careless people

31 Dec, 2025

…where do I even begin?

Our pick for this month at the Gazette was Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams, a memoir about her time at Facebook. It details her experience as a worker trying to pitch a job that doesn’t yet exist, based on what she considers the untapped potential of the company “to change the world”. As the person responsible for public policy among other things, she was the one to connect Mark Zuckerberg with governments all over the world, often making sure Zuckerberg got to attend intergovernmental events at the UN, APEC, etc. with talk slots and seating better than what most states could negotiate for themselves. The book describes changes at Facebook over the years, from the daring and quirky company headed by nerds (the engineers), to the behemoth that it is today, capable of installing any government, bending public opinion to its will, sidelining and even dehumanizing large sections of society, and cooperating with the worst actors in its aspiration for even more power, among other equally sinister things.

A lot of what she talks about is public knowledge at this point. Nonetheless, it was fascinating to see the workings of the Facebook machinery from the inside, learn more about the work culture of one of the biggest Silicon Valley companies and just feel confirmed in my view that the monstrosity of these companies does not lie in the people, but the system they’re embedded in. They are all interchangeable figureheads, a cog in the machine just like their subordinates. At the end of the day, the outcome is more or less the same regardless of who is pulling the strings. Struggling against their worst impulses from the inside and swaying them onto the better path, even when that better path is better for the company’s bottom line in the long term, is a pointless uphill battle with people and systems deathly allergic to doing good and changing for the better.

Workplace harassment was rampant and obviously none of it had to do with sexual attraction. Naturally, some genitalia was aroused, but that was a mechanical reaction to a mechanical environment that thrives on force and is sustained by it. In addition to that, workers had to be on standby almost 24/7. Maternity leave? More like unpaid labor. You’re a mother? How dare you disclose such an obscenity? You better offload care work onto some immigrant woman or else you lack “class”. You have reservations about this job we assigned you? What third-world scum you are. How dare you question our judgement? We would have your back! Unless it hurts our bottom line, of course; you must understand.

Many of the upper echelon courtiers had (have) severe delusions of grandeur. Those are people who have never heard the word “no” uttered by anyone but themselves. If you “no” them, you’ll pay dearly. No sex? Demoted. Don’t answer inappropriate questions or laugh at equally inappropriate jokes? You’ll be stationed exactly where you don’t want to be. You dare to live somewhere not where your superiors would most like to have you live? You’ll move, and you better be quick. Oh, you’re sick? Ew, degenerate. Just don’t be.

You know, I’m angry writing this. Not because this is the work culture at some place somewhere, and that place being Facebook which is dominating our collective consciousness nowadays. It’s because this is to some degree the work culture everywhere; the “freedom” the Americans and Europeans have spread worldwide. Wynn-Williams had the freedom to change jobs. But did she now? Changing jobs is not a walk in the park when you’re dying slowly and you desperately need the health insurance. Neither is it a walk in the park when you moved because of your job and wouldn’t be able to cover your living costs without the job you desperately want to leave. This is systemic oppression advertised as freedom, a perfect example of doublethink (Oppression is Freedom = War is Peace).

So far, I’ve mostly focused on the contents of the book, not the style. The book is written predominantly in short sentences that frequently start the same. It keeps the reader on edge while reading, like the worst next thing is about to happen and you just don’t know it. Which is true since Facebook got increasingly more evil throughout the book, but still. It felt inauthentic. Additionally, the chapters were short which made the book easy to drop and get back into while avoiding complexity at all costs. I hope it achieved more readership through this, but I can’t say I enjoyed reading that staccato. As if this wasn’t disorienting enough, the timeline is all blurry. It’s almost never obvious when what happened, and she kept going back and forth arbitrarily like it’s some Brandon Sanderson novel.

Furthermore, he author desperately wants us to feel for her, starting the memoir with a traumatic story of her being attacked by a shark which is used to justify her desperation to join Facebook to “change the world” because you only live once™️. Then at the end of the book she tells us that she pivoted towards AI policy, specifically working on weapons manned by AI. Why work out rules on how these weapons should be used instead of working towards banning them? This goes back to what boils my blood about the concept of “war crimes”. Sister, war is a crime. Period. I don’t like this woman, but I stand in solidarity with her in her court bitch fight against Meta. Slay them, comrade!

All in all, it was an enjoyable read, exactly how I expected it to be. I don’t enjoy reading about rich people’s lives that live in a whole different sphere but claim to be of “the common man”. I didn’t expect to learn much from it, and I didn’t. That is to say: it was entertaining, but not a source of wisdom.¹ Just made all that is horribly unethical about commercial social media ever more present in my mind.

#bookclub