Abnormal People
Introduction
At the start of Careless People, ex-Director of Public Policy Sarah Wynn-Williams relates how Mark Zuckerberg and the rest of the Facebook senior leadership team got into the kind of predicament usually associated with nerds in 1980s teen comedies. Zuckerberg and team are invited to a formal dinner, but the opening ceremony has a discomfiting number of semi-naked people at it; Zuckerberg is placed next to irrelevant relatives of the (hosting) Panamanian president, and Wynn-Williams’s attempts to switch position elsewhere are reverted twice by eagle-eyed staff; Zuckerberg is elaborately snubbed by the then Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper; when Zuckerberg decides that he should leave the event early, Wynn-Williams suggests that Zuckerberg escape all this embarrassment by running down a tunnel from which horses are emerging as part of another ceremony, panicking the animals and creating uproar. By choosing this as an opener, Wynn-Williams presumably means to contrast the sheer ridiculousness of that situation with the power, wealth, competence, and general worldliness usually attributed to Zuckerberg and his team, aiming to humble them. Look, she says: even those bestriding the world may occasionally stumble.
There are two problems with this approach. The first is that both the power and the ridiculousness can be true at the same time: they are not opposites, and the power generally persists, even after the stumble. Furthermore, chaos and embarrassment are far from unprecedented in senior leadership circles: more or less every biography of comparable figures contains similar stories. (One thinks of Napoleon being chased by a thousand hungry rabbits, Boris Yeltsin caught by agents attempting to drunkenly order pizza, or the founder of McAfee faking a heart attack to escape extradition. No wonder the greek myths are primarily about the sheer pettiness of the pantheon.) Most such cases - and there are plenty of them in Silicon Valley - do not make their way to public attention. The details here are new, but there is nothing fundamentally surprising about them.
More importantly, though, the second problem with this approach is that it provides neither diagnosis nor remedy: Zuckerberg may occasionally tread in horse excrement, but even warehouse-scale quantities of it will not substantially diminish his power. He is not, for example, George H. W. Bush, who could in theory be voted out on the basis of - for example - vomiting on a foreign leader. Instead, he has some very weak constraints based on continuing business success, in practice insufficient to provide much accountability. His envelope for action is sufficiently broad - one thinks of the ~$50bn spent on the Metaverse with little enough to show for it - that it is clear there is no serious opposition from the board to anything Zuckerberg does. (One genuine service the book does is to show us beyond any doubt that the board is not independent, and no particular counter to Zuckerberg’s desires can be expected from that quarter.)
If we accept the above, then the implicit argument of Wynn-Williams’s opening, which is that such scenes make these supposed titans more like us and thereby more questionable, is not successful. The author’s implicit argument is rendered more explicit by her framing towards the end of the opening section, where she calls the Facebook leadership team “a bunch of fourteen-year-olds who’ve been given superpowers and an ungodly amount of money”. Again, the author presumably means to denigrate Zuckerberg and the rest with those comparisons. But in this, she does the Facebook leadership team a great disservice: they are much more dangerous than that framing suggests, and not because they are older than fourteen. It is because they are on top of a system which magnifies their every act, concentrates and stabilises their wealth and power, and renders anyone without their levels of power little more than a exploitable resource, or a target - as the book shows us with innumerable concrete examples.
Ultimately, this is the same mistaken framing as Triumph of the Nerds made in the mid 1990s. The core idea is that “computer people” are inherently unlikely holders and wielders of power, and that in some sense their empires are accidental. This is, of course, wrong, and even less true for Zuckerberg than for Gates, Jobs, Bezos, et cetera, all of whom have been shrewd and highly intentional leaders in business with good measures of ruthlessness and ability, in parallel with luck. In the 1990s, it was possible to write convincingly about these supposedly ephemeral empires with something akin to the disdain of the jock for the nerd; the era before pervasive computing, the era when you could still draw a sharp line between ordinary life and the livestream. In the 2020s, the computer follows you everywhere, and those critics seem at best like a kind of journalistic John Henry in denial. This reader has sympathy with what Wynn-Williams is trying to do, though, even if the framing is off. Her journey from enchantment to its opposite is - with one difficulty - emotionally convincing, and framed in an engaging, even sometimes salacious narrative. It is very readable, and well designed to attract and retain attention.
Unfortunately, that one difficulty is important - not just to our understanding of the book, but also how we might understand corporations like Facebook, the mostly unconstrained havoc they wreak on the world, and how they might be controlled for a better society. That difficulty is the author’s deficient understanding of power, and particularly the interplay between systems and personalities. Her book is almost all personalities, and is likely to be all the more commercially successful for it; but the problems and the solutions come from systems, and systems are largely absent from her account.
The beginning
How the author begins her journey at Facebook is atypical, and in some sense a demonstration of how her wilful pursuit of her own goals comes occasionally at her own expense. When she first encountered Facebook in 2009, she writes that she had an epiphany about how crucial it was going to be in the future, and realised that Facebook was going to be so important, it was going to need someone to help it navigate the interface with government and policy. In this, Wynn-Williams is entirely correct, and prescient. However, she brings a model of how that will work from her previous work experience, and that model is entirely incorrect.
Probably neither of these things are surprising; her previously public-service oriented job at the United Nations came from a conviction that regulation and democratic compromise were absolutely foundational to how society should work, whether it be through GMO regulations, to quote an example from her work history, or telecoms regulation, which Facebook falls foul of on numerous occasions. She might seem an unlikely convert to the idea that the private sector is the best way to pursue the common good. But as far as this reader can tell, her conviction is real, and her single-minded pursuit of it very familiar to those of us who have experience watching tech companies from the inside. However, with no disrespect intended, her idea that she can work with Facebook in general, and Zuckerberg in particular, to facilitate the common weal requires an almost superhuman ability to ignore the obvious.
We get a feeling for Wynn-William’s self-belief fairly early on, when she relates a shocking tale about nearly being killed in a shark attack, and - spoiler alert - having to convince her family that she is actually seriously ill afterwards in order to avoid dying of sepsis. A telling part of the post-recovery period is when her mother, leaning over her as she surfaces from a coma in ICU, asserts that she’s lucky that the doctors saved her life; Wynn-Williams responds by writing in underlined capitals I SAVED MYSELF on proffered paper, since the ventilator she is connected to means she cannot speak. (It is a fascinating and disturbing vignette, quite different in tone to the rest of the book, and makes one wonder in admiration if she might have another, more personal memoir in a drawer or cloud drive somewhere.) Regardless, the vignette succeeds in making the point that Wynn-Williams has almost pathological levels of drive and ability to tolerate suffering. This will turn out to be well suited for her environment later on. But the other thing it implies is that she needs these qualities of persistence and creativity because people do not listen to Wynn-Williams, even when she is saying very obvious and true things. That, unfortunately, is much less suitable for her environment.
She describes a kind of mania that settles over her (“I decide I will stop at nothing to be part of it. […] I’m desperate to be part of it. I can’t remember ever wanting anything more.”) as she tries for many months to persuade Facebook to hire her as a policy person of some kind, knocking on every door she can find. Well-connected journalist Ed Luce facilitates the series of conversations that lead to her eventual hire. Not without some struggles; one in particular involving Wynn-Williams’ sister surviving the Christchurch earthquake in early 2011, a traumatic experience that plays into her pitch for the policy role:
“I know I have to pitch quickly. But where I’d previously struggled to articulate the power I saw in Facebook, now it flows, raw and personal. Almost too personal. I burn with embarrassment when my voice cracks as I describe how I searched for my sister [online].”
Her first boss is not fully convinced that the job - Manager of Global Public Policy - should in fact exist, and Zuckerberg himself is initially ambiguous about whether or not he wants to partake in this work. But ultimately, she prevails.
Wynn-Williams notes early on that her most successful lines of persuasion are based around threats to business growth, rather than what she had initially hoped for:
“I know what I want this job to be. It’s clear that in these next few years, Facebook and governments all over the world are going to be figuring out the rules of the road for these giant, globe-spanning internet companies. What they set in place will determine how social media is used for decades to come. It will affect elections, privacy, free speech, taxes, and so much else. I want to be part of that. The debating, the shaping, the deciding.”
As a harbinger of what is to come, Wynn-Williams’ early efforts to steer things in this direction, a proposal to set up a global council of external experts parallel to those created by, for example, Goldman Sachs, is rejected within days.
At this stage, Wynn-Williams is less directly close to Zuckerberg than she will end up being, and more peripheral to the core leadership team generally. She starts off in Sheryl Sandberg’s org. At this stage, Sandberg had not achieved the world-wide fame she has today, but was well-known amongst elites: she had already had a glittering career, with several marks of high achievement in academia (Harvard), government (the Clinton Treasury Department), and business (Google), so it was not completely inevitable she would look for something larger. However, Sandberg’s departure from Google was seen internally as in line with both her ambition and her capabilities, and did much to copper-fasten Google’s suspicion that Facebook was a serious competitive threat - leading to the ill-fated G+.
Sandberg’s character is one of the more serious casualties of the book’s blast radius. Conversely, Zuckerberg’s character was broadly known since at least 2010, when The Social Network was released, and was known in smaller circles for some years prior to that. When the book provides evidence that he is self-interested, insecure, believes cultivated fine dining is the most important thing in the world, and possesses a strange combination of naivety and ruthlessness, we are not particularly surprised. (We are surprised, in context, about his political ambitions. Post-2016, when the political power of Facebook becomes clear, Wynn-Williams documents how Zuckerberg became obsessed with how to leverage that power that into other forms - in particular, running for president, which Wynn-Williams does her best to torpedo. She may in fact be partially responsible for saving us from President Zuck in 2020, even if Zuckerberg himself was partially responsible for not saving us from President Trump.) But one’s moral expectations of Zuckerberg are not high, and he has the good grace to consistently meet them.
Sandberg, however, was widely hailed as “the adult in the room” upon joining Facebook, was - initially at least - seen by insiders as the conscience of Facebook, helping to steer some path of compromise between business and right action, and stabilising what was, after all, a multi-thousand person company run by a twenty-something year old. There are of course gender-based expectations at work here, but it’s not incorrect to point out that Zuckerberg was younger, narrower in experience, and simply less mature than Sandberg, while Sandberg was already well known and broadly respected, and had a considerable reputation for emotional intelligence, excellent organisational and managerial skills, and business acumen. If nothing else, Sandberg’s time in government would create a legitimate expectation of the awareness of the idea of public goods.
But the Sandberg we see here is quite far removed from that image. Most of the other reviews will front-and-centre Sandberg’s apparent attempts - successful it seems, in at least some cases - to manipulate or otherwise emotionally blackmail her staff and associates into what must be assumed in context to be sexual relations. The behaviour is obviously and clearly unacceptable on a number of levels; again if nothing else, in such power relations, consent can neither be freely given nor safely assumed. But we have come to expect no negative consequences for Sandberg for these actions, and in due course, none follow.
Indeed, though the exercise of reading the book multiple times is like being repeatedly and sickeningly confronted by the kind of disturbing videos Facebook itself propagates, there is some value to repeated readings: one thing that emerges is how Sandberg’s behaviour is a detailed illustration of the worst attributes of leadership. The examples are endless. In Sandberg’s direct team, for example, Wynn-Williams describes a kind of clichéd and cliquey, in-group-membership-obsessed relationship between Sandberg and her reports: the kind of group cohesion familiar to fans of Mean Girls. Her team are required to sit in the front row and obsequiously praise her after every public event. Wynn-Williams rebels and reflects that “[a]utonomy disturbs a certain kind of powerful person, and Sheryl has never accepted independence among her advisers”. Despite Sandberg partially excluding Wynn-Williams as a consequence, it later emerges at an event that “some of [Sandberg’s] closest advisers start a WhatsApp group while sitting in the front row to complain about how bored they are and include [Wynn-Williams].” They proceed to use the group chat to insult and demean their boss - in some cases, their sexual and emotional support partner. It seems that the supplicants see how they are being treated as “little dolls”, and are willingly loyal in public in return for Sandberg’s largesse - a story about Sandberg financing a $13,000 lingerie set is a particularly notable example - but rare indeed is the slave who does not come to hate the slave-owner, even if they are well treated in their servitude.
There are many other occasions on which Sandberg’s private actions can be contrasted with her public stances. Her attitude to China - which like Zuckerberg’s, is one of line-toeing in public, matched with eager greed and facilitation of repression in private. (The book provides much of value in documenting Facebook’s actions in detail here.) Her complicity in not staffing the trust and safety teams adequately to prevent the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar. Her authorising the anti-semitic smearing of George Soros and having a subordinate resign once discovered - despite her Jewish identity being ostensibly important to her. In other words, her embrace of Facebook’s growth at literally any ethical cost, the consequences of which far overshadow any distaste we might feel at clique-ridden behaviour.
One example that obtruded over successive readings is precisely an issue you would expect the “unofficial self-appointed world dean of women” to be solid on - as Sandberg was described by the ex-VP of communications, Elliot Schrage. Unfortunately, it turns out that pregnancy, childbirth, and child-raising are all issues on which it turns out Sandberg has unquestionably lagging, not leading, opinions. Perhaps we might expect this, given what she has sacrificed to thrive in high-level environments, or even given the ostensible message of her writings on the topic, which is that women should not unnecessarily forswear ambition in service of family. But the toll on Sandberg’s own staff is considerable. Wynn-Williams relates the moment when her waters break during a meeting, she rushes to the hospital, the birth is beginning and Sandberg is “about to unexpectedly go into a meeting with the president of Brazil at Davos and [wants] talking points. I’m in the delivery room, my feet in stirrups, in labour. I put down my phone and reach for my laptop. I start drafting.” Her husband asks in astonishment what she’s doing, and when Wynn-Williams responds that she is getting Sheryl some talking points, he first begs Wynn-Williams to stop, and then turns to her doctor, who gently closes her laptop and says the manifestly true words, “It’s a very special thing to give birth to your first child. I don’t think you should be working through it. Sheryl will understand.” But Wynn-Williams has the unanswerable rejoinder: “She won’t,” I say. “Please let me push Send.” And so she does, between contractions: pressing send out into the world.
Ever compromised as the memory of her first birth will be, worse yet is to come: her “first performance review after maternity leave is problematic. While it’s positive, the only negative feedback relates to my baby. The fact that people can hear her in the background on calls”. It turns out that children shouldn’t even be heard, never mind seen.
Wynn-Williams does everything she can to put together a local support network while living thousands of miles away from the rest of her family, but things comes to a head when Sandberg pulls her aside:
“Marne told me about your childcare situation,” she says breezily. I’m mortified this is something that has been discussed with the COO. […] “Hire a nanny,” she instructs. “Be smart and hire a Filipina nanny.” She mistakes my look of horror for scepticism. “Sarah, I’m telling you, they’re English speaking, sunny disposition, and service orientated.” Marne echoes this sentiment. Both have at least one Filipina nanny in their retinue of staff.”
Plenty of people hire nannies, and regardless of the essentialist characterisations of the nanny’s behaviour, it can work. However, hiring the nanny turns out to have a negative consequence when said nanny is accidentally trapped outside the apartment one day, and the fire department has to be called to break in, an event which has the misfortune to happen while Wynn-Williams is working in Mexico with other senior leadership team members. Unavoidably, they hear her panicked phone calls, and her next performance review contains the strong recommendation that she not mix personal problems and business. Wynn-Williams is flabbergasted: ‘“My baby was trapped by herself and the fire department was called. We didn’t know if something terrible had happened.” Her boss replies,
“That’s not the point. These are personal issues. I’m trying to help. To give you honest feedback. When you’re with the most senior members on the team, Mark, Elliot, Javi, you need to be professional and focused on them.”’
Or as Wynn-Williams further elaborates,
"The expectation at Facebook is that mothering is invisible, and the more skilled you are, the more invisible it is. Months later when the baby’s rushed to the hospital in an ambulance, I don’t mention it at the office for days. Then I only mention it in passing, assuring Marne that it won’t affect my work in any way. This “don’t mention the children” ethos is of course the entire opposite of the cheery slogans at Facebook to “bring your authentic self to work.”’
Sandberg writes in Lean In of going home to her children at 5:30pm, and perhaps she does, but Careless People portrays different expectations of her staff - so either Wynn-Williams is lying, Sandberg is lying, or Sandberg is a bully with one rule for the female boss and another for the female staff. Regardless, Wynn-Williams writes that Sandberg’s staff’s “real secret behind maintaining [their] work-life balance, mothering as if they don’t have children: [is] undergirded by their multimillion-dollar paychecks”.
All in all, this is not notable because a senior leader expressed an opinion unfavourable to maternal obligations - such can be found in many country clubs or C-suite equivalents throughout the world. Neither is it notable that this senior leader was a woman with children herself - such behaviour is also not unknown, as so-called Queen Bee syndrome would attest. What is notable is the world-historical hypocrisy of staking your public reputation on support for women, and doing precisely the opposite in private. In this, alas, Sandberg is in bad company - that of the rest of the management team.
The middle
Regardless of how she is treated, however, it is curious that Wynn-William’s sense of duty and obligation, misdirected or otherwise, continues to motivate her to achieve Facebook’s goals. They are often at odds with her feelings, at least as described in the book. The conflict is occasionally acute, since her job places her at the centre of many of the most controversial and difficult moments in the history of Facebook. In particular, it is during the period that the company plateaus at roughly a billion users and realises that the best prospect for escaping that is to expand internationally - or, as she believes the leadership team characterises it, “getting past foreign regulators and opening up markets.” If she refuses this characterisation, I don’t see it in the book, and it is her job to get past those regulators, which she manifestly achieved. In her narrative she is clearly working hard to achieve the best outcome for Facebook, like any dutiful employee.
Many of those moments will already be familiar to those who have been following the tech industry. The Myanmar genocide, Cambridge Analytica, the serving of advertising to suicidal teenagers in particular and the harm done by Instagram to young women in general, and supporting the Chinese government in de-platforming and in some cases targeting dissidents all feature here. This strikes one as more a list of crimes than of controversies. But part of the problem that both Careless People and our current moment suffer from is that the crimes are substantial, but there are so many of them, and the precise responsibility unclear, that the reader is sometimes left with a string of vignettes rather than a more organised diagnosis. We might not legitimately expect more from a memoir, yet as the reader pages through terrible incident after terrible incident, we often feel like we’re in a detective novel where the murder has been committed and it emerges that the authorities may never arrive.
In this context, it feels both correct and somewhat of a miss for Wynn-Williams to spend time arguing that a number of the crimes are sins of omission rather than commission. Allowing questions of business priorities, operational expenditure, or similar corporate concerns to decide these matters might well be a sin of omission in some interpretations, but people still died as a result. Facebook resolutely refuses to provide adequate due diligence, since any effort to do so adds friction to scaling, but it turns out that a certain amount of friction is actually useful. We might consider the example of beheading videos as an example of how Facebook behaved in different ways when it came to material celebrating death; when a Mexican beheading video attracted sufficient attention, including condemnation by David Cameron, British Prime Minister of the time, it was removed, but it is known that when beheading videos were at their peak popularity, and the US government was attempting to suppress their spread, Facebook refused to remove them and stated that the only way to prevent their appearance was for the US government to buy ads that would be displayed at a higher priority than the videos. Such an approach is neither a decision to explicitly platform beheading, nor a decision to explicitly profit from it, but the approach taken by Facebook again and again skirts the line between lawbreaking malignancy and criminal negligence.
Perhaps the clearest example of this is the Rohingya genocide, an ethnic cleansing in Myanmar, during which approximately 25-40 thousand Muslims were killed. Wynn-Williams vividly describes one of her first assignments, where the leadership team reacts to the the fact that “the military junta that runs Myanmar blocks Facebook. We have no idea why. […] Why block us now?” Wynn-Williams eventually works out that she should go there to answer the question, after one of those silences that you should never let descend descends over a high-level meeting. It’s quite intimidating; not only is there a military dictatorship, but much of the Western infrastructure of communications, travel, and commerce either only partially exists or exists in ways that she finds hard to access. But in partial compensation for this, Wynn-Williams has a fine eye for the dictator-chic she encounters while there:
“I’m sent to meet […] men in different locations—some spartan, some that look like bunkers, some that are like Bond villains’ lairs, with too much carpet and portraits of generals whose frames are encrusted with sparkling rubies and garnets. I’m too nervous to ask if they’re real. Many of the men are in traditional dress. Others are in full military uniforms adorned with medals. All of them act like they’re used to being obeyed and rapport is not part of their job description. The raw power they project is clear and not obfuscated in the way you often get with officials around the world.”
The reader is not surprised when she manages to prevail in persuading the junta to unblock Facebook, finding creative ways around the restrictions, and also meets Aung San Suu Kyi, Nobel Peace Prize winner. All while pregnant, which she has not told her boss.
Myanmar is a special case for Facebook and arguably for Internet adoption generally, because due to how the communications infrastructure rolled out there, the country is effectively mobile first, and effectively skips the desktop and wired era entirely. Moreover, because the connectivity is poor generally - meaning downloading sizeable apps is hard - and Facebook happens to occasionally come pre-loaded on phones, Facebook has become something of the default home page for the country. But this is despite a huge number of problems: Facebook itself has not been translated into Burmese, so a subset of the interface either doesn’t work, or shows up with corrupted characters. (Critically, this includes both the community publication policies and the problematic content reporting button.) Facebook itself can’t be downloaded in country, so most of the access is via unofficial third-party apps, installed at mobile shops or via friends, with every negative implication for hacking you can think of. Problematic posts can’t be reported, and as Wynn-Williams explains,
“[...]in the few cases [an incident reporter] managed to get a report through, no one took action. They clicked on a button and nothing happened. It also explains why the content team confidently assured me throughout 2014 that users in Myanmar weren’t filing reports about questionable content. Of course they weren’t filing reports. Of course we took no action. Our users weren’t using apps capable of any of that.”
Wynn-Williams establishes that translation into Burmese was technically possible, and doable quite quickly, but the staffing had not been prioritised. Furthermore, she uncovers evidence suggesting that of the two contractors in Dublin assigned to content moderation, one of them may be anti-Muslim, or at least systematically takes moderation decisions consistent with this. It seems inevitable that something terrible would happen as a result, and indeed, it does, with viral anti-Muslim Facebook posts triggering riots, targeted reprisals, and hundreds of thousands of people fleeing the country while tens of thousands died in the ensuing violence and chaos. During all of this, Facebook was operating completely normally, and the newsfeed was operating as designed: doing its job of showing the content attracting the most engagement. It turns out that what A Clockwork Orange got wrong was that having your eyes clamped open while being force-shown violent videos would be for private profit, rather than government-initiated aversion therapy.
The end
When it comes, the end is as mundane and petty as you would expect given the above. Joel Kaplan, her final boss, is a partisan Republican bruiser through and through, whose most notable public act towards the end of the book is to gleefully support Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court. His private acts, according to Wynn-Williams, are precisely in line with that, and include her sexual harassment, and it is her complaint about this that eventually results in her termination. Wynn-Williams herself writes that she knew HR would just protect Joel - we might wonder at this point if is there any department or vocation more fundamentally lost than Human Resources - and so she goes to her bosses boss, Elliot. He is unsupportive, as we expect.
What is it that Kaplan does? Amongst other things, he asks her to explain breastfeeding to him with a straight face, critiques her responsiveness during a period of maternal leave (in which she is in a coma, leading to one of the best rejoinders in the book), kite-flies a back-room deal about the investigation against him that he later reneges on, demotes Wynn-Williams by trimming her scope and making her work on policy areas she doesn’t want to, issues flat-out lies about ad targeting as official press releases, drops a napkin in front of her expecting her to kneel down and pick it up for him (crawling on hands and knees could have no more clichéd symbolism), and calls her “sultry” in front of the rest of his team at an event before grinding against her on the post event dance floor. The reader will be unsurprised to learn that an internal investigation exonerates Kaplan, and Wynn-Williams is fired shortly thereafter in a perfunctory manner.
The serious question to be asked though, is what precisely Wynn-Williams thought she was doing? Her original conviction about the change that’s coming, and how the interface between government and Facebook needs to be built, is well-founded. Neither her determination nor her energy can be questioned. Though Facebook themselves have obviously done all they can to denigrate Wynn-Williams’s motivations, I believe that she entered with good intentions and was in some sense attempting to do the right thing in an environment not particularly interested in achieving those ends.
Yet though we should not make the mistake of retroactively applying our knowledge of the future to the past, the puzzle of the questions above remain. It’s clear that Wynn-Williams is new to the sector and its expectations. She writes about equity compensation in a way which is strange if you’ve encountered it before - but maybe she hasn’t, coming from government - and is also surprised to encounter the kind of intense focus on the job to the exclusion of friends, hobbies, families, etc., which are common at the highest levels in both those environments. Arguably, Wynn-William’s boss’s straightforward rejection of any elevated meaning to her job is at least more honest than the totalising mission of many of Facebooks’ contemporaries:
“There is no grand ideology here. No theory about what Facebook should be in the world. The company is just responding to stuff as it happens. We’re managers, not world-builders. Marne just wants to get through her inbox, not create a new global constitution.”
Wynn-Williams’s inexperience might suggest an adjustment period as her model of the situation was compared with the reality and adjusted. But that would be months, or a year at most. Instead, we are left with the puzzle of how long she stayed there - seven years - and what she achieved, despite being manifestly misaligned with leadership. Though the book seems to be written as if Wynn-Williams understands herself as someone fighting for some kind of higher purpose, it might be more accurate to think of her as a kind of highly skilled policy technician - perhaps a kind of Samantha Power figure, as opposed to someone who connects policy details to broader systems. Regardless, Wynn-Williams has obvious self-interest in describing her acts as generally competent, but she is honest, detailed, and vulnerable enough about both her successes and her failures that the memoir cannot be represented as the kind of revenge fiction that Facebook has attempted to characterise it as. Leaving aside everything else, the occasional crazy details she surfaces in the text have the texture of lived experience - her tale of how the junta in Myanmar came to understand that she was in fact from Facebook contains an official gently touching her face to make sure she was real - and there is enough of this kind of thing that the casual reader would be convinced that what is written here is authentic.
Indeed, the book’s engagement with what is genuine and what is not is perhaps the most sustained underlying theme: a kind of restless search for authenticity underpins the entire book. Wynn-Williams spends time searching for authenticity in all the wrong places, and does not find it. But she keeps looking long past the moment she must have known she would never find it.
For those of us in Ireland, the book also makes less than completely comfortable reading, since apart from confirming the broadly unremarkable industrial policy that allows important companies to receive special treatment of various kinds, ex-Taoiseach Enda Kenny himself is revealed as playing just as much of a game as the rest of them when he discusses ways for Facebook to avoid Irish taxation with Sandberg. Wynn-Williams wonders, “is this what it looks like when a company conspires with a government to avoid paying taxes?” and states that this kind of “backroom deal” just “doesn’t feel right”, even though she acknowledges that Kenny is trying, in some sense, to do the right thing for his country. The Irish Data Protection Commission also comes in for some disinterested criticism, when at one stage, Kenny asks Facebook for support in moving the locus of enforcement to Ireland, fulfilling the goal of letting Facebook prosper because of deliberately insufficient oversight. The DPC has long been understood to be a joke in Irish tech circles, so it is useful to have third-party confirmation of this.
Again and again Wynn-Williams finds, instead of a “feeling of idealism”, the realisation (in this case at Davos) “there’s no pretense that Facebook is out for anything but ourselves. It’s brazen.” Another example is probably the moment when the leadership team is talking about visiting the only country for which there is an open arrest warrant for Facebook officials - Korea. It emerges that leadership decide that someone should go there in order to test the waters for Mark and the others: in other words, that someone should be prepared to go to jail for Facebook.
Eventually, as Wynn-Williams writes, “It’s breathtaking to me, how casually leadership speaks of employees being jailed. […] Everyone starts calling this a ‘mitigation strategy’—even though the mitigation in this case is to find a “body” to be arrested.” Another one of those pregnant silences falls, and it suddenly seems like Wynn-Williams is going to be the body: “Somehow, it didn’t seem like I had a say in the matter. This was my job. I started to prepare. It took [my husband] to point out, no, you have a seven-month-old baby at home. Doing jail time in a foreign country is not a reasonable ask from your bosses.”
Finally, the moment of self-realisation:
"I have this thing, which sometimes I think is related to being an eldest daughter, that someone has to take responsibility and do the hard thing and I guess that’s going to be me. […] It’s an uncomfortable realization of how little they care, these people I’m with for sixty, seventy, eighty hours a week. Facebook’s leaders aren’t the people I hoped they were. And in retrospect, I should have thought a lot harder about this fact than I did. But for the first time, I think maybe this place shouldn’t be my home, not forever.”
The only surprising element of this is that Wynn-Williams ever thought about this as her home, and could bring herself to use such comforting language about the cold house Mark Zuckerberg built.
The fallout
Assessing the ultimate impact of the book is of course a hazardous undertaking. Leaving aside whatever will happen to her professionally afterwards - life is notoriously hard for whistle-blowers, and many of them struggle to ever work again - I am deeply sympathetic to Wynn-William’s project, and her approach. If no other argument resonates about the value of this book, even supporters and shareholders of Zuckerberg and Facebook benefit from the increased transparency she brought to their decision-making, their instincts, and their vision of the future. As a tell-all salacious memoir it also delivers, though perhaps it is Sandberg who suffers the most here, since the distance between her public persona and private behaviour is greater, especially given that she was seen within Facebook as providing something of a moral compass.
In some sense the central success of the book is that it is a very readable, often humorous and entertaining insight into the lives of the rich and famous in a way we don’t often see directly. Many readers will leave the book shocked by the behaviour of the protagonists, and if it helps to turn a few of those readers against those protagonists, perhaps there will be some longer-lasting policy-making outcome. Finally, as well as noting Wynn-William’s professional courage in writing this, we should also acknowledge that she nearly dies multiple times in the course of the book, suffers multiple related and unrelated severely traumatic events, and yet (in this reader’s case anyway) she succeeds in retaining the sympathy of the reader, and never portrays herself merely a victim of careless villains. One can hope for action based on outrage, and the book will probably have as much chance of intensifying anger as the Facebook newsfeed does.
But as well as successes, we should discuss its failings. They are two: inadequate diagnosis, and absent remedy. Diagnosis in Careless People is generally a question of personalities: Wynn-Williams has some rare moments of rhetorical power when she spends time excoriating the senior leaders for their Myanmar response (amongst other things):
“None of the senior leaders—Elliot or Sheryl or Mark—thought about this enough to put in place the kinds of systems we’d need, in Myanmar or other countries. They apparently didn’t care. These were sins of omission. It wasn’t the things they did; it was the things they didn’t do.”
It seems clear that there is a perfectly plausible parallel universe where more money and effort was spent on doing things properly, and perhaps that Facebook-prime grew more slowly or plateaued at 2.8 billion users rather than 3, but it was possible for it still to exist and prosper and make plenty of money without the costs it imposed.
Yet Wynn-Williams does not ask the questions that lead up to the situation she is complaining about. Why is social media not regulated more strenuously? How is it that Zuckerberg can be in this situation of essentially unconstrained power? How were he and Sandberg allowed to do everything they did, and suffer no meaningful consequences? How could we, even at this late stage, begin to take back some of this power, and use it for positive ends rather than individual enrichment, or the presidential campaigns of the worst people in the world?
The book is mostly silent on this, and that silence goes in hand with its strangely naive attitude towards systems of power. For example, at this present moment in the United States, Zuckerberg is arguably accountable to no-one except President Trump, and while that accountability is partially based on what we might term economics, it is also based on the inherent unpredictability of a regime which can arbitrarily change the basis on which your company exists, as well as the state exercise of gradations of violence. Wynn-Williams is outraged at Zuckerberg’s transformation into a fascist apologist, mentions the dual class voting structure, but does not question his right to sit on top of the company in the way that he does. Towards the end of the book, she is sickened by what’s happened:
“Now I’m consumed by the worst of it. The grief and sorrow of it. How Facebook is helping some of the worst people in the world do terrible things. How it’s an astonishingly effective machine to turn people against each other. And monitor people at a scale that was never possible before. And manipulate them. It’s an incredibly valuable tool for the most autocratic, oppressive regimes, because it gives them exactly what those regimes need: direct access into what people are saying from the top to bottom of society.”
But in this view of the world, it’s a matter of individual choices made badly:
“At every juncture, there was an opportunity to make different choices; China, Myanmar, elections, hate speech, vulnerable teens. They could’ve made it right again. A different path was possible. And in the long term, it would’ve been in their own self-interest too.”
Yet we could equally ask: what led them to those decisions? Why is long-term self-interest not of concern? Are we simply to assume wickedness on the part of Zuckerberg and Sandberg prior to their choices - that they were merely waiting for an opportunity to do the most damage they could in return for the most profit they could? Or is there something about a sufficiently large system of power which creates a series of ever more corrupting choices? And if that is true, how could we both help people to escape that corruption should they so choose, but more importantly enforce anti-corruptive processes? There is a rich substrate of writing and policy practice on answering such questions, and it is both a pity and surprising that on the topic of remedies for these problems, an ex-UN official seems to be without ideas as to how to organise and control actions towards the common good. The answer must at least partially be government and law, but perhaps Wynn-Williams has absorbed a little too much of the Valley distaste for such solutions, or perhaps she genuinely can’t see any way out of our current semi-kleptocratic oligarchy. We can still appreciate the evidence book she has accumulated, but ultimately someone needs to be charged with crimes.
Careless People takes its title from a passage in The Great Gatsby:
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
It is a fine title, and Gatsby certainly touches on relevant themes of decadence and decay. But in deference to Zuckerberg’s recent attachment to the culture of Imperial Rome, “commissioning sculptures of his wife ‘in the Roman tradition’” and wearing T-shirts altering the phrase Aut Caesar Aut Nihil - either Caesar or nothing - to his own name, we might instead consider Bluesky’s CEO Jay Graber’s response at a recent SXSW. She wore a T-shirt emblazoned with Mundus sine Caesaribus: world without Caesars. Wynn-Williams’s book provides us with more evidence - as if we needed it - of what a world determined by Caesars looks like, and why we should not allow ourselves to be borne back into such a past.
Alan Craige has worked in the technology sector in the US and in Ireland.
