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zinelib 's review for:
Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism
by Sarah Wynn-Williams
dark
medium-paced
Careless People is a spicy Facebook tell-all by someone who is a reliable narrator, but also deeply delusional. Wynn-Williams gets it into her head that she wants to work for Facebook because she believes in Facebook's community mission. She thinks Facebook can bring the world together and therefore wants to help with international policy. Wynn-Williams is a New Zealand diplomat, so you'd think she'd be good at reading the room. And she kind of is...?
The first roadblock is that Facebook the company prides itself on being difficult to reach.
What about that makes you think the company is not full of assholes? And yet Wynn-Williams tenaciously develops a contact and eventually gets them to create a job for her. And you know what foreign policy is all about? Tax shelters! Did you know that Dublin, Ireland is a tech hub? Ireland is a tax haven country--for businesses. Employees still get to pay taxes, which is just so capitalism. On page 155, about a third of the way through the book Wynn-Williams observes
There's no pretense that Facebook is out for anything but ourselves. It's brazen. By this point I know I shouldn't be surprised but it still makes me recoil.
I don't think she's a third of the way through her seven years there at this point and knows they're irredeemable and yet she can't let go.
Let me pause and say that I'm hard on Wynn-Williams, but this is a very readable book (even if I did feel more depressed and anxious than usual while reading it).
Here's a WHAT?!? moment. After a diplomatic screwup with China (the one country Wynn-Williams refuses to have anything to do with, but can't entirely get away from)
...Mark [Zuckerberg] gets another chance to speak with [Chinese president] Xi. In Mandarin, he asks Xi if he'll do him the honor of naming his unborn son. Xi refuses.
πππ
But if you think this book is mostly about what an asshole Mark Zuckerberg is, rest assured she leans in to shedding light on Sheryl Sandberg's venality, hypocrisy, and creepiness.
Sheryl emails the leadership team from Davos breathlessly highlighting how terrorism is working to Facebook's advantage: "Terrorism means the conversation on privacy is 'basically dead' as policymakers are more concerned about intelligence/security." In other words, this is a moment when governments are more interested in surveillance than people's privacy. Which is good for Facebook's business.
And then Sandberg pressures Wynn-Williams to go to bed with her on the private jet. We don't know what going to bed entails. I, maybe naively, didn't assume it was sexual, but it was definitely a show of power. When Wynn-Williams refuses, her relationship with Sandberg is never the same.
Another Facebook executive who gets his moments in Wynn-Williams's memoir is Joel Kaplan who becomes her boss a couple few years in. After Wynn-Williams returns from maternity leave after the labor and delivery of her second child that required 35 blood transfusions and put her in a coma, Kaplan gives her a negative performance review. Of the period she was on maternity leave and still recovering/hemorrhaging. Kaplan wants to know where she's bleeding from. He also asks her how breastfeeding works. And now he's MAGA's guy at Facebook. Classic!
But back to Zuckerberg--he seems genuinely shocked (but still kind of blasΓ©) to learn that Facebook put Trump in office in 2016. Whereas Sandberg is ready to make lemonade
...once [Sandberg] grasped what Trump's campaign did, her immediate response was not horror but that it was brilliant and innovative and do you think we might have a hot at hiring Trump's guy Brad Parscale to come work at Facebook.
And after the election, heads of state become more gentle with Zuckerberg. No one wants Zuckerberg to use his power against them. Reading this book, I was reminded of the omnipotent kid from The Twilight Zone who becomes a total monster because everyone has to do what he says. (There are anecdotes about how everyone let Mark win at games, and how he accuses Wynn-Williams of cheating when she beats him.) I wondered if Zuckerberg was always that awful (good chance) or if it was power corrupting, as it likes to do.
At some point, Wynn-Williams seems to feel like she's in a golden birdcage. She's moved her family from DC to Silicon Valley. She joined Facebook before the IPO, so she has stocks--that she gets access to only if she stays. I'm semi-sympathetic, but I looked up what a director's salary is at Facebook, and per Glassdoor, it's half a million. https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Facebook-Director-Salaries-E40772_D_KO9,17.htm Being the primary earner in a family of five is surely expensive, but I'm guessing Wynn-Williams could have gotten another job. She literally met the leaders of most of the countries in the world. She is from NZ, and her husband the UK. If all her US contacts got burned, she'd still have options. Still, I understand feeling stuck; I really do.
And Kaplan again, or rather one of his lieutenants at a "diversity brown bag session"
"When will women focus on work and stop talking about diversity already?"
Then HR steps in, sharing the process for reporting, that Facebook takes complaints seriously, etc.
Most of the company is made up of white and Asian men who don't seem to have a problem with how things have been going. The entitlement in the Facebook offices flows as freely as the prosecco from the Prosecco Tap that's installed in one of the Facebook office kitchens.
Damn.
When confronted with their role in connecting the Charlottesville organizers and the other 200 hate groups Facebook platforms according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the executives are defensive.
It reminds me of the way a nationalist movement responds to criticism. Nationalism always begins with the claim that you're on the principled, moral righteous side of things.
Finally, when Wynn-Williams parts ways with the company, she has some inkling that her mission-driven plan was never going to work.
I had told myself I could do more on the inside than the outside, but realistically, being the grit in the machine isn't working.
That Wynn-Williams ever thought there was something worth fighting for at Facebook is what's surprising to me. I mean, I do enjoy Facebook and am sorry that it's past its heyday. I think the interactions there are better than on any other social media platform, but I've never held any delusion that it has an interest in being a public good.