Review: Vivien Horler

Careless People – A story of where I used to work, by Sarah Wynn-Williams (Pan Macmillan)

The tech bros – or the broligarchy as someone called them – may have met their match.

Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former young New Zealand diplomat working at the United Nations, got a coveted job with Facebook for seven years before being fired.

She has called her gripping memoir of working there Careless People, drawn from a paragraph in F Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby: “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.”

By the end of her career at Facebook, which she had joined believing its interconnectivity was going to change the world, for the better. “I was in awe of its ineffable potential.”

It had been launched in 2004, and by 2009, when Wynn-Williams woke up to it, about 400 million people were using it around the world.

But by the time she left in 2019, she had decided that Facebook’s bosses, including of course Mark Zuckerberg, just didn’t care about the damage the medium was doing (its record in Myanmar was particularly egregious) – as long as the money kept rolling in.

So there they were, the broligarchy, at Donald Trump’s second inauguration as president: Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Jeff Bizos, basking in the reflected glory.

Now, less than three months later, they are all losing money hand over fist, thanks to Trump’s tariffs. And you know what? Trump doesn’t care.

Wynn-Williams got her job on the strength of her diplomatic contacts and experience at the UN. She had persuaded the powers that be that Facebook, which at that stage was focusing on the US market, needed an international strategic policy and someone to lead it.

She became the company’s global public policy manager, having close and regular contact with those at the top, including Zuckerberg. Her initial enthusiasm carried her a long way, but slowly she began to see the methods and modus operandi more clearly.

The company culture (“move fast and break things”, now apparently appropriated by Trump) didn’t really work for a young mother.

She was still sending work emails between contractions while in labour, until her obstetrician took her laptop away. She discovered the expectation on Facebook was that mothering should be invisible.

At one point around 2014 the top team was planning a tour of Asia, which would include a visit to South Korea. It turned out there were open arrest warrants for both Mark Zuckerberg and his right-hand woman Sheryl Sandberg, for reasons which were not clear.

Shortly before the trip a Korea crisis meeting was held, as Facebooks’s lawyers had warned the threat of jail and criminal liability was real.

At the meeting the Mteam (management team) decided to send “a body” – a staff member – to Korea to see if they were arrested

Everyone advanced reasons why it couldn’t be them. Then the room fell silent and Wynn-Williams realised they were all looking at her, the least senior person present.

She writes she would have gone (“I don’t think this says anything good about me”) but her partner put his foot down. It was the first time she had declined a job and the Mteam accepted this, not out of concern for her, she says, but because they needed her in the office to make Zuckerberg’s trip a success.

There was more and worse, like the time she was assessed at a performance review and found wanting for not being available during maternity leave. Her protest that she was in a coma at the time cut little ice.

There were also appalling incidents involving the company’s interventions at home and abroad. Wynn-Williams explains in detail how Facebook helped Trump win the 2016 presidential election by tweaking the algorithms.

She summed up the attitude: “If politicians depend on Facebook to win elections, they’ll be less likely to do anything that’ll harm Facebook.”

Wynn-Williams found herself growing increasingly disillustioned, but hung on, believing she was more useful working there, trying to influence policies from the inside.

Also she was earning very good money, which had enabled her and her partner, a British foreign correspondent, to buy a house in California, in the same neighbourhood as Zuckerberg. Once she asked him why she never saw him around, and he replied he hardly ever used the property because he was having problems with the council not allowing him to land his helicopter on the property. Rich people’s problems.

In the end she was fired, after accusing her immediate boss of sexual harassment. And then she wrote this book, which outraged Facebook. It insisted she not publicise the book, which was of course enough to attract people’s interest.

Careless People is about – as the Daily Maverick’s Rebecca Davis put it so well, “a company with terrifying reach and no global compass”. It is chatty and often darkly funny, but the childish glee with which the bosses take on the world is unnerving, and has real consequences in people’s lives – and deaths.

In the light of all this, it’s hard to feel sorry for Zuckerberg et al who have been hit hard in their wallets over the past week.