Chaos monkeys
"The industry provocateur behind such companies as Twitter and a nascent Facebook presents an irreverent exposé of life inside the tech bubble that traces his hedonist lifestyle against a backdrop of early social media and online marketing, sharing critical insights into how they are shaping today's world."--NoveList.
Stats for nerds
30recommend
91mentions
73people
2016–2025years
40% recommend56% neutral4% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I love looking at books in people's photos. Here's what I found in yours. I hope you don't mind!
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Bad Blood by John Carreyrou - A detailed account of the Theranos scandal.
The Founders by Jimmy Soni - Explores the early days of PayPal and its impact on Silicon Valley.
Shoe Dog by Phil Knight - Memoir by the founder of Nike.
Measure What Matters by John Doerr - A book about OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) and organizational success.
Business Adventures by John Brooks - Classic tales of corporate life, highly recommended by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.
Becoming by Michelle Obama - The former First Lady's personal memoir.
The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch - Inspirational reflections on life and achieving dreams.
Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson - A comprehensive biography of Apple's co-founder.
Chaos Monkeys by Antonio García Martínez - A look into the wild side of Silicon Valley.
Facebook: The Inside Story by Steven Levy - A deep dive into the social media giant's history and controversies.
Skunk Works by Ben R. Rich - Stories of innovation from Lockheed Martin’s legendary division.
Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke - How to make decisions under uncertainty.
Superforecasting by Philip Tetlock and Dan M. Gardner - Insights into better prediction and decision-making.
Educated by Tara Westover - A memoir about resilience and education.
Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain - A raw look at the life of a chef.
Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin - A biography of the physicist behind the atomic bomb.
The Almanack of Naval Ravikant - Wisdom on wealth and happiness.
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I've read Naval's book, but not the others. Are there any in particular you really enjoyed?
- Hey everyone, I'm currently reading Chaos Monkeys and the Pragmatic Engineer newsletter, both were very good sources and gave me an insider's for the sorts of mindset people in the valley have.
Are there any other good resources like PE's Meta and Amazon engineering culture series? Specifically I would love to learn more about Google, Microsoft, and Netflix. Not really looking for a business analysis, but rather an insider's perspective on how these companies worked.
- Unrelated but you are a great writer! "user agency lives in the very long tail of any software usage" "agency drives the birth of tech but dies in the scoreboards" "scale to species level adoption discover that the ethos of creation is lost in the swarm of consumption"
You remind me of the writing of Antonio Garcia Martinez in the book Chaos Monkeys.
- Books that I read (and re-read) in 2022 that I'd recommend to folks on HN. Ordered from most enjoyable / insightful to least.
- Edward O. Wilson - Biophilia
- Will Durant - The Lessons Of History
- Freeman J. Dyson - A Many-Colored Glass
- Venkatesh Rao - The Gervais Principle
- Ray Bradbury - The Martian Chronicles
- Colin Wilson - The Outsider
- Stanislaw Lem - Cyberiad
- Antonio Martinez - Chaos Monkeys
- Ben Horowitz - What You Do Is Who You Are
- Alice Flaherty - The Midnight Disease
- Oliver Sacks - Musicophilia
- Ken Binmore - Rational Decisions
- Josh Kaufman - The Personal MBA
Edit: All these books made the cut, there were others that I never completed / disliked / wouldn't recommend, or were just plain mediocre / bad.
- There’s a bunch of technical auction theory and ML stuff that’s semi-germane, but mostly it was Sheryl breaking ranks with a wage-fixing cartel. Google and Apple and Pixar and a dozen other companies have been found guilty in court of various “no poach” arrangements and other wage suppression collusion, and so here comes Sheryl offering twice the TC and raising the hiring bar accordingly. FB in 2008-2012 was harder to get into than Harvard and paid better. So we were better, and the novelty of the situation created a camaraderie that had everyone sleeping at the office with the singular focus of putting Vic G out of a job.
There’s a lot of structural nuance and important details but it was an absurdly elite group of people who hadn’t been disillusioned yet and we forced Google’s jaws open wide enough that there are now 2 panopticon ads businesses instead of 1.
Antonio García Martínez wrote a great book about it called “Chaos Monkeys” if you’re a long-form reader.
- I was not planning to respond more in this thread, but you are trying to not argue with me, but rather being constructive, which I appreciate.
Facebook originally started as a social network where I could see my friends' lives, babies, family life, puppies, and it was awesome and interesting, as it's something that I could talk with them about.
The problem with looking at friends' lives from Facebook's point of view is that it's not as addictive, and ads don't integrate naturally.
I loved the book, ,,Chaos Monkeys'', as it explained how impossible it was to monetize the huge active Facebook userbase in the early days, while users were prioritized and making money was just a secondary afterthought that Mark didn't care about.
It turns out that making assymetric relations, where some people/content creators have tens of thousands of followers and hundreds of thousands of views, and not usually friends with (except the case you are talking about) are much more addictive for people, and much easier to monetize as well. At this point though social media gets more media than social, and gets the same problems that other type of media had: creating unhealthy expectation for people whose brains don't really distinguish between what they see there and real life.
