What’s in the Book Mark Zuckerberg Doesn't Want You to Read
by Maria Bustillos
People are all in a snizz about this Facebook memoir by former executive Sarah Wynn-Williams, and rightly so. Careless People: A Story of Where I Used to Work provides a rare and detailed look into the disastrous early years of Facebook—and in particular, its effects on geopolitics—from deep inside. Meta, the parent company of Facebook, sued to prevent the book’s publication based on Wynn-Williams’s possible violation of a non-disparagement agreement she signed when she left the company in 2017. So far they have succeeded both in preventing the author from publicizing her book while the matter is in arbitration, and in publicizing the book themselves, through news coverage, to thousands or millions of curious people who would otherwise have never heard of it; the restrictions on the author don’t apply to her publisher, and at the time of writing, the book is the No. 4 best seller on Amazon.
This weird book is grounded in ethics that are simultaneously praiseworthy—because Wynn-Williams openly describes what she saw during her six-plus years at Facebook, at great personal risk to herself and her family—and gigantically questionable, because, despite quite a bit of handwringing, she doesn’t really blink at admitting that she was an eager participant in one of the worst catastrophes in modern political history, viz., Facebook’s senseless, elephantine, oversight-free blundering in world affairs.
A New Zealand native and former diplomat and environmental lawyer, Wynn-Williams opens the book with her realization, in 2009, that Facebook was “an explosive force… about to tear apart and remake politics all over the world” and “change the course of human events.” She decides she will stop at nothing to be part of it, and spends more than a year trying to get Facebook management to agree that they need a diplomat: that they need her. Finally, she is hired, and starts work in the summer of 2011 as the company’s “Manager of Global Public Policy.”
At which point I’m like now stop right there, Sarah Wynn-Williams. If you really think that Facebook is about to change the course of human events, why do you think that you—a thirty-something lawyer from New Zealand with limited political experience—are the right person to shape policy for this potentially world-altering force? Wouldn’t a sane person prefer these decisions to be in the hands of governments, of coalitions of governments? As with so many tech triumphalists of that era, from Elizabeth Holmes to Mark Zuckerberg to Elon Musk, Wynn-Williams’s invincible self-regard, her unshakeable belief in her own fitness for her position, despite that she is determining the potential fates of millions of people, never really comes into question. And since her bosses are utterly crass, incurious, self-centered monsters, it’s not so surprising that she can paint herself as the good guy because comparatively? She is the good guy.
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