Let me begin off by telling you about what I’m reading. I should have been done with this book by now but I had to slow down and start taking notes. Savour it like I do a Café Javas Black Current cake on Sunday morning after church.
There is another reason. I could not speed read through a minefield. Careless People was supposed to educate me more about the workings of Meta and its founder Mark Zuckerberg. Why should you care about Meta or Zuckerberg?
Meta is the company that owns Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram. Those three are possibly the most used and important communication platforms in the world today. They belong to one man: Mark Zuckerberg.
I consider Zuckerberg one of the seminal businessmen of our time. As a start up founder in 2004, it was astonishing to witness Zuckerberg relentlessly innovate what Facebook could offer even as he battled off competition from the likes of Friendster and MySpace.
Zuckerberg’s anticipation of the future of our digital was uncanny. He correctly guessed that, no matter the geographical location, users of the digital space shared one desire, a need for that experience to be as close to our real world interactions as closely as possible. We wanted to know people around us and to be known. He summed it up simply as a need to: connect.
Like Stephen Levy’s Facebook: The Inside Story, Sarah Wyn-William’s Careless People furthers our understanding of Zuckerberg’s psychology and motivations, which, while a very visible CEO, he goes to great lengths to obscure. I will be writing in detail next week about the insights Williams shares in her book.
For now, though, I wanted to talk about the the road I found Careless People leading me down that I had not expected. Careless People has become a traumatic revisit of the horrors of working in the corporate world for a big company.
Somewhere in the 1980s and 1990s, a theory of management took hold that believed companies have a right monopolise all the waking hours of their employees. Working hours were to be calculated to the millisecond and maximum labour must be extracted that was greater than what the company was paying each worker to deserve to be called a profitable arrangement.
A lot of the technology that was developed in those decades was geared towards efficiency. The more the technology to work on the go evolved, the more deep rooted this belief and system of management became. Today, it is the norm to expect a company man or woman to answer emails and attend Zoom meetings regardless of where they are or what could be happening around them in their personal lives and be professional about it.
This is the environment author of Careless People Williams found herself in at Facebook. From bosses who bark at you and treat you like you have the intelligence of an idiot to supervisors who award you a failing grade during quarterly job assessments because your child was overheard crying in the background on a call. Williams documents with dates, time and names the people who were there during this bad behaviour.
Until Careless People, I thought I had recovered my own previous, terrible experience as a corporate drone. I was wrong. I found myself having to put the book down and take a walk in Botanical Gardens to get a grip of my seething emotions.
Careless People is an invaluable look into Facebook at 20. I believe, though, long after Facebook has joined the heap of defunct companies, Careless People will grow in value as reference source material for studies in unchecked corporate power. But more next week!
I could not let this week pass without acknowledging the performance of National Unity Platform (NUP) president Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu on NBS TV’s Barometer Akasammeme programme on Tuesday, April 1, 2025.
For four years, Kyagulanyi and Next Media (which owns NBS TV) have been at war. In January, 2021, Kyagulanyi accused Next Media of colluding with the state to “hide” results that showed he had won the general election that year.
Next Media stridently denied any such action. Internally, a decision was taken not to host Kyagulanyi or NUP leaders in future until a retraction was issued. BBEG Media’s Edris Kiggundu has written a nice piece about how this falling out was repaired to enable this interview to happen.
I want to marvel at the Kyagulanyi that showed up for that Barometer show hosted by Al-madhi Adam Kungu.
Those who believed in Kyagulanyi eight years ago when he started his political journey in Kyadondo East have had a satisfying feeling of vindication at the polished politician that made his entry at Plot 13, Naguru, Summit View that Tuesday evening.
The Kyagulanyi that strode up the Next Media Park steps that have entertained all sorts of luminaries was a very different Kyagulanyi from the 2019 Kyagulanyi who struggled to explain what fiscal policy meant in an interview with NTV’s Patrick Kamara.
The Kyagulanyi that turned up on April 1 had clearly lived many political lifetimes over since 2017. This is a Kyagulanyi who knew first hand what it takes to keep a dream alive and small minded, brilliant underlings more interested in their own petty interests in check so they can continue to strive together towards the bigger prize.
He had been through the bruising 2021 general election, the betrayals and disappointments of the 11th parliament with many members he helped put there during the “red wave.” He has had to comfort many crying mothers and orphans, elderly fathers looking for their breadwinner children allegedly kidnapped for showing Kyagulanyi support.
The Kyagulanyi that showed up on the hill, after a four year absence, could have been embittered but it seems he had instead taken to heart Shaka Ssali’s dictum: don’t get bitter, get better. The Kyagulanyi who showed up on set in that studio was a refined version of the Bobi Wine who won millions of fans around the world twenty years ago.
No longer self conscious and afraid of making mistakes, this Kyagulanyi could joke, pause for emphasis, redirect questions to what he wanted to talk about or make fun of his interlocutor like he used to when he was a musician against his stage rivals.
Most worryingly, his rhetoric can now soar to inspirational heights for years only seemed to show in his lyrics. If you have the time, watch that interview for the section where towards the end he turns from Adam Kungu to speak to the “the youth who are watching this.”
This was the action of a master communicator who can reach out beyond the prison of the screen to touch the heart and mind of those who needed to hear his message and until that moment had no idea they were perched for it.
Watching Kyagulanyi on Barometer, I began to appreciate why first son and army commander General Muhoozi Kainerugaba has been obsessed with him in his tweets since the beginning of this year. Muhoozi must have been informed that Kyagulanyi was no longer just the “ghetto president” whose appeal was limited to Kampala and nearby towns.
Kyagulanyi’s skills have grown to such a level that wherever you place him with a microphone before his lips, when he opens his mouth, he will sway a sizeable number of minds and hearts that will pledge fealty. The Kyagulanyi of 2025 is going to be very hard to beat in 2026. Kyagulanyi is only 43. He is just getting started.
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