Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism
When Sarah Wynn-Williams was a young girl in New Zealand, she was attacked by a shark. She made it out of the water fine, but the doctor who treated her missed internal lacerations and she went into septic shock, unable to convince her parents that she was actually sick until she almost died.
That story is also a pretty good metaphor for Wynn-William’s career at Facebook, and this subsequent memoir, which is a dishy expose of several senior executives, notably Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, former VP of Global Communications and Public Policy Elliot Schrage, current President of Global Affairs Joel Kaplan, and of course, Mark “Emperor AuZuccus” Zuckerberg.
Wynn-Williams left her job at the United Nations and joined Facebook in 2011 in a spate of idealism, selling the company on the idea that they were becoming an international political force and had to act like it. As such she arranged meetings between executives and heads of state and tried to keep the company ahead of bad news.
The guiding star of Facebook is, was, and will always be growth. Everything will be sacrificed in the name of growth, including user privacy, legal agreements with various countries, and any last scruple. To the extent that Wynn-Williams had idealism, it was burned out of her over the years, and particularly in the fiasco of the Myanmar genocide, where her attempts to staff up anything more than a de minimis response were rebuffed.
But policy is whatever, this is about people. Joel Kaplan, participant in the 2000 Brooks Brothers riot which locked in Florida for George W Bush, and longtime conservative consigliere, is an outright villain, who repeatedly sexually harasses Wynn-Williams through the book. He’s also a notable Harvard educated dumbass, who is astounded to learn that Taiwan is an island. Elliot Schrage, Kaplan’s superior, is a company man, loyal to fellow Harvard dudes and power above and beyond any sort of ethics or competence.
Sheryl Sandberg comes off as an absolute freak. The secret to Leaning In is to have an income in the million+ range, so you can foist off anything that is not your career onto your servants. She’s absolutely attuned to the finest distinctions of social status, a perfect denizen of the World Economic Forum at Davos. She was always surrounded by a coterie of ambitious 20-something women, who she blended official and personal duties with, and who she used hard. Perhaps the most lurid detail is that Sandberg would have her assistants buy thousands of dollars of luxury underwear, and then on long private plane flights would lounge in silk pajamas stroking each other’s hair like some kind of Eyes Wide Shut version of a teen sleepover.
And Zucc, well, Zucc is the hollowness at the heart of Facebook. He’s obsessed with decisive leaders and grand builders and yet seems unwilling to adjusgfhcvt his ideas to reality. Over the course of the book, he goes from political naif to realizing that he’s going to outlast presidents and prime ministers, and that they should pay obeisance to him. Zucc has been quieter than other billionaires on how he thinks the world should be reshaped, but he clearly has ideas that don’t accord with liberal democracy.
Meta came out swinging against this book, a definite self-inflicted Streisand effect that’s seen it catapulted to the top of the best seller charts. I think Wynn-Williams is more like her subjects than she would care to admit, but the gossip is fun.