Framed

O’Hearn, a tech-industry insider, exposes the unseemly underbelly of social media.

In this entertaining and edifying “collection of shards and shreds and conspiratorial diatribes,” the author takes readers on an expert tour of the “amusing, dreadful world of social media.” O’Hearn worked at a tech startup—he gives it the fictitious name Cutlet—where he was charged with leading “algorithmic recommendation systems, push notification infrastructure, and personalized social feeds.” He was involved in all kinds of user manipulations—the blatantly dishonest engineering of user engagement. (“The users of Cutlet were my avatars, my puppets. I was a social scientist carrying out experiments. I was free to manipulate the app’s small audience without anyone knowing who I was, what I was doing, or what I was trying to accomplish.”) The author details his own misdeeds with impressive candor and discusses “social media iniquity” in more general terms; his biggest target is the “Instagram underworld” and the ways in which the popular app tricks its users into buying ad space. O’Hearn thoughtfully considers the deleterious impact of the internet—which, in his view, “robs life of meaning” (especially in the case of its youngest users)—and the “purely nihilistic” cosmos of social media influencers. This is a wide-ranging assemblage of essays written with verve, insight, and technical authority; as a software engineer, the author is uniquely positioned to explain, in extraordinary and largely accessible detail, the nuts and bolts of the internet. Additionally, he supplies a fascinating treatise on screen addiction and the ways in which its awful effects can be mitigated, such as the aggressive limitation of screen time for younger users. This is a startling read—humorous, but often discomfiting and always deeply informative.

A wealth of eye-popping information presented in a buoyantly irreverent style.