I never would have read *Careless People*, Sarah Wynn-Williams's tell-all memoir about her years running global policy for Facebook, but then Meta's lawyer tried to get the book suppressed and secured an injunction to prevent her from promoting it:
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/23/zuckerstreisand/#zdgaf
1/
So I've got something to thank Meta's lawyers for, because it's a great book! Not only is Wynn-Williams a skilled and lively writer who spills some of Facebook's most shameful secrets, but she's also a kick-ass narrator (I listened to the audiobook, which she voices):
https://libro.fm/audiobooks/9781250403155-careless-people
I went into *Careless People* with strong expectations about the kind of disgusting behavior it would chronicle.
2/
#1 New York Times Bestseller“Careless People is darkly funny and genuinely shocking...Not only does [Sarah Wynn-Williams] have the storytelling chops to unspool a gripping narrative; she also delivers the goods." -Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times “When one of the world’s most powerful media companies tries to snuff out a book — amid other...
I have several friends who took senior jobs at Facebook, thinking they could make a difference (three of them actually appear in Wynn-Williams's memoir), and I've got a good sense of what a nightmare it is for a company.
But Wynn-Williams was a lot closer to three of the key personalities in Facebook's upper echelon than anyone in my orbit: Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and Joel Kaplan, who was elevated to VP of Global Policy after the Trump II election.
3/
I already harbor an atavistic loathing of these three based on their public statements and conduct, but the events Wynn-Williams reveals from their private lives make these three out to be beyond despicable. There's Zuck, whose underlings let him win at board-games like Settlers of Catan because he's a manbaby who can't lose (and who accuses Wynn-Williams of cheating when she fails to throw a game of Ticket to Ride while they're flying in his private jet.
4/
There's Sandberg, who demands the right to buy a kidney for her child from someone in Mexico, should that child ever need a kidney.
Then there's Kaplan, who is such an extraordinarily stupid and awful oaf that it's hard to pick out just one example, but I'll try.
5/
At one point, Wynn-Williams gets Zuck a chance to address the UN General Assembly. As is his wont, Zuck refuses to be briefed before he takes the dais (he's repeatedly described as unwilling to consider any briefing note longer than a single text message). When he gets to the mic, he spontaneously promises that Facebook will provide internet access to refugees all over the world.
6/
Various teams at Facebook then race around, trying to figure out whether this is something the company is actually doing, and once they realize Zuck was just bullshitting, set about trying to figure out how to do it. They get some way down this path when Kaplan intervenes to insist that giving away free internet to refugees is a bad idea, and that instead, they should *sell* internet access to refugees.
7/
Facebookers dutifully throw themselves into this absurd project, which dies when Kaplan fires off an email stating that he's just realized that refugees don't have any money. The project dies.
The path that brought Wynn-Williams's into the company of these careless people is a weird - and rather charming - one.
8/
As a young woman, Wynn-Williams was a minor functionary in the New Zealand diplomatic corps, and during her foreign service, she grew obsessed with the global political and social potential of Facebook. She threw herself into the project of getting hired to work on Facebook's global team, working on strategy for liaising with governments around the world.
9/
The biggest impediment to landing this job is that it doesn't exist: sure, FB was lobbying the US government, but it was monumentally disinterested in the rest of the world in general, and the governments of the world in particular.
But Wynn-Williams persists, pestering potentially relevant execs with requests, working friends-of-friends (Facebook itself is extraordinarily useful for this), and refusing to give up. Then comes the Christchurch earthquake.
10/
Wynn-Williams is in the US, about to board a flight, when her sister, a news presenter, calls her, trapped inside a collapsed building (the sister hadn't been able to get through to anyone in NZ). Wynn-Williams spends the flight wondering if her sister is dead or alive, and only learns that her sister is OK through a post on Facebook.
The role Facebook played in the Christchurch quake transforms Wynn-Williams's passion for Facebook into something like religious zealotry.
11/
She throws herself into the project of landing the job, and she *does*, and after some funny culture-clashes arising from her Kiwi heritage and her public service background, she settles in at Facebook.
Her early years there are sometimes comical, sometimes scary, and are characteristic of a company that is growing quickly and unevenly. She's dispatched to Myanmar amidst a nationwide block of Facebook ordered by the ruling military junta.
12/
At one point, it seems like she's about to get kidnapped and imprisoned by goons from the communications ministry. She arranges for a state visit by NZ Prime Minister John Key, who wants a photo-op with Zuckerberg, who - oblivious to the prime minister standing right there in front of him - berates Wynn-Williams for demanding that he meet with some jackass politician (they do the photo-op anyway).
13/
One thing is clear: FB doesn't really care about countries other than the US. Though Wynn-Williams chalks this up to plain old provincial chauvinism (which FB's top echelon possess in copious amounts), there's something else at work. The USA is the only country in the world that a) is rich, b) is populous, and c) has no meaningful privacy protections. If you make money selling access to dossiers on rich people to advertisers, America is the most important market in the world.
14/
But then Facebook conquers America. Not only does FB saturate the US market, it uses its free cash-flow and high share price to acquire potential rivals, like Whatsapp and Instagram, ensuring that American users who leave Facebook (the service) remain trapped by Facebook (the company).
15/
At this point, Facebook - Zuckerberg - turns towards the rest of the world. Suddenly, acquiring non-US users becomes a matter of urgency, and overnight Wynn-Williams is transformed from the sole weirdo talking about global markets to the key asset in pursuit of the company's top priority.
Wynn-Williams's explanation for this shift lies in Zuckerberg's personality, his need to constantly dominate (which is also why his subordinates have learned to let him win at board games).
16/
This is doubtless true: not only has this aspect of Zuckerberg's personality been on display in public for decades, Wynn-Williams was able to observe it first-hand, behind closed doors.
But I think that in addition to this personality defect, there's a *material* pressure for Facebook to grow that Wynn-Williams doesn't mention.
17/
Companies that grow get extremely high price-to-earnings (P:E) ratios, meaning that investors are willing to spend many dollars on shares for every dollar the company takes in. Two similar companies with similar earnings can have vastly different valuations (the value of all the stock the company has ever issued), depending on whether one of them is still growing.
18/
High P:E ratios reflect a bet on the part of investors that the company will continue to grow, and those bets only become more extravagant the more the company grows. This is a *huge* advantage to companies with "growth stocks." If your shares constantly increase in value, they are highly liquid - that is, you can always find someone who's willing to buy your shares from you for cash, which means that you can tread shares *like* cash.
19/
But growth stocks are *better* than cash, because money grows slowly, if at all (especially in periods of extremely low interest rates, like the past 15+ years). Growth stocks, on the other hand, *grow*.
Best of all, companies with growth stocks have no trouble finding more stock when they need it. They just type zeroes into a spreadsheet and more shares appear. Contrast this with money.
20/
Facebook may take in a lot of money, but the money only arrives when *someone else* spends it. Facebook's access to money is limited by exogenous factors - your willingness to send your money to Facebook. Facebook's access to shares is only limited by endogenous factors - the company's own willingness to issue new stock.
That means that when Facebook needs to buy something, there's a very good chance that the seller will accept Facebook's stock in lieu of US dollars.
21/
Okay, this post set the hook and: oh yay! My library has the audiobook available for online access:
✓ed out!—now I know what my weekend listening will be!
Edit: okay, I'm setting aside this blog post to finish after listening to the book 😋
The sad thing about Careless People is that it's bookended by delusions. Sarah Wynn-Williams starts out all gung-ho about the possibility of FB as a force for good. It begins with her pitching for a job there.
Then the scales fall from her eyes, but it takes far longer than it should do. That's the nature of a cult.
It ends with a coda in which she's similarly gung-ho about AI, and pitching for a job in that industry.
@riggbeck @pluralistic eww. I'm not surprised about the pivot to AI, but it makes me much less keen to read the book.
I mainly want to buy it to loan to a friend who's in their 70s and maintains a Facebook page for our small town, and is smart enough to take in the content and hopefully it will help explain to them why I refuse to use Facebook. Most "normal" people simply don't understand Facebook refusal. It's so frustrating.
But in regards to it taking too long to realise something is evil - I was a massive Google fan girl in the early days. I had friends working there and I was a very early Android adopter.
These days I just want to deGoogle, and I'm embarrassed how long it took me to realise they were not the force for good I had believed for so long.
@lemgandi @riggbeck @pluralistic yeah I need to work out Mail server stuff to get my email out of Google even a little, though I have defaulted to the main Gmail address ever since they enshittified being able to reply from a non-Gmail address. It used to work great and no one even knew Gmail was where I did all the work.
I've been working on Photos first, and that's been going pretty good.
@kudra @riggbeck @pluralistic a bit more than a decade ago, my swing dancing association realized that Facebook was a useful groupware tool.
You go to a dance class. When the class ends, there's a review. One student records the review and uploads it to the group, and everyone in the class Facebook group can then review the material. Also, it's where people tell the rest of the group if they will be absent.
With 8-10 different levels/classes per 'season' of 7-8 weeks and five seasons a year, that's about 50 new Facebook groups a year.
Since Facebook became the easy, 'free' choice for a service, we were unable to deliver on any other platform, nobody really looked for alternatives at the time, and now it feels like nobody developed any alternatives for the last decade or more.
Sucks.
Another association of mine, a social club, had a thriving web forum, but in the early tens, the traffic moved to Facebook. The functionality was less impressive than the self-hosted forum, but things seemed shinier and easier to use to most users, so the forum became a ghost site.
Here's to hoping that fediverse alternatives grows strong :/
@Rockbear @riggbeck @pluralistic haha! I used to be a swing dancer, and run an ezboard for Swing Dancing - it was called Swingtalk Australia. Anyone remember ezboard? I was reminded of that relatively recently, as I'm on one private messageboard that STILL exists (barely) that actually began as a Yahoo group even pre-dating that.
Unfortunately even with all the awfulness in the last few months there hasn't been a revival at that messageboard, as you'd think people would seriously start looking for alternatives, finally, at this point where people should be fucking waking up given the dark fascist turn of the US and exposes like this: but no, they continue to sleepwalk,probably into the fucking gas chambers I expect, if it came to that.
I'm glad Fedi exists though. And a few people are actually table flipping after having put up with FB for years, but they are largely the nerdier types that have the digital literacy to pivot: the non-techies find it fairly unfathomable still at this point.
We need a device which has a bunch of Fedi & FOSS installed that works as easily as a Windows PC or iPhone to get people away from the Broligarchy.
I haven't read the book, it's largely unobtanium here.
It's important to differentiate between AI and LLMs.
I suspect AI is a cornerstone of Facebook's facial recognition technology.
Remember when they ran facial recognition on a huge crowd in a stadium? Things went quiet after that because Creepy.
Many such AI implementations are much more respectable scientifically than the current LLM madness, and have less chance of dying in the fire of a market bubble burst.
I don't think there's a difference between LLMs and so called AI, which is the propaganda term used to suggest there's intelligence behind it. Unfortunately, every time it's used, the term is fixed into our minds and language.
I agree that LLMs do have some useful scientific applications.
I haven't read about the hearing, but I really want her to have told the judge "It's OK, I'll never need to promote my book because these guys have just done it for me!"
@slashdottir @pluralistic And a reminder:
You cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet.
Physics, it's the law.
@pluralistic @craigburdett
Lots of my world feels like the outcome of this:
“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.
—F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, THE GREAT GATSBY”
Excerpt From
Careless People
Sarah Wynn-Williams
This material may be protected by copyright.
"According to Wynn-Williams, Facebook actually built an extensive censorship and surveillance system for the Chinese state – spies, cops and military – to use against Chinese Facebook users, and FB users globally. They promise to set up caches of global FB content in China that the Chinese state can use to monitor all Facebook activity, everywhere, with the implication that they'll be able to spy on private communications, and censor content for non-Chinese users."
😦
Cory Doctorow
Cavyherd
LeBonk
noplasticshower
Fardels Bear
Kudra 
lemgandi
Peter Paaske Juul
Ramon Baback
zl2tod
sandywb14
donald_brady
Mark T. Tomczak
Graeme 🏴
Bytebro 🇬🇧 🇺🇦 🇬🇱
foo ✅
Kinene⭐🐻
JoelBarr
Tim Finnerty
CBinNYC
FreediverX
Dr Russell Glasson
Japonica
Dubi is here 
Kailas Idavanmuzhi