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An explosive memoir charting one woman's career at the heart of one of the most influential companies on the planet, Careless People gives you a front-row seat to Facebook, the decisions that have shaped world events in recent decades, and the people who made them.
From trips on private jets and encounters with world leaders to shocking accounts of misogyny and double standards behind the scenes, this searing memoir exposes both the personal and the political fallout when unfettered power and a rotten company culture take hold. In a gripping and often absurd narrative where a few people carelessly hold the world in their hands, this eye-opening memoir reveals what really goes on among the global elite.
Sarah Wynn-Williams tells the wrenching but fun story of Facebook, mapping its rise from stumbling encounters with juntas to Mark Zuckerberg's reaction when he learned of Facebook's role in Trump's election. She experiences the challenges and humiliations of working motherhood within a pressure cooker of a workplace, all while Sheryl Sandberg urges her and others to "lean in."
Careless People is a deeply personal account of why and how things have gone so horribly wrong in the past decade―told in a sharp, candid, and utterly disarming voice. A deep, unflinching look at the role that social media has assumed in our lives, Careless People reveals the truth about the leaders of Facebook: how the more power they grasp, the less responsible they become and the consequences this has for all of us.
Sarah Wynn-Williams was working for the New Zealand government in 2009 when she had an epiphany: Facebook had the power to change the world. "It seemed obvious that politics was going to happen on Facebook, and when it did, when it migrated to this enormous new gathering place, Facebook and the people who ran it would be at the center of everything," she writes. "They'd be setting the rules for this global conversation." And she wanted to be a part of it. Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism chronicles her evolution from that idealistic young woman, so optimistic about Facebook's power and her own, to one completely disillusioned by the narcissistic, hypocritical people for whom she worked by the time she left the company in 2017. Her time at Facebook, as she puts it, "started as a hopeful comedy and ended in darkness and regret."
Back in 2009, the site's revolutionary potential was a sharp contrast to the diplomacy work she'd been doing. In one funny scene, early in the book, Wynn-Williams is representing New Zealand in the United Nations and is part of a subcommittee drafting an annual report on the "law of the sea." She drily observes delegates "literally arguing over punctuation… whether to insert a semicolon or a comma after some word in a paragraph deep in a document no one would ever read." Sensing her frustration, a fellow diplomat asks her, "Do you know what the single most impactful thing to actually protect the oceans over the last decade is?... Nemo… That little fishy they have to find." "When you realize a cartoon fish can achieve more than the United Nations, it's time to go," she writes.
It took her many months and many interviews, but she was finally hired in 2011 as Facebook's Manager of Global Public Policy. Early on, though, Wynn-Williams finds that Facebook's senior leadership is self-absorbed and oblivious to anything but their own interests. The first time she meets Mark Zuckerberg in person, for example, she asks him if he'd like to meet an important visitor—the New Zealand prime minister. "No. I already said I definitely didn't want to do that," Zuckerberg rudely replies, the prime minister well within earshot. Wynn-Williams watches in disbelief as her bosses seem to care more about their image than about those around them or the harm they're inflicting on society. She relays story after story in which their insensitivity is on full display: A Facebook employee is jailed in Brazil, but his plight is used to promote the platform in a way that could have easily made the man's situation worse; Facebook is used to disseminate "fake news" that is leading to genocide in Myanmar, but leadership can't be bothered to restrict the content; executives are more concerned about who's sitting where during an important meeting than discussing the implications of the policies they're creating.
The book's epigraph is a quote from The Great Gatsby (so fitting that one wonders if the author wrote her manuscript with it in mind): "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness…and let other people clean up the mess they had made." The reader gets the overwhelming sense that the company is run by a bunch of bratty teenagers who have unlimited power and wealth—and it's not a pretty picture.
Part of what makes Careless People so engrossing is that from start to finish it's a personal account. There have been plenty of articles about Facebook's corporate culture and its questionable business practices over the years. But here, everything comes from Wynn-Williams' own experiences and observations; we're not so much reading about a corporation as about a woman trying to function within its constraints. The fact that she desperately wants Facebook to be a force for good in the world is palpable, as is her frustration that no one in leadership wants to even talk about creating guardrails to ensure the platform isn't misused.
A policy wonk from the start of her career, Wynn-Williams can't quite stop herself from drifting into the technical weeds toward the end of the book; there are long sections on China and Myanmar that slow the narrative's momentum. By that point in the book she's concluded that she can't stay at Facebook, and her writing reflects that. She's become so disenchanted with those she formerly admired that she's checked out; abuses are so commonplace they're no longer worth noting to the reader. And in 2017, after accusing a top executive of sexual harassment, she was fired (Facebook, now Meta, says her termination was because of her "poor performance and toxic behavior").
Unsurprisingly, Meta has filed legal action, first trying to keep the book from being published and then to keep the author from talking about her experiences. They've stated that Careless People is a "mix of out-of-date and previously repeated claims about the company and false accusations about our executives." (Kudos to the publisher, Flatiron Books, for their vigorous defense: "This book is a first person narrative account of what the author herself witnessed. We thoroughly vetted the book. We have no obligation to give Meta or anyone else the opportunity to shut down her story.") Given the speed at which tech companies evolve, there have certainly been considerable changes in the eight years since Wynn-Williams left Facebook; and in fact, many of the individuals mentioned in Careless People no longer work for Meta. But in capturing a specific era of the company's history, and the crucial decisions that led to what Facebook has since become, Wynn-Williams has created an engrossing and important book.
Reviewed by Kim Kovacs
Maria Semple
Roxane Gay
Rated 5 out of 5
by Bonnie G
A clear eyed frightening behind the scenes look at big tech
When you can't stop thinking about a book, when it invades your dreams, when you ask everyone you know to read it ... you know it has had an impact. Even if Meta was not working so hard (and succeeding in part) to get this book and the author's voice quashed, I would be imploring everyone to read it. The book is fast paced, astonishing in its content, and clear minded in its view point. Kudos to Sarah Wynn-Williams for going where others dared not go.
Sarah Wynn-Williams' book, Careless People, details her experiences at Facebook from 2011 to 2017. The company had been around for seven years before her chronicle begins, however, and its earliest history is fascinating.
Born May 14, 1984, Facebook's founder Mark Zuckerberg was a wunderkind. He displayed a talent for computer programming from an early age, encouraged by his father, Edward, who taught him Atari BASIC when he was around 10 years old. Mark outstripped his father's ability to instruct him within a few months, so his parents hired a software developer to tutor him—a move that quickly paid off. Edward, a dentist who ran his practice from his house, wanted a way to contact his receptionist without having to trudge downstairs, so 11-year-old Mark created an internal messaging app for him, which he named ZuckNet. In high school, he created Synapse, a program that learned users' music preferences and suggested similar content to them, much like the music service Pandora (which was launched in 2005, several years after Zuckerberg's creation). AOL and Microsoft offered to hire him and give him one million dollars to further develop Synapse, but he turned them down, deciding instead to study psychology at Harvard.
In 2003, during his sophomore year, Mark had the idea to create a website he called Facemash. It was a version of "Hot or Not," an offensive game in which people vote on whether or not a specific person is attractive. In Mark's version, the pictures of two female students were displayed side-by-side on the web page, and users who were logged in could select which of the two was the prettier one. Needless to say, it almost immediately garnered complaints, citing sexism and privacy concerns. The Harvard administration took the site offline two days later, but in that short period of time 450 people participated, casting 22,000 votes. It also turned out that Zuckerberg had hacked into the school's student database to obtain the pictures he used, which nearly got him expelled.
Undaunted, Mark continued to brainstorm other ideas with his roommates Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. Mark was determined to create something that would connect Harvard's students together. The project started out as an online version of a book Harvard provided to incoming students, a sort of directory that would help them get to know each other better. They named this early effort TheFacebook and launched the site in early 2004.
TheFacebook was initially designed just for Harvard students, with the idea that users would post pictures of themselves along with a few bits of personal information, such as their class schedule or hobbies. The more students that participated, the more people would feel connected, forming a tighter community. Over a thousand students registered to be a part of this service within the first 24 hours, and half the student body were members within a month. Zuckerberg and his crew expanded access to other Ivy League schools, and by June 2004 they had 250,000 members from 34 schools. They also began attracting advertising revenue from big corporations, like Mastercard.
At the end of the school year, Zuckerberg, Moskovitz, and Hughes rented a small house in Palo Alto from which to run their burgeoning business. They had intended to return to Harvard at the end of summer to complete their degrees, but by that time TheFacebook had received so much advertising revenue that Zuckerberg and Moskovitz decided to remain in Palo Alto. Sean Parker, the creator of the file sharing program Napster, also joined the team that summer as Facebook's first president. Perhaps his most important contribution, though, was convincing PayPal's creator Peter Thiel to invest $500,000 in the new company.
The website, renamed just "Facebook" in early 2005, continued to roll out new features over the ensuing months, garnering more users and more advertisers. They gradually expanded their userbase, and by early 2006 had opened access to the website to anyone over the age of thirteen with a valid email address. By August 2009—a little more than five years after their launch—Facebook had over 10 million active daily users and over 1200 employees. A little more than a year later, it was the third largest company in the United States, behind only Google and Amazon.
Image courtesy of Coolcaesar, CC BY-SA 3.0
Filed under Medicine, Science and Tech
By Kim Kovacs
From Atlantic critic and Pulitzer Prize finalist Sophie Gilbert, a blazing critique of early aughts pop culture.
An urgent warning of the unprecedented risks that AI and other fast-developing technologies pose to global order, and how we might contain them while we have the chance—from a co-founder of the pioneering artificial intelligence company DeepMind
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