Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism
Sarah Wynn-Williams
Macmillan
I remember signing onto Facebook for the first time at the start of 2009. I wasn’t sure how or what to post, or what tone to assume. But sending and receiving a bunch of friend requests was fun, and I was excited to experiment.
A few days later, my mom died, and the news felt too dark, raw, and personal to share on Facebook. I mean, did I really want everyone I’d just casually reconnected with to know about this, when I was struggling to process it myself? In the end, I determined that I wanted privacy and space for my grief more than I wanted immediate words of comfort.
It’s weird to recall that tipping point – the moment when we all started weighing our desire for privacy against our ego’s desire to feel “seen” and loved by others. We were all abuzz about the positive potential of Facebook then, and how it could connect us regularly to those we love and those we’d lost touch with, no matter how busy we all were, or how far apart we lived. The pull was intoxicating and irresistible.
Sarah Wynn-Williams – then a former New Zealand diplomat and international lawyer who would go on to write the riveting new Facebook memoir called Careless People – was hardly immune. In 2009, she grew obsessed with the idea of working for this innovative tech company that was going to change the world.
It took some amateur detective work, and repeated efforts to convince Facebook’s then small, secretive team that they needed to start thinking globally about how to solve tricky political, legal, and financial problems that would inevitably arise. Wynn-Williams eventually got the call in July 2011 to be manager of global policy.
The harrowing, shocking rollercoaster ride that followed, during Wynn-Williams’ six-year tenure at Facebook, provides the basis for her blisteringly candid book. If you read it (which I recommend), it will permanently change the way you view the granddaddy of social media platforms.
Which is a good thing. We’re overdue, frankly, for reckoning with the bargain we’ve long been willing to make: free social connectivity for personal data.
In the early days, Wynn-Williams, like many of us, assumed that as Facebook’s team worked its way through complicated moral dilemmas, domestically and globally, it would make decisions with human beings’ safety and greater good in mind.
As Careless People makes clear, nothing could be further from the truth.
There’s a progression, of course. Awkwardly comical moments that follow Wynn-Williams’ hire – including founder Mark Zuckerberg saying he has no interest in meeting New Zealand’s prime minister (John Key) while the man is standing right in front of him, next to Wynn-Williams – remind you that this pioneering company was, at the time of its greatest growth, being led by an impulsive, twenty-something kid. During Wynn-Williams’ tenure, as Facebook’s reach and power and profits explode, things take an increasingly dark, greed- and ego-forward turn. It becomes clear that growth and profit are not just the company’s main drivers, but its only drivers.
Wynn-Williams didn’t want this to be true, of course. As situation after situation plays out this way, thereby demonstrating who and what are important (and what’s not), her disillusionment grows, and her hopes of “righting the ship” from the inside are extinguished.
But oh, what jaw-dropping stories she has to tell. In 2015, for example, Zuckerberg appeared at the United Nations and announced a new vision: to bring wifi to refugee camps. Wynn-Williams (who previously worked at the UN) is surprised but encouraged by this – until it becomes clear that Zuckerberg made it up, and has no plans to see it through.
She writes: “At this point, I’m still a true believer in Facebook’s mission to change the world. And I had thought my role in it – my contribution – would be to get Mark to engage internationally, meet with real heads of state. I thought that would teach him to exercise political power responsibly. Make reasonable compromises when compromises when needed, on privacy, protecting children, and whatever mattered. Build a company that would make money, sure, but also be a good citizen of the world. But now it occurs to me that maybe Mark isn’t on the same page at all. Somehow, introducing him to global leaders and putting him on the world stage at the United Nations is having the opposite effect of what I’d hoped. He seems to be giving less of a damn. Saying things because they sound good. Posting things because they look good. Looking back now, I regret having enabled this.”
Meanwhile, there’s also rampant sexual harassment – from Wynn-Williams’ boss, Republican operative Joel Kaplan, to the “Lean In” queen herself, Sheryl Sandberg, who insistently invites the author to “come to bed” on the company’s private jet (Wynn-Williams refuses). There are bizarre situations like a mercenary Facebook employee being sent to Korea, where there’s a warrant out for Zuckerberg and Sandberg, to see if authorities toss her into jail. (Wynn-Williams, a nursing new mom at the time, was the favored candidate to go, but ultimately Facebook’s higher-ups decide she needs to stay and work on planning a more extensive upcoming trip to Asia.)
There’s also a chapter on how Facebook wanted China’s business so badly that it was working with that country’s Communist government to provide ways to censor material and intercept messages. A chapter details how Myanmar’s Rohingya genocide, in 2017, was sparked by disinformation spread on Facebook (by posts the company was slow, or refused, to take down, quibbling about whether they violated the guidelines or not). Another chapter show how Facebook gleefully delivered to advertisers a means to reach teenage girls when they were feeling particularly vulnerable and “worthless” (one of the key words used).
It’s all sobering, depressing stuff. But given how big a role social media now plays in all our lives, we can’t afford to not look any longer. Wynn-Williams’ book implicitly argues that we have to start asking ourselves some tough questions about how and where we spend our time online. Facebook can be, and has been, an easy, enticing connector for people, but the cost to our humanity may ultimately be way, way too high.
