The gig has been up for Meta and Mark Zuckerberg for years — at the very least since Frances Haugen blew the whistle in 2021, proving that Zuckerberg and his senior executives had long been aware of the harm their products inflicted on society.
But we’ve known for much longer that Facebook, as it used to be, was symptomatic of and encouraged the worst kind of contemporary capitalism.; that it was the consummate example of what type of people should not be running the most influential companies in the world.
So a book by a disgruntled former Facebook employee should be grist to the mill, but also familiar territory. I was concerned there wouldn’t be much new in it, especially as the author, Sarah Wynn-Williams, left the company seven years before completing her manuscript. But with Meta trying its hardest to suppress its publication I thought, why not?
Careless People, the title comes from The Great Gatsby, is a genuine page-turner — very amusing at times and also insightful, both in the detail we’re exposed to and in coming to understand how ostensibly good people can end up working themselves to the bone for bad people doing objectively bad things. Reading this account gives a good idea of how a young, idealistic, talented woman can be lured in and then boiled gently like a frog.
The warning signs are there early in the book — for the reader, at least — as Wynn-Williams lands her dream job at Facebook in 2011, and quickly discovers an office culture of gross materialism. The employees are mercenaries, earning so much that they boast they are “price insensitive”; they don’t bother to look at price tags when shopping. Christian Louboutin shoes, Louis Vuitton bags and diamond bracelets are everywhere, even among junior staff who are remunerated according to tenure, not position.
So while Wynn-Williams has a unique and ultimately senior role — director of global public policy — the office administrator is ahead of her on the pay scale. And though she quickly clocks it, she doesn’t fully accept the ramifications of what she’s dealing with. She arrives with stars in her eyes and a mission to lead Facebook boldly into international politics — a role that she doggedly has to convince them they need because no-one seems to realise what might happen when you connect hundreds of millions of people all over the world.
Of course, Zuckerberg — when she eventually starts dealing with him regularly — is as dreadful as we now know. Again, the details are the thing. Wynn-Williams is desperate to get him to acknowledge and respond to the growing political influence of Facebook, but all he cares about is coding. He refuses to take meetings before noon, even with heads of state. When she finally puts him in front of a global leader, the now former prime minister of New Zealand John Key, he asks her who he is.
The corruption at the core of Facebook is essentially one of greed, but the power dynamics are also brain-melting. Oppressive work expectations and arbitrary fear fuel the company, and almost all the senior executives are an incestuous gang of ex-Havard chums who don’t much care for the little people.
Zuckerberg is initially so disconnected from the reality of what he’s built that he simply can’t comprehend that Facebook has the power to shape elections.
Meanwhile, then COO Sheryl Sandberg is a random liar. For no obvious reason, she claims publicly to have been booked on the Asiana Airlines flight that crashed at San Francisco airport with three lives lost; this is a complete fabrication. The giveaway: Sandberg would never fly a budget airline.
When Wynn-Williams goes into labour with her first child, she writes emails to her immediate boss with her feet in stirrups and her husband and doctor trying to convince her to close the laptop. I find it astonishing not just that she thought this was acceptable, but that it took her so long — years, possibly even a decade — to realise just how deranged it was.
As the culture of management toxicity slowly overcomes her, she also starts becoming aware of the many inconvenient consequences of Facebook’s operating model: the way it encourages bullying, privacy violations, harassment and crime.
Wynn-Williams confirms that Facebook executives were aware they were the new Big Tobacco as early as 2016, suppressing the science of just how damaging social media and the attention economy had become. At times her story reads as farce. When it’s leaked to the press that Facebook is targeting teenage girls when their online behaviour indicates insecurity and anxiety — when they delete a selfie, for instance — the PR department issues a flat denial. Wynn-Williams then receives a furious call from a senior ad executive. How is he supposed to sell this highly effective concept to advertisers, he complains, when the company is pretending it doesn’t exist?
Zuckerberg is, of course, where the buck stops — which it never does. But it is only after Wynn-Williams witnesses him make the decision to allow the arrest in Brazil of Facebook’s vice-president for Latin America, and then dithers in trying to organise his release, that she concludes that he fails “a basic test of normal human decency”.
In the end, we see Wynn-Williams reluctantly reaching the conclusion we’ve known for so long: that Facebook “personalises, atomises, and weaponises” its users; that it feeds on anger and outrage, keeping its users connected by making them hate each other. That while Zuckerberg and Facebook purport to be about networking and connecting and being “social” on the outside, they’re deeply antisocial at heart.
Once the penny drops, however, Wynn-Williams finds herself unable to extricate herself. By now appalled by the collective moral failing around her, she too is trapped by the money — both the health insurance she desperately needs for a chronic medical condition and also the time needed for her equity in the company to mature. In the end, she isn’t brave enough to jump ship and she isn’t disciplined enough to bite her tongue. She starts becoming troublesome, eventually raising the behaviour of her lecherous boss with HR. The chums close ranks, and one day she is summarily fired.
Just how true are all the details in Careless People? Why did Wynn-Williams wait so long to write it? What events have been left out, and exactly how complicit was she in the ethical debacle she was party to? These are some of the questions you might ask yourself on turning the final page, though the general responses to the book, both officially from Meta and the many insiders who have worked there, suggest that it all rings true. And it should be noted that Wynn-Williams has filed whistle-blower complaints with both the Securities and Exchange Commission and the department of justice in the US.
The book has not changed my opinion on Meta or Zuckerberg much, if at all. But it genuinely is an entertaining read, and it adds layers of human nuance to an understanding of how Facebook became what it is today.
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