Book Review: Careless People - A Story of Where I Used to Work by Sarah Wynn-Williams
Caveats:
First up, it's Wynn-Williams' memoir, and she paints herself in the best possible light - there isn't much taking accountability for the ways in which she also enabled, and in some cases actively engineered, some of the shadier stuff she talks about.
It's absolutely the case that she was the victim of a lot of truly execrable behaviour and decision-making, but one can be both a victim and a participant in the victimisation of others at the same time. Wynn-Williams was literally in "room where it happens", and her plaint that she thought she could do more good by staying and trying to influence people wears thin once things really start to take a turn and it becomes obvious that she will be implementing things she knows good and well are wrong.
It's also true that some of the things she dwells on in the first third of the book, which corresponds to her early tenure at the company, amount more to culture clash or fit (her Kiwi aesthetic not fitting the tech millionaire ouevre she found herself in) rather than truly egregious shit.
Personal assistants being able to afford designer shoes? OK, but I don't really care. Performative Silicon Valley execs behaving less warmly behind closed doors? What a non-revelation. The fact that Mark Zuckerberg likes to wear hoodies, is bad at small-talk, and prefers to work at night then sleep til noon? Really not a surprise, or indeed necessarily a moral black mark (I know many excellent people who'd fit that description exactly, if they had the money and ability to do it). Tech nerd bro is tech nerd, colour me shocked.
Substance:
The disclosures about Facebook's (now Meta's) imperatives and methods, which are the core of the book, are chilling, even if not completely surprising. I was honestly less exercised on a broad level with her revelations about individual senior staffers doing the same predictably awful shit that senior staffers do in a lot of big companies (bullying, harassment, exploitation etc) than I was about the revelations re Facebook's SOP. Why? Because the latter affects not just all users of the service, but in fact the world at large, in very profound ways. Certainly, some individuals come through as not just careless but truly terrible people, but I don't think that is at the heart of what Wynn-Williams is trying to convey with this book. I think she is attempting, mostly successfully, to paint a picture of a changing, or perhaps hardening, ethos at Facebook, an increased willingness to take whatever action (or inaction) is seen as being in the commercial growth interests of the company without any but the barest lip-service to social, political, cultural or human impacts.
Wynn-Williams' second subtitle is "Power. Greed. Madness". In my view, the book makes an irrefutable case (especially when combined with the evidence available in the world around us) for Power and Greed, but I'm sad to say, I don't think Madness has a dog in this race. Rather, I think that Meta, no differently to X or Amazon or any of the other big tech players, is operating from a place of morally deadened self-interested sanity. If it was a person, it would be a sociopath, possibly even a psychopath, but mad it ain't. It might be better for us all if it was, because then it might be easier to unravel.
Aftermath:
Anyway, here's where it's left me. Combined with the broader thinking I have been doing since reading Naomi Klein's excellent Doppelganger earlier in the year, which triggered me to retire from Threads (a decision I am so pleased I made), I feel that my time as a Facebook regular is coming to an end. I no longer feel that handing over my life to Meta is wise, or in my (or the broader world's) interests. I'm not quite ready to fully pull the trigger yet, but I think it will happen within the coming weeks - possibly after our family Mother's Day celebration, which might serve as my last hurrah of regular posting.
I won't lie, it will be a wrench to move towards timeline inactivity. I have used Facebook extensively as a place to post family events, milestones, and general thoughts. It has been valuable to me for that, but I can't see that value as worth the cost anymore.
I won't delete / deactivate my account - my book club and my poetry group both use FB Groups to communicate, and I can't in conscience ask them to change the way they do that just to accommodate me - and I most certainly won't be deleting Messenger, which is the main chat app I use with family and friends. My goal is simply to be absent or almost-absent from the TL going forward. I won't say I'll never use it again once I wind down - if there is something critical that I urgently need to communicate to a lot of family and friends at once, it might be the most expedient way to do that, and I'm not about to cut off my nose to spite my face. But I think my days of logging events and milestones there are done. (Instead, my 5.5 regular blog readers will get to read about them here, aren't you lucky :-P
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