The Facebook book is very scary and you need to read it

Seriously, this thing is nuts

Irrespective, he blames other people for all of those things, including forgetting the passport. I guess that’s what it’s like to live in a bubble, like Mark does. But a bubble implies flimsy transparency, a diaphanous space where you can see a normal life just beyond your grasp. And what Mark inhabits is more like a thick opaque dome, a murky fortress that separates him from the rest of the world. When you have so many other people doing things for you professionally and personally, you stop taking responsibility for any of it. Max Weber said that dealing with unintended consequences of your actions is what political responsibility is. This guy can’t even take responsibility for leaving his passport at home, let alone influencing the US election.

This is from Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams, the former global policy director of Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg is due to fly to Lima for a political forum and forgets his passport—and his solution is to have his people call the president of Peru to see if he can get in without one.

This feels like it sums up a lot about him.

Wynn-Williams worked for Meta (then Facebook) from 2011 to 2017. She effectively created the position; she formerly worked at the UN and saw the potential for Facebook to connect people and influence policy after the devastating 2011 earthquake in her native New Zealand.

If you read the news, you know the broad strokes of Meta’s sins, but Wynn-Williams weaves a damning narrative, portraying Zuckerberg as a reckless, petulant boy-king, and Sheryl Sandberg, the company’s former COO, as a hypocrite whose whole “lean in” philosophy seems only to apply to her. The rest of the company’s executives seem to exist only to tell Zuckerberg and Sandberg how smart and pretty they are.

How bad is this?

In the wake of the 2016 election, it becomes clear Trump’s victory was due, in large part, to data and information manipulation on Facebook, and the company’s reaction is less “what did we do?!” and more “wow, look what we can do!”.

In a desperate ploy to gain a foothold in China, the company worked hand-in-hand with the Chinese Communist Party to develop systems allowing the CCP to access user data and private messages, potentially exposing users from other countries along the way—and lied to Congress about it.

And the company refused to squash violent hate speech and disinformation targeting the Rohingya minority in Myanmar, leading to a massacre in 2017. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Facebook is to Myanmar as Kissinger is to Cambodia.

Then there’s Zuckerberg’s Internet.org initiative, which in public he sells as a program to bring internet connectivity to the parts of the world that don’t have it. In private he sounds like a heroin dealer—he wants to get people hooked into the system so he can monopolize internet services in those countries, mine their data, and ultimately upsell them on more services.

Wynn-Williams suffers a slew of indignities as well. She receives a negative performance review for not working while on maternity leave, part of which she spent in a coma because of medical complications from giving birth. She’s frequently sent to dangerous parts of the world with no support and no regard for her safety. And she’s ultimately fired for reporting a supervisor for sexual harassment.

It’s hard to pick a “worst part” of this book, but that forum that Zuckerberg attends in Lima (for which he ultimately sent someone to his house to get his passport) is bad. It seems like it could be a reckoning; Facebook just effectively swayed an election.

But instead of calling him to the carpet, world leaders trip over themselves to take selfies with him. They see how powerful Facebook is to their own seats of power, and they don’t want to risk alienating the boy-king.

It’s chilling.

These are just highlights. There’s plenty of horrifying shit to discover, and Wynn-Williams reveals them in a smart, breezy narrative that, at times, reads like a thriller.

I first noticed Careless People when it was shared by a pal who runs publicity for the book’s publisher, and I’m always up for a good corporate takedown—while The Warehouse is chiefly aimed at Amazon, there’s a little Facebook DNA in there as well.

But then Meta pursued arbitration, saying that the book is prohibited under a non-disparagement contract. They won, and will go to private arbitration. They don’t want people to read this, and they’re working overtime to suppress it.

Which makes it a must-read.

I’ve already gotten off Twitter, because Elon Musk is a dipshit of the highest order, and the service has turned into a piss-soaked waterpark full of Nazis and Russian bots. This is making me seriously consider my relationship with Meta. I barely use Facebook, other than sharing news about book stuff, mostly so my mom’s friends will see it. My chief social media usage is on Bluesky (not evil, yet), but also Meta-owned Instagram and Threads.

(And yes, I’m posting this on Substack, which has its own problems.)

I want to keep in contact with my friends and audience. I want to sell my books. But it’s hard to read Careless People and feel good about logging into anything in the Meta universe.

Being informed is the first step. Read this book. Tell your friends about it. Please. It’s on all of us to at least understand how deep the rabbit hole of fuckery goes.