In a review of Aaron Sorkin’s 2010 film The Social Network, the author Zadie Smith confessed she was baffled by Facebook’s reason for being. “The striking thing about the real Zuckerberg, in video and in print,” she wrote in The New York Review of Books, “is the relative banality of his ideas concerning the ‘Why’ of Facebook. He uses the word ‘connect’ as believers use the word ‘Jesus,’ as if it were sacred in and of itself.”
Oddly, that same banality haunts the pages of Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism, Sarah Wynn-Williams’s otherwise explosive account of her seven years as head of global policy at the social media giant now officially known as Meta. Not that her story is boring. It’s a briskly told, darkly funny, horrifying memoir that will satisfy any reader who enjoys the gory details of elite misbehavior. And it has certainly played a valuable role in exposing Meta’s secrets at a time when the company faces a trial for shielding its monopoly and a Senate investigation into other alleged misdeeds.
As a witness, Wynn-Williams is refreshingly unabashed. She was fired from the company in 2017 (after accusing Joel Kaplan, who is now head of global affairs, of sexual harassment) and has since embraced her role as beleaguered whistleblower. In March, she told members of the Senate Judiciary Committee what she also tells her readers: that Facebook’s secret business in China was more sinister than anyone realized and that damaging children’s mental health was part of its growth strategy. What she never fully explains is why she joined such a ruthless company in the first place.
“It was idealism that originally led me to Facebook,” she writes in the first chapter. After graduating from law school with a passion for human rights and environmental issues, she began her career as a diplomat, representing New Zealand at the United Nations and, later, in Washington D.C. It was there, in 2009, that she was “overcome” by what she describes as “a Facebook fever,” a “fascination” that “evolved into an unshakeable belief that Facebook was going to change the world.” How? She never specifies, but she pitches her novel diplomatic and legal skills to the company, arguing she can help ensure its rapid global expansion. “I was in awe,” she writes, “of its ineffable potential.” Potential for what? It’s never made clear. Like Zuckerberg with “connection,” she uses this language—“idealism,” “change the world,” “ineffable potential”—as if it were sacred and self-evident, and not college-essay boilerplate.
Apart from the usual boosterist spin that credits Facebook for the Arab Spring and mobile payment technologies, the most compelling use case for the platform is disaster response, as Wynn-Williams discovers in the wake of a major earthquake in her hometown of Christchurch. But even back then, it was clear enough that humanitarianism wasn’t Facebook’s primary focus. It was growth—clicks and eyeballs meant more ads and thus more revenue. To be fair, we Millennials were especially easy targets when it came to Silicon Valley’s declarations of benevolence. Even so, her description of her own faith in the company (couched in a breathless present tense) can sound disturbingly similar to the marketing copy one might find on a McKinsey recruitment brochure:
This is so basic, but it’s nice working with people who are smart. And the work feels important. Like Facebook is a force for good in the world. It’s a mission-focused company, and I share that sense of mission. I feel so lucky to be part of helping Facebook make the world more open and connected.
Maybe I’m expecting too much from a whistleblower’s memoir, whose purpose is to raise awareness of wrongdoing and push for change. In that respect, Wynn-Williams has succeeded admirably: Careless People is a best-seller, and Meta’s panicky, vengeful response has only helped to drive sales. It’s also a genuinely entertaining read, a bit like hearing a gossipy friend boast about her cool job while also slagging off her bosses—in this case, “Mark and Sheryl” (that is, Sheryl Sandberg, the former COO).
As director of global policy, Wynn-Williams’s task was to steer a fundamentally adolescent company through the storm of geopolitics:
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. I imagine the kinds of arguments we used to have at the UN. We’ll be sitting down with governments to puzzle out what’s best, the trade-offs, the competing interests, sharing the spoils, all of it. We need to get this right, for the hundreds of millions who are sure to be using these platforms every day, for years to come.
They got it terribly wrong, of course, and Wynn-Williams is at her best when explaining how that happened. A big part of the problem was that Zuckerberg and Sandberg simply did not take seriously the consequences of Facebook’s growth; they were too focused on themselves.
For the reader, this is the fun part. We get to watch as Wynn-Williams switches out Mark’s name card at a gathering of heads of state to secure him a better seat. We see her thrust a copy of Lean In into the hands of Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, so that its author Sheryl can secure a photo op and raise her own profile. These scenes are sharply written, capturing Veep-like levels of cravenness, ignorance, and hubris. Mark prepares for a meeting with the president of South Korea by showing off his repertoire of “fake gangsta handshakes.” Sheryl develops the alarming habit of buying expensive lingerie for her young female subordinates and urging them to nap with her. The comedy, as well as the tragedy, lies in the fact that these are the people “inventing how the company would deal with governments,” while Wynn-Williams indulges their relentless narcissism and finagles them “pull-asides” at Davos. The only true hero in this story is Angela Merkel, who snubs them.
Facebook’s moral drift eventually leads to the company’s dark turn toward political advertising. “The idea is, if politicians depend on Facebook to win elections, they’ll be less likely to do anything that’ll harm Facebook,” Wynn-Williams writes of her former employer’s catastrophically amoral calculus. The chief promoter of this nefarious use of the platform—which involves tolerating disinformation, “juicing” the algorithm to curry favor with various autocrats, and censoring dissidents—was Joel Kaplan, Sandberg’s Republican ex-boyfriend. A Bush administration alum, Kaplan comes across as dangerously toxic, both in his attitude toward women and in his cavalier approach to Facebook’s role in global affairs. “I find this all repugnant,” Wynn-Williams says of the revenue plan that helped to elect Donald Trump and Rodrigo Duterte, the Filipino strongman awaiting trial at the Hague. “I feel alienated from this new regime from the outset.”
Facebook’s courting of China is especially distasteful to her, and for good reason: it was extremely cynical and treacherous. Disguising its work from Congress, Facebook pitched itself to Beijing as a digital weapon of state control, coaching the Party on how best to use its new surveillance tools (including photo-tagging), offering to censor banned content, and agreeing to hand over user data. This deference to power was global. When Russia asked Facebook to shutter a website for Alexei Navalny, it did. When Maria Ressa, a Filipina journalist, alerted Facebook that Duterte’s campaign was spreading disinformation, the company took no action. Most unforgivably, executives merely looked on as the junta in Myanmar used Facebook to post vile propaganda against the Rohingya people, a Muslim minority group, resulting in a massacre that has since been called a genocide. Recalling these events helps to explain Zuckerberg’s self-serving embrace of Trump’s second election (he recently called him a “badass”) as well as his request that President Xi Jinping name his firstborn child. The subtitle is accurate—it’s a tale of power and greed.
But is it also, as the subtitle continues, a tale of “lost idealism”? “Disappointed ambition” might have been a more accurate choice. One can easily understand why a driven young person with a taste for adventure and challenge would have sought out this position. “The problems are relentless and varied,” she writes, recalling the thrill and the chaos. She travels to Colombia and Indonesia during times of profound political change. She meets with Nobel Peace Prize–winner Aung San Suu Kyi. She helps draft an early version of Facebook’s Community Standards. And she deals with unexpected crises: “The Mexican president is hit by a poop emoji storm on his page and petitions us for its immediate removal.” Still, deprived of a clear sense of what exactly Wynn-Williams’s idealism consisted of—beyond the vague, zeitgeisty optimism around Big Tech—the reader cannot feel its loss.
This wouldn’t matter as much if not for the memoir’s lofty literary allusions, which signal an intent to reflect philosophically on the era itself. Two of the chapter titles nod superficially to Joan Didion (“Slouching Toward Autocracy” and “Auf Wiedersehen to All That”). And the original “careless people” are Tom and Daisy Buchanan from The Great Gatsby, suggesting that Mark and Sheryl have likewise “smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money” and will “let other people clean up the mess they [have] made.” In Fitzgerald’s novel, this observation is made by the narrator, Nick Carraway, whose melancholic ambivalence about a bootlegger’s doomed love affair is suffused with a sense of complicity in Gatsby’s wild dream. In contrast, Wynn-Williams casts herself as a total outsider among Facebook’s executives, who are so rich they refer to themselves as “price insensitive.” For her, however, “[m]oney’s tight,” as she says at one point, and “[t]hat dividing line is a constant presence.” (This is hard to square with the mention of equity grants and nannies.) Importantly, she relies on the health insurance her job guarantees (the chapter about her delivery is riveting and distressing), but there’s little to indicate she was ever actually cash-strapped. At one point, she describes “being dropped into this world of luxury hotels, private jets, infinity pools, and personal concierge service.” But she wasn’t “dropped” at all; she pitched herself to the company. Elsewhere, she explains that she was “living the American dream, bootstrapping from nothing to private jets with tech titans.” From nothing? She’s from Christchurch, not the Valley of Ashes.
By publishing this book, of course, Wynn-Williams has exposed herself to legal and professional grief; whatever her embellishments, her boldness should be applauded. Meta, who called the author’s claims “out-of-date” and “false” (a delicious combination) has accused the author of violating her non-disparagement clause and tried its best to ruin her reputation and finances. (Ironically, they leveled these charges after removing the fact-checking feature on their own site.) Perhaps, given the author’s defiance in the face of corporate pressure, it’s ungenerous to point out the lack of true reflection on the meaning of idealism. And yet there’s something impoverished about the cosmopolitan meritocrat’s stated goal of wanting to make the world “more open and connected,” especially once it became clear that Facebook was a data-mining and advertising company and not the pro-social revolution she had hoped for. The evidence was always there for anyone to see, as it was in The Great Gatsby. People had long suspected Gatsby was putting up a front. There were rumors, business calls at night from shady characters. No one was really fooled. They just didn’t want to leave the party until it was all over.
Careless People
A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism
Sarah Wynn-Williams
Flatiron Books
$32.99 | 400 pp.
