Careless People [en]

This was one of the most shocking books I’ve read in a long time! Sarah Wynn-Williams worked at Facebook for five years before she was fired, and she tells the story of Facebook’s development not only as a social media platform but also as an international tool of information control and citizen surveillance.

I can imagine that some stories are tainted by the fact that she was fired, and also by the fact that she needed to make herself look less bad than the other people she talked about, but in general, I am sure most facts presented in the book are verifiable.

One thing I wondered throughout the entire book was why she stayed with Facebook as long as she did. If things were really as bad as she described, as unethical, as shockingly wrong, then why did she not simply find another job elsewhere? I know it’s not easy to find work, I know that things are often not suddenly bad and that sometimes we keep telling ourselves that one thing is bad but the whole picture is still good, that we still do more good than bad, etc. But the stories told in this book are really wrong from the beginning. There was not a single time when I thought « ok, finally something good. » No. It went from really bad to unbelievably unethical and profoundly shocking. And I’m not just talking about Brexit and the 2016 US election. There were way way way worse things, like the Myanmar genocide, for example.

I watched The Great Hack about how Cambridge Analytica and Facebook have influenced the Brexit referendum, and it was shocking, but this book was even worse. It was sometimes so painful to listen to that I had to stop and read something else to give time to my brain to recover. If you want to know why Mark Zuckerberg is the most powerful man on earth and why we are all doomed, read this book. (I definitely put Sam Altman in that category, too.)