Excerpt from Chaos Monkeys by Antonio García Martínez (2016) | Hacker News Reader

Excerpt from Chaos Monkeys by Antonio García Martínez (2016)

wired.com

81 pointsmelenaboija50 comments

The book is ok — it has plenty of interesting stories about Facebook during its heady IPO ish era. And a bunch of great startup-y tales.

But what kills the reading experience for me are the constant metaphors/analogies/similes/parentheticals/whatever the author keeps making. It’s funny if it’s done sparingly, but he just interlards every passage with them. Like so:

“After my day of interviews, I had imagined that MRM and Facebook would get along about as well as a Berkeley hippie and a Marine scout sniper, and I was right.”

It’s funny, but imagine an entire book (that’s otherwise a good read) filled with these sometimes successful attempts at humor. It gets tiring after a few chapters.

Just 50% less of it would’ve made the book waaay better IMO. Plus humor like that usually lands better if you use it sparingly.

I have to disagree. I enjoyed the use of metaphor, and actually highlighted several on my Kindle.

# "Zuck had once famously derided [Twitter] as 'a clown car that drove into a gold mine'"

# "One of the Harvard mafiosi got into the habit of theatening engineers that he'd "punch them in the face" if they messed up. Quod licet Bozi, non licet bovi. Gods may do what cattle may not."

# "Eventually, Russia, India, Brazil and parts of Africa will fall into the Growth team's patient ministrations. Then, Mark Zuckerberg, like a young Alexander the Great at the Indus River, will weep for having no more world to conquer."

It’s like eating a cake made purely out of frosting -- fun at first, but then it just becomes too much after a hundred pages or so.

I wish I could upvote you twice for the irony

Need to ask for that meta-upvote feature

> Then, Mark Zuckerberg, like a young Alexander the Great at the Indus River, will weep for having no more world to conquer

He got his shoehorned Plutarch wrong [1]. Alexander wept for being lord of not even one among infinite worlds.

This mistake turns the joke on its author.

[1] https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/03/19/and-alexander...

My Latin is rusty, but I was skeptical about 'Bozi' there, not sure if the mistake is in the original text, but it's actually 'Jovi' (Iovi) [1]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quod_licet_Iovi,_non_licet_bov...

I didn't catch this when I read it years ago, but it makes it more hilarious: It's a reference to FB employee Andrew "Boz" Bosworth as the asshole who threatens to punch people.

The preferred plural of Boz would be Bozos.

I always have a hard time with books that seem to be trying to create a second wave of success on "Hey, look what an asshole I was."

If you've realized that you've been a jerk, you owe it to yourself to recognize that and keep quiet about it, not try to turn the fact that you were a jerk into your next big opportunity.

This requires quantities of humility and empathy some people don’t have.

Well, yeah, but if you're a jerk you don't care, so...

Like with that ghostwriter of Donald Trump writing about what a terrible mistake he has made while making $3million along the way.

I bought that book a while ago and never opened it. Never will now, that was just very poorly written and uninteresting. Felt like reading a fake story about Silicon Valley on a high school kids Tumblr.

I did read the book and your impressions are correct. The narrator comes off as very immature and a total jerk. A few examples:

- After getting let go from Facebook he describes peeling out of the parking lot and speeding on campus

- He has a whole chapter on a sexual encounter he had with a colleague at work that had no bearing on the story

- He doesn't even bother naming the woman who bore two of his children, referring to her only as "London Trader". Even a pseudonym would have been appropriate if he wanted to keep her anonymity. His whole relationship with her was cringey and the author was not the least bit self-aware.

All this bragging and assholery speaks volumes about their pronounced narcissistic traits. Unfortunately our culture makes for this type of behaviour to thrive because making money and bragging about it is what sells.

I couldn't even make it through the Wired article because the writing was too atrocious. It reminded me how much I loathe bro culture.

In October 2010, a mother in Florida had shaken her baby to death, as the baby would interrupt her FarmVille games with crying. A mother destroyed with her own hands what she’d been programmed over aeons to love, just to keep on responding to Facebook notifications triggered by some idiot game. Products that cause mothers to murder their infants in order to use them more, assuming they’re legal, simply cannot fail in the world

Everything you need to know about everyone involved in this.

Yeah I wasn’t sure if he was going for dark humour there, but it just read as though he is a despicable human being.

Someone without morality or guilt or shame or a conscience can’t really be called a human being. Someone who displays the same sociopathic traits and narcissistic love for their traits as Chaos Monkey’s author seems to would’ve made a fine Nazi commander.

People who do horrible things are absolutely still human beings.

The test is your genome, not your actions.

If your life philosophy does not account for that, it needs to be replaced.

Dehumanizing people does not stop them from mistreating others - it encourages more of the same.

Yeah I quit reading right there. Kind of doesn't matter if that was really his thought process or he thought it'd be an edgy addition to his narrative.

(In truth I made it a couple more graphs into the tortured orgasm simile; what a bunch of garbage).

I read the book when it came out. It is an interesting snapshot of a particular period in technology history but, as in any memoir, it comes with heavy dose of the author’s personality. I finished the book because the time period is interesting (social media maturing, Facebook and Twitter both growing, the start of “SV bro” Culture etc).. but I found parts of the book incredibly, teeth-grindingly irritating. YMMV.

I found the book pretty enjoyable. The description of advertising technology could be more lucid, the portion on Facebook seemed a tad long, and the romantic intrigues were pretty tame to be mentioned. Still, there's alot to like: I enjoyed the autobiographical tour from quant to startup employee to startup founder to grown-up startup employee to unemployed, particularly the description of the AdGrok acquisition talks. It's always difficult to ascertain what might or might not be true in these kinds of books, but I was left feeling like a friend of Martinez, him pulling back the curtain a bit and letting slip a few secrets, me discovering cracks in the Silicon Valley blend of meritocracy and 'we're changing the world' companies.

Recommended read, though the meat of the book is in the first 1/2 to 2/3. Tone is pretty polarizing, though clearly I was a fan.

I read this last year. The story was interesting, but the author comes across as abrasive and irritating.

Here are my notes on the useful takeaways:

https://mtlynch.io/book-reports/chaos-monkeys/

NYT "Review of ‘Chaos Monkeys’, Silicon Valley tell-all"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12003912

85 comments

"I am Antonio Garcia Martinez, a tech entrepreneur who lied to my investors. AMA."

https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5b4tqe/i_am_antonio_g...

and

"I'm an ex-Facebook exec: don't believe what they tell you about ads (theguardian.com)"

131 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14250910

Needs a "(2016)" in the title. The article, like the book, is years old.

It is still surprising to me all these stories that sound like science fiction and create heroes and villains that drive so many people motivations.

I wonder how this small bubble will be seen in 500 years

It will most likely be forgotten 500 years from now or at most mentioned somewhere in a footnote. This culture will not exist for too long because it is not self sustaining. For each success story there are way too many abused, overworked, misled and lied to. What makes it sustain itself at the moment is exactly this type of holiwoodisation, selling the dream. But this eventually turns stale.

I think Silicon Valley (the TV series) is a good snapshot of that culture for the future. Sure, it's all fiction, but a lot of it is closer to reality than you can get with real stories without violating NDAs.

> I wonder how this small bubble will be seen in 500 years

How much do you know about the movers & shakers in steel production in AD 1520 Toledo? Same, but spice trade merchant-empires in Italy? How many people know more than like 5 names and a couple events or anecdotes (which may or may not even have actually happened) from all of US industry 1880-1930?

There you go. No one but specialists will remember it at all. A couple names might survive but almost nothing about them, and little of it true.

That is actually my point.

Knowing what greediness brought to human history seems a good reason to try to change things to better.

And I am not talking about this specific case but the whole Silicon Valley phenomenon and the fact of concentrating this amount of wealth in such small community.

BTW I am the OP and what caught my attention, besides its veracity, is precisely how this kind of stories have interest in the tech scene that sometimes seem to be totally disconnected from a much broader reality

Contrary to folks here, I found the story of negotiating with Twitter and Facebook to be quite fascinating.

The writing is so immature "try-to-be edgy" that I cannot even finish reading this crap article.

Great book for SV outsiders. And reflective of what I have read on here and in tech media.

Doesn't that mean this could be complete fiction?

Upvoted because it was interesting, not because I like the behavior.

i tried to read it but found it unreadable

He vastly improved twitter's deal and did it at half price

Nobody's THAT generous ;)

"His team mates turned back to their code, without a word. Crying at the thought of his noble sacrifice and departure"

I like the thumbnail. It's quite accurate.

This seems like the personality you have to have to want to work at Facebook. Money uber alles.

more discussion on this book review from back in (2016), when this was news

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12003912

I read it and found it interesting. -Country Bumpkin

Uninteresting book, to be honest. Not the worst story, though, but uninteresting.

tldr: Twitter offered $10 million for startup with CEO and co-foundes. CEO would rather work at Facebook without co-founders. Company sold for $5 million.

Bertrand Russell was a philosopher, so he wrote about the "problem of induction."

"Domestic animals expect food when they see the person who usually feeds them. We know that all these rather crude expectations of uniformity are liable to be misleading. The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken."

Game theorists probably have a different term for unexpectedly converting a repeated game to a terminal one.

The street has its own words for this sort of person.

Facebook wanted the CEO.

Twitter wanted the developers minus the CEO for 5 million.

The way the author comes off, I'm not surprised Facebook and their insane frat culture only wanted the CEO.

Twitter offered $10mil for all founders, settled for two founders at half the price.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com