Hey! A book review! Been a bit.
Should I Read This: Probably. It covers some old ground but in a useful, revealing way.
BookShop.org Link (non-affiliate): Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams
Author’s Website: Careless People
There is a certain kind of person, well meaning, open to inspiration, genuinely wants to help the world that I think gets us into more trouble than perhaps any other kind of person. Not because they are bad people — far from it. In fact, they are often the best among us. But they seem to have a certain impatience, a certain frustration with the nuts and bolts of truly democratic that lead them to work for and with truly bad people. Sarah Wynn-Williams strikes me as that kind of person. And let me be clear — I will take a world filled with Sarah Wynn-Williams as compared to the alternatives. But Careless People, while meant to be about the Facebook elite, also shows, unintentionally I think, how decent people make the initial mistake of working for bad people.
And let us be absolutely clear: the people who run Facebook are bad people. Sheryl Sandberg talked a good game about balancing life and work for women but treated her subordinate, especially her female subordinates, terribly. Facebook itself made it clear that kids had better never, ever come up in a work situation, not even when you happened to be close to dying after childbirth. Sexual harassment was rampant, and HR investigations seemed to be aimed at suppressing the reporters rather than solving the problems. Senior leadership like Joel Kaplan, of Brooks Brothers Riot fame, and Elliot Shrage cared only about growth, and thus profits, at all costs. An attitude insisted on by Mark Zuckerberg.
Zuckerberg, if even half the stories in this book are true and we have no reason to believe any of them are false, is one of the worst human beings on the planet. The book makes clear that Zuckerberg and other senior leadership knew that Facebook was responsible for violence in Myanmar and did nothing. They knew that they were selling to teens at their most vulnerable, ads being tied to “depression” or when they delete a selfie, for example, and were proud of it. They worked hand in hand with the Chinese government to turn over sensitive data to the Chinese authorities, knowing both that people would be hurt because of that action and that data for non-Chinese citizens would also end up in their governments hand because of the way Facebook setup its services. They didn’t care about any of that because growth was all that mattered.
Two incidents highlight, in a small way, why Zuckerberg is such a terrible person. At the end of her tenure, all her fucks given away, Wynn-Williams is on a flight with Zuckerberg. Mark likes to play games, primarily, I suspect, because he is always allowed to win. Wynn-Williams does not let him win. He cannot believe that he could lose, and he probably even more cannot believe he could lose to a woman that didn’t even go to Harvard (it’s very clear that all of the Facebook senior leadership are extremely impressed with their Harvard degrees. Harvard should probably think long and hard about what that means). She must have cheated, he says. She didn’t cheat, and she walks back through the game pointing out all of the stupid shit he did that caused him to lose. She then, having moved past no fucks to give and into the transcendent realm of an arsonist standing in a pool of gas with a lit match, points out that the same stubbornness that cost him the game cost him in real life. Zuckerberg does not apologize or give any indication that he understands. he merely moves the conversation along, content, apparently, in his own wisdom.
More disturbingly, after an employee is arrested in Brazil because of Facebook’s unwillingness to comply with a court order regarding a man who is threatening to assassinate the judge handling the case, Zuckerberg writes a post about how heartwarming it is that the employee would protect the data of Facebook users. the post is written in such a way as to undermine the legal case Facebook was trying to build to get the employee released. Zuckerberg didn’t care. A few months later, when presented with said employee, it was obvious Zuckerberg had no idea who the man was.
Since Wynn-Williams worked on the policy side, created the job, in fact, she had close contact with the most senior leaders in the organization. This allows her to fill the book with stories about their bad behavior and disdain for anyone that was not them. All of that is helpful, but there is also an undercurrent of why Wynn-Williams joined the company in the first place and why it took so long to see that she was working with bad people.
I do not question why she stayed. Money drives everything in the US and asking to give up your source of healthcare and security when you have kids who need help and you yourself are facing a potentially life-threatening condition is a huge ask, bordering in unreasonable. I am even at home to the idea that it took her so long to see what was wrong because people do not want to see what is wrong with people and institutions that they once believed in. Wynn-Williams apparent blindness to what I saw as enormous blinking red flags is probably best ascribed to common human failing. What does interest me, and what concerns me given how she ends the book, is why she joined Facebook in the first place.
Wynn-Williams worked as a diplomat at the United Nations on environmental issues. She was disillusioned by the process and the slow pace and the backwater that the UN had largely become. Facebook was new, exciting, and she could see how it could be a force for good. except that Facebook is a company and no company can be a force for good, not in any meaningful sense. this is not to say that all companies are driven to be evil. the firm I work for is not, no more than anything or anyone else in late capitalism. I work with a lot of smart people and while the expectations are high, they give me the space required to take care of my health and my family. But at the end of the day, they are companies. They are going to push to make money, and publicly traded companies are going to be pushed to grow quarter to quarter. That can be done ethically, and I think most companies try to be ethical, but it does mean that in companies will not, cannot, put what’s good for society over what is good for themselves. That is why we have governments.
When presented with the idea that a movie was more effective than the UN, Wynn-Williams gave up on government. She didn’t try and change the UN. She didn’t try and go to a spot where she could have more influence. She didn’t try and go home to New Zealand and work on government programs there that would have a more immediate impact. She didn’t even get into the movie business to make more movies that would encourage people to save the environment. No — she went work for a private form led by a man with no accountability to anyone but himself, seduced by the idea that a company could improve the world. We all know what happened next.
This idea, that business is a proper receptacle for the desire to improve civil society, is wildly misplaced. When companies move fast and break things they tend to break the important things — civil society, laws, democratic accountability — that restrain their ability to make money. Any firm powerful enough to actually shape events, like Facebook, is almost certainly going to shape events in favor of their bottom line. It is silly to think that extremely wealthy, unaccountable people can be consistently counted upon to put civil society above their own needs. Again, that is what we have governments and non-profits for.
If Wynn-Williams wanted a good Facebook, she should have focused on creating one in the non-profit or governmental space. If she wanted to make the world better, she should have worked for people whose job it is to do so. Perhaps the greatest trick the devil ever played on humanity was convincing people that business was more important, more effective, more meaningful than government and charity work. Wynn-Williams does seem to have learned her lesson, at least a little bit. She appears to be working on AI policy outside of the AI companies. She is still buying the hype a little too much, in my opinion, but she has moved on from the business world into trying to do good in the real world.
That, as much as the understanding that Zuckerberg and other billionaires need to be reined in, is my largest takeaway form the book. We spend too much time glorifying business and not enough time appreciating public service. As a result, otherwise intelligent and dedicated people like Wynn-Williams waste their time and their talents trying to change the world inside a vessel uniquely unsuited to the task.
I do recommend the book. Wynn-Willaims is a very good writer, getting to the heart of the story easily in a style that conveys both her disbelief and the seriousness of the moments. And while it covers a lot of ground politically aware people know, she does an excellent job of showing how that ground makes up a coherent geography, not just individual places.
Plus, it describes how teenage her survived a shark attack despite the New Zealand doctors, her parents, and apparently the entire nation told her to walk it off.