Book Review: Chaos Monkeys: Inside the Silicon Valley Money Machine (2016). Antonio Garcia Martinez.

Chaos Monkeys is a gossipy but amusing personal account of life in the fast lane of post-2008 crash Wall Street investment firms, Silicon Valley startups, and Facebook, by a young man who experienced it, and was there in the middle of it as it was all taking off. It's cynical, funny and outrageous, with very good insight and commentary on how things really work in the high-stakes worlds of big money and venture capital.

It also contains the clearest descriptions that I have ever read of how online real-time advertising markets work in the virtual world of Facebook, Google, Twitter and others. These mechanisms and algorithms, which daily supply all those eerily relevant and timely ads on your smartphone, as you're browsing some seemingly unrelated app, are technologically impressive, at the same time they are truly disturbing and annoying on the level of the invasions of our personal privacy which are required to make them work.

Martinez's descriptions of how these uncanny and often creepy systems and markets were developed, and how they function, is crucial reading for anyone who wants to understand the strange social media and internet world all around us, which most of us now take for granted (although it shocked me today to recall that the iPhone and its ubiquitous smartphone descendants have only been around for about 15 years). Recommended.