An inside look into what is arguably the most influential company in America, if not the world. Sarah Wynn-Williams account of her employment at Facebook is an alarming tale of how nakedly amoral and sociopathic our technocrat oligarchs are. There is no right or wrong for the likes of Mark Zuckerberg or Sheryl Sandberg, only growth. Number must go up, damn anyone or anything else.
Wynn-Williams story is deftly told, grounding us first with her personal motivation for joining Facebook - literally inventing the job that she applies for - and then relating each state visit and political crisis she was tasked with handling not only through her eyes, but through the eyes of her superiors. There is a certain amount of guesswork involved in describing the motivations and thought processes of others, but Wynn-Williams for the most part paints a very clear and very unflattering picture of her former bosses through their actions - and perhaps more critically, their inaction.
As a character piece, it is very revealing on the people who run Facebook, but as a historical document, it's woefully lacking. I picked up this book primarily because I was interested in what Facebook's former Director of Public Policy would have to say about the Rohingya Genocide since it occurred during her tenure, but unfortunately there's only a single chapter out of 48 written on the matter, and most of it is spent lamenting how Zuckerberg or Sandberg or anyone else failed to care enough to do anything. Which is awful, which is shocking, and which conveniently absolves Wynn-Williams of any real blame in the death of 40,000 innocent people.
This is a persistent issue in Wynn-Williams' book. From the way she frames herself, it would be easy to think she was stuck as just a lowly intern or assistant, but the reality was that she was an executive at Facebook. In fact, she was the Director of Public Policy, a title which she never ascribes to herself, but is only mentioned once in the "About the Author" section. This memoir is full of moral condemnation for Zuckerberg and her fellow executives, but for however much Wynn-Williams talks about her desire to resign, she never does. Wynn-Williams only leaves Facebook when she's forced to: fired in retaliation for reporting on one of her bosses for sexual harassment.
Facebook is a hideously evil company, after all. And if anyone should have known that it would be the Director of Public Policy.
As much as Wynn-Williams wants to pin the moral failings of Facebook on a select few, the issues were - and still are - more structural than that. At the end of Careless People, Wynn-Williams laments on how her dream for Facebook ended up so twisted. She had joined the company, hoping to change the world for the better, and left with the feeling that she had done just the opposite. But despite all her moral condemnation and pontificating, Wynn-Williams never seems to demonstrate any real moral backbone or have much of an ideological framework for that matter.
She condemns the way Facebook advertisers aided the Trump campaign with aggressive misinformation, how they specifically targeted depressed and socially isolated girls aged 13-17 with beauty product ads, or how little Facebook cares about hate speech proliferating on their platform even when they have deadly consequences. But time and time again, it doesn't seem like she did anything about it besides expecting her fellow executives to be better people.
The whole book is spent telling us how harmful to society Facebook is, but Wynn-Williams never touches on a solution - perhaps because the only sensible solution would be serious government regulation, but to suggest that would undermine her other criticism of Facebook: giving censorship tools to the Chinese government for the Chinese version of Facebook - a version that was never released, mind you, but the idea of which inherently offends Wynn-Williams. Again, not enough to actually quit over, but enough for her to include in her tell-all memoir post-firing.
Careless People is written in a very compelling manner, it's easy to side with Wynn-Williams as she tells us of her pain, her embarassments, and her silent moral outrage. But the more you read on the subject, on the genocide, on the aid Facebook provided Trump, on the hate speech, on the million other nasty things Facebook does on the regular, the more petty and self-serving this book feels. Why was she silent all this time? Why was this story only worth telling when she was personally negatively impacted? Sarah Wynn-Williams does offer some explanations, but given the magnitude of harm Facebook inflicts daily, they make for meager excuses. By the end of her memoir, Sarah Wynn-Williams unfortunately seems as careless as anyone else at Facebook.
