Facebook: The Inside Story

An all-encompassing, accessed and overall considerably nuanced history of Facebook, from Zuckerberg’s upbringing, high school and Harvard days to the present election security and privacy challenges of present. This is long — it’s over 600 pages, but it flies by.

Levy is the right author for a book like this — he has known and interviewed Zuckerberg since the beginnings of Facebook, traveled extensively with executives around the world, and has a one-foot-in, one-foot-out grasp that understands and in some cases sympathizes with the complexities facing the company from the inside, while understanding from the outside the colossal societal impact the company has, and where there have been irrecoverable mistakes.

I wouldn’t say this book is about humanizing Zuckerberg, Sandberg, Parker, Cox, Boz, et al. It does that, yes, but it’s purpose is more Rawlsian — to take the reader outside their own experience with Facebook, and show the sweep of how an idea so small (and in some ways unintentional) can have virus like spread across society in our technical age, and the implications of that exponential spread over such a short amount of time.

I’d really recommend this book. Most everyone alive is affected by Facebook and it’s constituent social mores; this is a more considered look at the company than most of the incomplete and bite-sized clippings we are used to across the media, and on bookshelves