brendan halpin

Here’s the problem with memoirs: readers may find themselves interested in different facets of the story than the author is interested in. This was a common theme in reviews of my two memoirs (along with “why does he use so much profanity?”), and I find it a pretty common complaint I have when reading a memoir.

And so it is with Sarah Wynn-Williams’ Careless People.

I was, of course, interested in the juicy details of how the people who run Facebook/Meta are horrible, and they’re here, but they’re ultimately not that surprising. Zuckerberg is an overgrown child who demonstrates no capacity for empathy. He’s surrounded by sycophants who let him win at board games, and he’s dumb and arrogant enough to think he’s just the best player in the world.

Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In is a crock of shit and she’s an abusive boss who literally expects her underlings to do work while they’re in the delivery room trying to have a baby. She is also a sexual predator, which is an interesting revelation that hasn’t been made much of in the reviews of the book. Perhaps because Wynn-Williams can only reveal the predatory behavior she actually witnessed, which involved Sandberg cuddling with her underlings and/or inviting them to share her bed on the private jet. But come on. The chapter is called “Lean in and Lay Back.”

Also, of course, the company these terrible people are in charge of does terrible things in the world. I guess it’s somewhat valuable to have all this info in one place for people who haven’t been following Meta over the years, but if you have, there’s really nothing new here. Again, except for the news about Sandberg’s predilection for nonconsensual cuddling.

In the first part of the book, we learn that the narrator is smarter than everyone else because she understand’s Facebook’s potential to wield global power. We also learn that she’s naive because she expects Facebook to wield this power for good. We also learn that she’s competent and dedicated and that she’s appalled when she starts to see the truth of the company.

What we don’t learn, though, and what was most interesting to me, is why she stayed. Was it hubris? Did she believe that she alone could change Facebook/Meta? Was it ambition? It certainly couldn’t have been money—I can’t imagine her having worked closely and successfully with high-level sociopaths would have been an obstacle to employment at another tech company. She and her husband are citizens of different countries—do they need her Facebook-sponsored visa to stay in the US? (But also, why not just go back to New Zealand or the UK?)

These are the questions that interested me. I didn’t care at all whether she succesfully pulled off the flash mob/riot that Zuck demanded when he visited…I think it was India? I care about why she, a person who, in her telling, appears to have a conscience, put that conscience aside and continued to be an active part of making an evil company successful.

I must confess that I found the book pretty boring and ultimately didn’t finish—by the like, hundredth time someone does something appalling and Wynn-Williams reveals that she was privately appalled, I was like, well, so fuckin what?

We don’t need a tell-all memoir to know that billionaires are evil; we can just look around. Hell, we can just look at the absolute lack of human emotion involved in amassing and keeping such sums of money and conclude that yes, these people are broken in their souls and probably beyond redemption.

What I’m really interested in is the question Wynn-Williams ducks, which is why people who are not sociopaths outsource their consciences to the pseudo-human billionaires. Plenty of people stay in jobs they hate working for abusive bosses because they don’t have other options. But what if, like Wynn-Williams, you do have options? Why, then, do you stay? Zuckerberg and Sandberg either don’t know or don’t care that what they’re doing is evil, but everyone else does. And yet they continue to serve evil. Why?

If someone wants to write that book, I would really like to read it.