I have not read a better book this year than Sarah Wynn-Williams’ Careless People: A cautionary tale of power, greed and lost idealism. Neither are you likely to.
Careless People is a scandalous tell-all book about what it was like to work at Facebook for Mark Zuckerberg from 2011 to 2018. The book spills how many of Facebook’s “worst mistakes” from selling data to Cambridge Analytica to possibly facilitating a genocide in Myanmar were far from that.
In equal vein, Careless People blasts apart the long, carefully cultivated image of Facebook as a “fun place” to work at, detailing all the toxicity that comes from certain higher-ups being deemed untouchable, thus able to get away with shockingly bad behaviour towards lower-ranked staff. Zuckerberg’s long-time number two, Sheryl Sandberg, was allegedly used to demanding one of the prettier staff “share her bed” on long flights.
But the real reason why most people will pick up Careless People is for a better understanding of Mark Zuckerberg. I consider Zuckerberg one of the seminal businessmen of our time. As a startup founder in 2004, it was astonishing to witness Zuckerberg relentlessly innovate what Facebook could offer even as he battled off competition from the likes of Friendster and MySpace.
Although he has grown beyond Facebook, in a real way, it remains the nucleus of the billion-dollar business empire Zuckerberg has created. Zuckerberg sits at the head of Meta, the company that owns Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram. Those three are possibly the most used and important communication platforms in the world today.
Mark Zuckerberg is the modern Alexander Graham Bell with power. If we have to live in his world, it behoves us to know more about our Lord and Master. Careless People serves that purposes more wonderfully than any previous book about the Facebook founder.
We learn that Zuckerberg is ruthless and relentless when it comes to pursuing his interests. While Facebook is banned in China, Zuckerberg was willing to bend over backwards as much as the Chinese government wanted to be let into that one billion-plus population market.
He was ready to sacrifice the privacy of his trusting users for access to China, within the blink of an eye. As soon as Williams and others opened their eyes to the megaphone power of Facebook to mobilise people for a cause, Zuckerberg pushed for selling this advantage to politicians, regardless of their agenda.
Zuckerberg did not care whether they were peddling falsehoods as long as they were willing to pay. For the right price, you can make a deal with Zuckerberg. Only pesky American regulations and some demurring Facebook employees willing to risk “wintering” would hold him back.
Whether it was intentional or not, Williams ends up showing her tremendous ego when she confesses that when she joined Facebook, she hoped not just to help it become a better communicative platform to bring the world together. She had high hopes that she would influence its creator, Zuckerberg, to appreciate her point of view and begin to grow into the role of a liberal benefactor for all good global causes.
Like Zuckerberg would put aside his ambition to build the biggest, most profitable social network platform to help obscure third-world tribes and communities better learn how to navigate the internet to protect their interests. Help spread democracy in countries that did not have it by eschewing deals with the strong men and women who had those countries in their grip.
Williams’s idealism was so naive that one cannot help but wonder why an adult who lives in the world as it is today would expect that, given a choice between appeasing a Myanmar junta with 60 million potential Facebook customers and surrendering user data, Zuckerberg would have sleepless nights about that choice.
Doing whatever it takes to keep Facebook growing is what Zuckerberg believes in. If Williams had spent more time closely following Zuckerberg’s career from its beginnings in 2004, she would have been aware that this had always been his driving motivation.
One of the unintended uses Careless People will end up serving in the future is how far we let toxic work culture take over. In the early 2000s, Facebook was one of the most admired companies in the world. So revered was Facebook and Zuckerberg’s lightning speed innovations that it was admitted into an exclusive club of FAANG companies.
These companies, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google, were the undisputed leaders in their fields. Once you worked for any of them, there was practically no job you could not get anywhere in the world, if you applied for it.
The Facebook Williams begged, schemed and wormed her into in 2011 was already edging away from that early 2000s spirit of serve the customer, screw the bottom line. Now it was to sell to the customer to make money. That rule applied even to employees who were discouraged from leaving the Facebook compound, even to give birth.
The most important relationship you were encouraged to cultivate was 100% loyalty to Facebook and your supervisor before your intimate partner or family, 24/7. You should be ready to go to jail for Facebook. Take it as an honour. Sacrifice everything for Mark and Facebook.
Careless People reads like a Stephen King horror thriller. Except in this case, it is all true. It all happened. Sarah Wynn-Williams has the receipts and came close to death at least twice to snatch them for us. This is a book you must read, need to read.
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