Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams could almost be one of Christopher Buckley’s Beltway satires. Like Thank You for Smoking or The White House Mess, the first-person protagonist takes the reader on a journey from dream job to absurd nightmare—each chapter an ironic critique of the powerful characters depicted. Except Wynn-Williams is real, and so are the truly awful people and events she describes. “…like watching a bunch of fourteen-year-olds who’ve been given superpowers and an ungodly amount of money, as they jet around the world to figure out what power has bought and brought them,” she writes in the prologue.
The subtitle, A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism aptly describes this memoir, which begins with Wynn-Williams’s story of surviving a shark attack at the age of 13 in her native New Zealand and ends with her being escorted by security from the shark-infested headquarters at Facebook twenty-five years later. Hired in 2011 as the Manager of Global Public Policy, Wynn-Williams conveys her initial enthusiasm as a true believer in the power of Facebook to be a force for good and, on that basis, how she pitched the idea of a policy role for herself at a time when the leadership did not yet grasp why the company would need to build relationships with state leaders.
Initially, Wynn-Williams’s expertise as a former New Zealand diplomat reads like a satirical counterpoint to the fumbles of tech-nerds who don’t understand state craft. An early chapter, for instance, describes the visit of German delegates to Facebook’s Washington office and their bewilderment upon seeing the open-plan office with all the facades stripped away to expose the ducts and bare fixtures to “symbolize” the company’s nascent status. “‘You dismantled the furnishings of a proper office to make it look like this? Like it is under construction?’ one of the officials inquired, incredulous,” Wynn-Williams writes.
This image of the deadpan German thinking he is meeting with unserious people would be funny if not for the very real and deadly events that are indeed foreshadowed. As the narrative unfolds like a thriller, the protagonist discovers unbounded arrogance, callousness, hypocrisy—and ultimately—dangerous and criminal conduct among her superiors. The faux feminism of Sheryl Sandberg and lechery of Joel Kaplan become subplots about elite executives whose worst crime against humanity, so far, is arguably Facebook’s role in fostering rampant hate-speech which fueled the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar between October 2016 and January 2017.
As discussed in an earlier post, Senators Hawley et al., motivated in part by Wynn-Williams’s testimony and accounts in the book, have stated an intent to investigate Facebook’s misconduct designed to appease the Chinese Communist Party. But to me, the most compelling part of the memoir is the glimpse into Mark Zuckerberg’s character, especially as a putative oligarch in context to the Trump-led assault on the constitutional order of the United States.
Wynn-Williams’s portrait of Zuckerberg, an avatar of Big Tech leaders, combines the patriarchal vanity of John Galt with the innocent savagery of Jack Meridew—a boy billionaire, who plays board games that his staff let him win, but who ultimately embraces the destructive power he controls. Specifically, the chapters describing Zuckerberg’s psychological process upon learning that Facebook was catalytic to the 2016 election of Donald Trump can be described as denial, anger, pride, and corruption.
During a flight on the private jet to Lima for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit, Elliot Schrage, VP of global communications, marketing, and public policy, explains to Zuckerberg how, “A Trump operative named Brad Parscale ran the operation together with embedded Facebook staff, and he basically invented a new way for a political campaign to shitpost its way to the White House, targeting voters with misinformation, inflammatory posts, and fundraising messages,” Wynn-Williams writes.
Initially, Zuckerberg clings to the belief that his platform is a neutral conduit for free speech and “connecting people,” but he then becomes angry at the irrefutable evidence presented by Shrage. Then, at the APEC summit, Zuckerberg’s incipient sense of his own power, and test of his character, is described by Wynn-Williams as he is buffeted between foreign leaders kissing his ass one minute and President Obama in a side meeting lecturing him about the dangers of misinformation on Facebook.
Rather than introspection, Zuckerberg responds like a petulant comic book villain—so offended by the criticism of the U.S. President that he decides to use the power of his technology for his own run at the office. “After all, not only does Mark now have Trump’s playbook, he owns the tools and sets the rules,” Wynn-Williams writes. “And he has something no one else has, the ability to control the algorithm with zero transparency or oversight.”
Again, the image of the staff reacting to Zuckerberg’s announcement that he wants to hold events in swing states like Iowa, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania et al. would make great satire but for the fact that, as Wynn-Williams puts it, “He could run for president and not ask anyone for a dime.” Of course, the real point is not the prospect of President Zuckerberg—at least not yet—but rather Wynn-Williams’s courageous exposure of the mindset behind the allegedly “greatest tool for democracy ever invented.”
At tremendous personal risk, she is being threatened by Meta, which tried to stop publication of the book, tried to stop her testifying before Congress this month, and threatens to sue her for $50,000 per negative comment about Meta.
In many ways, Careless People reveals what many of us already knew about Meta and the other social media giants—at least since 2017: that they are not designed or operated according to principles that ever justified the populist rhetoric of “democratization.” That was a lie more than a decade ago, and the lie is exponential in the battle over development and application of artificial intelligence. Wynn-Williams sums it up well with her thoughts about the travesty in Myanmar:
“I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what unfolded next in Myanmar, and Facebook’s complicity. It wasn’t because of some grander vision or any malevolence toward Muslims in the country. Nor lack of money. My conclusion: It was just that Joel, Elliot, Sheryl, and Mark didn’t give a fuck.”
