What the Zuck?

Sarah Wynn-Williams etches the failures of Facebook into sharp relief

According to a recent story in Politico (by a former student of mine), Facebook is flooding Washington with ads aimed at convincing lawmakers to require its rivals’ app stores to verify shoppers’ ages and require parental consent for kids to download social media apps, instead of holding Facebook accountable for this. But to judge from Sarah Wynn-Williams’s juicy and yet surprisingly substantial memoir, it would be a mistake to adopt CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s point of view on anything.

Actually, there’s good reason to question Zuckerberg without reading this book. (See: Rohingya. See election of 2016. For that matter, see The Social Network—a great movie). But Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed and Lost Idealism confers a granular sense of the way corruption is practiced and justified at the intersection of high-tech and capitalism.

Wynn-Williams, a New Zealander and lawyer with diplomatic experience, finagled herself into a job at Facebook in 2011, where she was deployed in the service of forging relationships with foreign governments in the process of figuring out their policies for dealing with social media networks. It quickly became apparent that the company was purely instrumental—and improvisatory—in its approach to breaking into foreign markets. This is especially true in its approach to China, which dominates the latter part of the book, in which Facebook routinely complied with authoritarian rules it avowedly rejected in the United States, cynically and secretly allowing alarming levels of surveillance, including traffic into China from the United States. Again, this isn’t exactly surprising, but the conversations she records—the callous disregard for principle and the safety of employees—bring Facebook’s hypocrisy into sharp relief.

Wynn-Williams Zuckerberg is depicted as a boy king with a dilettantish approach to politics, government, and the world at large (the thing he seems to care most about is not scheduling any meeting before noon). But she reserves most of her venom for former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, whose 2013 book Lean In became a feminist manifesto. Sandberg is depicted as a tyrannical hypocrite who repeatedly demands her underlings sleep with her on long flights on private jets—a demand that apparently is not sexual but creepy nonetheless. Wynn-Williams does allege sexual harassment from one of her bosses, and it’s this accusation that eventually results in her expulsion from the company.

I did find myself wondering, with increasing impatience, why it was, amid her growing disgust at what she was seeing, that Wynn-Williams chose to stay with Facebook as long as she did. We get the usual explanations: trying to change the company from within; wanting to line up another job first; concerns about health care coverage for her family. All of which is understandable, and none of which is entirely convincing. She does not disclose the terms of her employment, but it’s safe to say that she was well compensated, and plenty of people have walked away from good jobs over less. But one doesn’t have to buy Wynn-Williams' account in its entirety to believe the core of what she says. And what she does say is rendered in a compellingly readable style that includes some very colorful anecdotes that include shark bites, wasp stings, and complicated pregnancies (I got a tutorial in the complexities of breastfeeding while traveling on business). Careless People manages to be breezy and informative at the same time—a neat trick. It’s worth a look.