macleginnAuthor of "Careless People" banned from saying anything negative about Meta
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/technology-uk/article/sarah-wynn-williams-careless-people-meta-nrffdfpmf
I'm going to place an order for the book right now. I encourage you all to do the same.
We the people hold the power to keep in check the immoral companies, governments, and other unscrupulous entities that would exploit the collective to enrich the few. And ultimately that's through our money and how we spend it.
Screw Meta and their anti-human business model.
Unlike an elected government, who the common people at least in theory have a chance to replace via elections, the public pretty much has no say in what these companies and their leadership are allowed to do. Nobody voted for Meta. Nobody voted for Palantir. Nobody voted for Philip Morris. You can say that someone "voted with their wallet," but that doesn't point to a viable solution. "Not voting with your wallet" essentially means becoming a hermit and living isolated in the woods. Because there are no alternate companies that are ethical. Ethics have costs, and the nature of competition means that ethical companies will always be outcompeted and die to companies who don't care to pay those cost.
> "Not voting with your wallet" essentially means becoming a hermit and living isolated in the woods.
This is a total exaggeration and just gives power to these companies. You can start here:
https://www.resistandunsubscribe.com/
YOU voted for Facebook when you use it, by not installing a hosts file that blocks it and all advertisements. We do not need to use these platforms, and the less people that use them the less you will need to use it.
All we have to do is start making their profit fall and they will change. But it must be a strong and unified effort.
“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
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Much easier to do when you exist 40ms and a firewall away from the world. The cloud companies ability to not share the experience of those using the service, to be remote, is a much greater retreat than what was possible 101 years ago, it feels like.
I hear lots of talk about concentration of power, but too little about its amplification. It was a quieter world before amplifiers, both literally and figuratively.
It has been discussed for generations, but unsurprisingly the people with the megaphones don't tend to promote that angle.
https://inist.org/library/1982-03-21.Illich.Silence%20is%20a...
> when you exist 40ms and a firewall away from the world
That sure is an impressive ping!
The leadership team of Meta (and all other giant mega corps) are much more isolated from the real world than 40ms and a firewall. These people don't interact in any way with normal people. They live in a different world than us, and don't even think about us, let alone wonder if their actions are hurting us. Do you think Zucc does his own shopping and has to interact with store employees? Do you think he talks to any of the staff of plumbers, electricians, HVAC repair people, gardeners, who maintain his homes? Do you think he flies commercial and sits next to randos in business class? Do you think he goes down to the DMV and stands in line to renew his driver's license? These guys have staff in their orbit who arrange for all these things to just magically happen, so royalty doesn't have to come into direct contact with the commoners. The billionaire class is thoroughly insulated from us through multiple layers of staff and staff of staff.
The billionaire class can do those things, but they don't have to. Same with non-celebrity Royalty.
This book was SO GOOD.
It's bleak. I always imagined that rich/powerful people only created suffering if that suffering was required for certain goals. It's easier for me to bear injustice when it's a zero-sum game. But the story of Facebook is not that. Facebook didn't make ethical sacrifices for profit -- its executives just didn't care to understand the consequences of their actions.
I wish those folks could feel how much harm they've caused.
Because at least someone benefits. It's why theft is arguably better than vandalism. If you steal the thing, at least someone gets to use it. If it's vandalized, no-one does.
> Because at least someone benefits
Arguably this makes it worse, not better
Understanding takes effort too, effort that might be better spent creating value.
Also, understanding creates culpability. So that's a downside. It's like people who walk in front of you on the road and pretend to not notice you. If I don't see the badness then I am not responsible for the badness.
And thirdly, never underestimate people's power to ignore.
> This book was SO GOOD.
One of the (very valid, IMO) criticisms of the book is that the author tries to set herself apart from the culture she was deeply embedded within. I think it's becoming a trap to hold the author up as a hero when she was clearly part of it all to the very core. It was only after she got separated from the inner circle club that she tried to distance herself from it.
So while reading it, be careful about who you hold up as a hero. In a situation like this it's possible for everyone to be untrustworthy narrators.
A strange response.
Rather than address the comment you change the subject, “whaddabout the author!”
Why do the dark work of deflecting on behalf of “Meta”?
(lol, that name gets me every time. Might as well have renamed themselves NoIdeaWhatToDoNow)
Because recognizing the author as conflicted and an unreliable narrator changes how you should weight and consider the information they are providing. It doesn't necessarily mean anything is untrue - but it does add extra, valuable information to how much you trust it.
If someone tells me something, I'm mostly likely to believe it without further investigation. But not always.
Another one. Deflecting the criticism of Meta with a “whaddabout the author!”
Formed as an answer to a question, but not one that was asked.
A different account than last time, though, so I’ll ask you too: Why do the dark work of deflecting on behalf of Meta (lol)?
I think the point is that up until she was fired, she was Meta. She wasn’t a random employee, she was their global public policy director. She wasn’t just implementing policy, she was responsible for creating it.
The question remains whether or not she would have written this book had she not been fired.
It’s not like she quit due to her ethical objections
The fact that she did end up setting herself apart is what's remarkable. For every one of her who was able to self-reflect, become horrified of the ethics of what she was doing, and took the hard steps of stopping and breaking away, how many current and former Meta employees don't do this reflection and remain contributors to the problem? 1:100? 1:1,000? 1:10,000?
She didn’t set herself apart. She was fired. She was forced apart.
That’s the issue here. Is this someone who found their morals or someone who found a stick with which to strike back at those who hurt her?
One of those doesn’t require her to change at all.
If we require every whistleblower to be a saint, then we’ll never hear a whistle. If you have a serious criticism of their credibility, that’s potentially different, but arbitrary criticisms of someone’s moral worth is mostly irrelevant.
We would have no book if the author was a hero: they would say "I'm not doing this," quit, and that would be the end of it. By this definition, only an unheroic person could've written it. By the same definition, an firsthand expose of Meta could never be written by a trustworthy person.
This obviously protects the company: you are ceding this ground to them, "No trustworthy person could work at your company and write an expose." I don't think we should cede that to them.
I felt it more being naive idealism in the beginning coupled with the thrill of achieving things before the realization.
Yet certain things stand out like her trip to Myanmar. Why to subject oneself through that in that condition.
The title is very apt, the executives, they simply didn't care. That was a fascinating glimpse
Having listened to the book on Audible, I'm both shocked at the behavior of the executive team, and not surprised all at the same time. What bothers me about all of this is what it says about us. It says we're willing to give rich and powerful people a pass just because they make overtures towards something we care about.
We wouldn't give our children a pass like this, nor would we teach our children to act this way, but we're perfectly willing to allow fully grown adults to act like this.
Here's just one example, there are plenty more:
Cheryl Sandberg inviting the author of the book to sleep in her bed next to her on the company jet, and the petulent and vindictive behavior when the author said 'no'.
Everyone in the orbit of the executive team knew about this behavior, and everyone gave it a pass, even going so far as to defend it and to protect Cheryl. This behavior should be universally deplored, and yet is not.
I think the overtures about things we care about more just provide plausible deniability and that when you dig down, people are more concerned about the risks of challenging the wealthy than they are about such window dressing.
By allowing powerful adults to act this way, we are in a sense teaching our children to act this way too.
Yes, all of this happens (and worse!) and still no boycott of Facebook. We have been turned into a country of dopamine deficient addicts.
And now these same companies are funding a useless war, killing innocent children, and soon, collapsing the world economy.
If you still use these platforms knowing what we know now you are just as complicit as every executive.
My understanding is that as part of a severance package she received in 2017 she agreed to some kind of "non-disparagement" clause. She then went on to write a book disparaging the company. The arbitrator didn't rule on the disparagement itself or if anything was true or false. Only ruled that she had to abide by the contract she signed.
It sounds like an interesting book, and I'll add it to the list. But it also sounds like she agreed to this in exchange for a lump-sum severance payment, and then broke the contract anyway. I'm not sure if this is really that principled of a thing. She sought-out and accepted a lot of money for this agreement.
It should not be legal to enforce this kind of thing 9 years after a person leaves your company. I get that it currently is legal, but have some principles. Just because this is legal doesn't mean it isn't morally reprehensible, and its legality should be challenged.
So allowing someone to sign themselves into slavery should be "legal" because it's "impinging on someone's right to enter contracts"? I get that some people balk at "morally reprehensible" as some sort of slippery slope, but c'mon we as individuals have to function somewhat coherently. As a social species reliant on some form of social cohesion (how much oil did you refine this morning?) we have to have some guidelines.
Fwiw, I think making such non-disparagement clauses illegal is an interesting idea, and could be a net positive. That said, I think the slavery comparison is a stretch. The situation up for debate is: Should you be able to voluntarily accept money in exchange for promising not to say bad things about someone or some company? I don't see a good faith interpretation of that as "signing yourself into slavery".
> Fwiw, I think making such non-disparagement clauses illegal is an interesting idea, and could be a net positive. That said, I think the slavery comparison is a stretch.
Arguably, its more like non-compete agreements but with the added fact that state enforcement of the agreements is in tension with freedom of speech.
But, you know, lots of jurisdictions sharply restrict enforceability of non-competes, too.
Nobody was trying to equate non-disparagement clauses with slavery. The relevance of slavery here is as an example of the kind of contract terms that everyone should be able to agree are rightly invalid and unenforceable. Any argument in favor of contract enforceability that would apply to a slavery contract just as easily as it applies to a non-disparagement contract is a bad argument, or at least woefully incomplete. Bringing up slavery serves as a necessary reminder that the details and nuance of the contract terms and their effects need to be discussed and argued, and that an unqualified "contracts should be valid" position is untenable and oversimplified.
The general principle is that you shouldn't be able to "sign away" something that's a constitutional or human right. Like the right to freely speak, the right to practice a religion, the right to be paid for work, and so on. Imagine if the severance contract specified that she had to convert to Islam in order to get her severance, or that she had to sacrifice a child. No court in the country would consider those clauses conscionable. Yet, somehow companies are allowed to gag your free speech as a condition in a contract? It makes no sense why this is allowed.
This is legalized buying people off, yes these contracts ought to be illegal and the comparison to slavery (a worse, but same category of morally reprehensible power dynamic) is completely valid
We already recognize that contracts that violate one party's fundamental human rights cannot be enforced because they "shock the conscience", in terms that American jurists use. This article does not include the terms of the non-disparagement clause, or the other terms and payments, so we can't really say whether the clause is vulnerable to being ruled unenforceable by courts. But it's wrong to say that nobody can enter into contracts that constrain their speech. People do that all the time.
For arbitrary contracts I would agree, but I think increasing the limitations in severance agreements specifically makes sense. There are already certain requirements (at least in California) for severance agreements and I think limiting the duration of non-disparagement clauses to 1-2 years would be a positive change.
IMO, "freedom to enter into contracts" isn't actual freedom, for the same reason that the MIT license isn't more free than the GPL despite it allowing more behaviors: in both cases, it's basically "permission to have your freedom taken away".
The government enforces contracts, so it gets to choose which contracts it enforces. Without a functioning judicial system (and a law enforcement system to enforce its verdicts), a contract is a piece of paper.
Plenty of contracts benefit both parties but are bad for society as a whole, and if the government pre-signals which sorts of those contracts it will refuse to enforce, this is good for society.
Why would it not be legal to enforce a contract after 9 years? If she didn't want it enforced after a duration, she could have negotiated for that, or just not signed it.
I don't see how it's principled to legally swear to not do something, then turn around and do it anyways. She's an adult, she has agency, and she chose to enter that contract.
It's also not like we're talking about a legal whistleblower here. That act DOES (and should) have a lot of legal protections. This is someone writing a book that they personally profit from.