Professional ethics books are the closest we'll get to applied Philosophy. (That is, until someone starts paying me to shout at people in the street how they are wrong about everything, but the last time someone tried to make that a profession--they ended up having to drink hemlock.)

Monteiro is the head of Mule Design. They are a company probably best known for a series of books on Web Design, as well as some books on Design as a profession. As part of the community that designed the modern web, Monteiro feels that he played some role in the dumpster fire culture dominating the world. He has a lot of ire for the teams at Twitter and Facebook, dedicating the book to the Twitter engineer who deleted Trump's account.

While this book is very clearly a call, and a basic outline, of ethics for App and Web Designers, but it's also a polemic railing at the general shittiness of our culture. Centering on the Orange-Faced-Shit-Gibbon-In-Chief's use of Twitter, the rise of Twitter Nazis, and Über hacking their way around Apple's reviewers and public oversight, his ire is directed and forceful.

Ruined By Design is not a Philosophy book. Not even close, it is a rough outline of a professional code of ethics. Monteiro tries his best to find places to flesh out these ideas fully but also acknowledges that Design needs a licensing body and codified rules. He's not trying to be Moses, but Patrick Henry. He is laying out the principals; he wants a process and democracy to put them into practice.

If you're into tech and not convinced that there is at least some need for ethical oversight, you aren't paying much attention. The government and market do not seem to be able to reign in Facebook in any way. I have my problems with blaming the tech and not the fact that people were always this horrible, we're all just forced to know about it now.

However, everything that Monteiro lays out in this book is about breaking patterns that make it impossible to get away from shitty people. From creating apps that are more concerned with profiting off your anger to throwing your hands up at underpaid drivers, Monteiro wants the designers to step in and be the company conscience. It's hard to argue against.