I overlapped with Sarah Wynn-Williams' entire tenure at Facebook. We worked for a time in the DC office together and were often on the same calls, in the same meetings, and at the same events. My role was on the US policy side, and hers was on the international side, so we didn't work closely together, but we had a friendly rapport (and were part of a joint office baby shower for our first kids, who were born only days apart). Our Messenger conversations from those years were exclusively side-bars during meetings where one or the other of us would note with incredulity the fecklessness of the people who invariably dominated the conversations.
Careless People is a fantastically written memoir about her time at Facebook. I can't fact check the whole book (and neither can anyone else), but I can say that the meetings and events I was a part of that are recounted in the book (and things that were relayed to me by others contemporaneously) are accurately represented. Maybe more importantly, the vibe she captured is spot on. It was just all so juvenile.
I loved my time at Facebook until I didn't. Until, like Sarah, I realized that despite my hope that I could help fix the things that were broken from the inside, there wasn't much I could actually do. There was less interest in fixing mistakes, owning mistakes, or even really learning from them--just surviving them until the next one. PR statements that started with, "We take these issues very seriously," and "It's so important that we get this right," were somewhat of a running joke. That isn't to say that there aren't thousands of people at Meta today who care deeply about privacy, about security, about child safety, about democracy, about fighting misinformation. But I worry that the arc of the Metaverse, unlike the moral universe, doesn't seem to bend toward justice--it just flaps around in a wind of whims.
Read Sarah's book. Don't read it because Facebook doesn't want you to or because Sarah is a perfect narrator or because every jaw-dropping interaction is recounted perfectly--there's just no way for us to know that. Read it because it captures a profoundly important moment in world history--a fact lost on many of the key actors and many of the people reviewing the book--from an insanely unique perspective.
Sarah wasn't the only one who felt the way she felt going in--optimistic, hopeful, lucky, proud, hoping to do good--and the way she felt going out--disappointed, demoralized, disillusioned, and exhausted. This is my primary criticism of the book: there were lots of Sarahs fighting their own battles in their own departments throughout the company, though the book suggests that she was an island of one (though of course, it is her memoir). But given her role, she's precisely the right person to tell this cautionary tale, and, on the cusp of another technology revolution via AI, now is precisely the right time to tell it.
