fairly certain she didn’t initially set out to defraud investors and put patients in harm’s way when she dropped out of Stanford fifteen years ago. By all accounts, she had a vision that she genuinely believed in and threw herself into realizing. But in her all-consuming quest to be the second coming of Steve Jobs amid the gold rush of the “unicorn” boom, there came a point when she stopped listening to sound advice and began to cut corners. Her ambition was voracious and it brooked no interference. If there was collateral damage on her way to riches and fame, so be it.”
Carreyou uses extensive interviews with former employees and associates of Holmes, as well as field experts, to explain to the layperson how Holmes used her reputation and influence to bully and threaten employees into confirming that her dreams were possible, while simultaneously fooling investors into giving her money to create a product that absolutely could not work in the way that she described. The book is fascinating and terrifying, as we see how close this broken technology came to making real life medical decisions for patients across the globe.