Sarah Wynn-Williams

As someone who has worked with founders in the startup space for over a decade and a half, the megalomania, the lack of empathy, and the moral bankruptcy in Careless People all seemed familiar. But Sarah Wynn-Williams’s first person account is about arguably the biggest phenomenon that has hit culture in the last decade and a half – social media, and specifically, the biggest player in it – Meta (then Facebook). She worked at Facebook from 2011 until her termination in 2017, the time when Facebook went from infancy to a full-blown global power base.

The book is a summary of moral bankruptcy and ethical failings in the company on two counts – one, the internal culture and decision-making process, and the other – the recklessness and callousness that powers its growth-at-all-costs approach, impacting the lives of millions of people through the ways in which the platform is used by bad actors.

On the first count, toxic behaviour, rampant and blatant sexual harassment by her own boss Joel Kaplan as well as Sheryl Sandberg (who allegedly said “You should have got into the bed” from a chapter titled ‘Lean in and Lie back’), and injustice in general. On the second, everything from helping China in surveilling its own citizens (and lying about it to the US lawmakers) to making politicians addicted to advertising so they be influenced on policies, to the Trump election, to targeting teens when they’re depressed, to the subterfuge in Intenet.org, to the apathy in the Myanmar genocide. As the book’s subtitle says, power, greed, madness.

The book begins with a hilarious incident at the 2015 Summit of the Americas, one of her early attempts to get Zuck to interact with politicians, and then goes right back to the time she decided Facebook is where she wanted to work at. I am still figuring out if the early part of the first chapter (her encounter with a shark) is a metaphor – for swimming with sharks later, or being a survivor.

In a way, Careless People is also like a biography of Facebook itself- the kind of problems it faced in its early days – from poop emojis to ISIS beheadings to Kony and breastfeeding protests! There really was no playbook for creating policies for these things!

The book is full of anecdotes – from the early idealistic days to connect humanity to the cold, inhuman approach that one is now familiar with. Catching Hillary Clinton on a dance floor in Columbia, Sheryl un-walking a lot of the talk from Lean In when it came to her own employees, and lying about narrowly missing a plane crash, Zuck’s failed attempts at courting Xi (anything to get a handshake, Xi refusing Zuck’s request to name his unborn child), how one low-ranking official in TRAI unwittingly scuttled Facebook’s populist move to get Free Basics running in India by opting out of all emails from Facebook, Obama telling Zuck in a private meeting that Facebook is playing a destructive role globally and so on. And peppered with her own encounters with non-human organisms – sharks, wasps, (almost) Zika virus at its place of origin and so on.

Careless People reads more like a thriller and is very accessible. One can easily sense the author’s frustration as idealism gives away to rampant greed and exploitation inside and outside. She doesn’t make it easy for herself with the blind idealism bordering on naïveté, and a work ethic that includes replying to a mail while in labour. Several times I wondered why she didn’t just quit, but later in Careless People, we get to know her own challenges. It is quite a read, and I’d definitely recommend it.

Notes & Quotes from Careless People

1. Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face ~ John Updike
2. WEF has weaponised the concept of status envy to create a Hunger Games for the .001 per cent. (about Davos)
3. The spyware Onavo showed Zuck which apps to buy by giving him confidential usage data
4. Sheryl once explained the cycle of wealth to me as she saw it I was complaining that someone I really admired had retired from Facebook at a very young age. I couldn’t understand why they’d do that. What would they do instead that would be so interesting? She said matter-of-factly that they would probably follow the cycle of wealth she’d observed at Google and Facebook: exotic travel for a year or more before becoming bored of that, then transitioning to getting very fit or some other personal goal. After achieving that goal, buying a boat or some other extravagant hobby purchase, and then finally getting divorced or going through some other personal crisis. If they come back from that, maybe they attempt their own start-up or fund or, most likely, philanthropy.
5. Uber weaponizes their drivers and riders, creating strikes, protests, and transportation chaos, forcing authorities to the table. They’re sponsoring the football teams of the children of key Brazilian senators responsible for decisions that impact their business, insisting on having UBER plastered across their kids’ uniforms. They propose compiling opposition research on journalists.
6. Over the course of the ten-hour flight to Lima. Elliot patiently explains to Mark all the ways that Facebook basically handed the election to Donald Trump. It’s pretty fucking convincing and pretty fucking concerning. Facebook embedded staff in Trump’s campaign team in San Antonio for months, alongside Trump campaign programmers, ad copywriters, media buyers, network engineers, and data scientists. A Trump operative named Brad Parscale ran the operation together with the embedded Facebook staff, and he basically invented a new way for a political campaign to shitpost its way to the White House, targeting voters with misinformation, inflammatory posts, and fundraising messages. Boz, who led the ads team, described it as the “single best digital ad campaign I’ve ever seen from any advertiser. Period.”