Careless People review
Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism
by Sarah Wynn-Williams.
Score: ★★★★☆
In Careless People Sarah describes her 7-year career at Facebook. She shares her motivations why she wanted to join the Facebook and how it impacted her personal life. We learn about her thoughts and feeling of how it was to work for one of the largest companies in the world.
For me the most interesting part was looking "behind the scenes" of how Facebook operates.
Sarah Career at Facebook
Sarah joined Facebook when it was still considered a one of the greatest places to work(2011). She was responsible for international public policy, specifically working with other governments on how or if Facebook should be implemented and regulated(less control is better of course) in other countries.
Over the years she observed how Facebook evolves from company that is "connecting people" to company that is purely driven by fast grow and greed. Author repeatedly mentions that the methods which Facebook used to expand are against her "moral code" still she acknowledges, complies and helps with whatever she is instructed to do. There is a list of excuses why she can't leave Facebook(health insurance, unvested stocks, mortgage or because it's "hard to find replacement"). From what we can read she chose her career over her family and personal health. For example she responds to work emails while in being labor. Frequently travels around the word while having young children. At one point her husband creates excel sheet with list of her work travels(she don't know why but I assume its evidence in case of divorce)
She is a victim of sexual harassment from her boss, numerous mobbing cases which in the end results with forceful termination.
Looking Behind Facebook Curtain
Many of the things that are described are not new but learning about them from the first hand gives me a neck chill. To list some:
- Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg:
[...] like most of the leaders at Facebook with younger children, severely limits her kids access to screens [...] because [...] how well these executives understand the real damage their product inflicts on your minds.
- How Facebook Helped with Trump Election:
Facebook embedded staff in Trump's campaign team in San Antonio for months, alongside Trump campaign programmers, ad copywriters, media buyers, network engineers, and data scientists.
Trump's campaign had amassed a database, name Project Alamo, with profiles of over 220 million people in America.
The campaign used Facebook's "Custom Audiences from Custom Lists" to match people in that database with their Facebook profiles. Then Facebook's "Lookalike Audiences" algorithm found people on Facebook with "common qualities" that "look like" those of known Trump supporters. So if Trump supported like, for example, a certain type of pickup truck, the tool would find other people who liked pickup trucks but were not yet committed voters to shows the ads to.
Then they'd pair their targeting strategy with data from their message testing. People likely to respond to "build a wall" got that sort of message. Moms worried about childcare got ads explaining that Trump wanted "100% Tax Deductible Childcare"
At any given moment, the campaign had tens of thousands of ads in play.
How lack of moderation caused riots in Myanmar
How Facebook basically bend the knee for China and created tools for mass surveillance in order to enter the China market:
[...] the "key" offer is that Facebook will help China "promote safe and secure social order". And what does that mean? Surveillance
One on the strong sides of the book is writing style. It's easy to read and follow even by a nonnative reader (like me :))
I'm conflicted about this book. I think Sarah knew what's she was getting herself into, enjoyed all the Facebook perks. At some point her vision of how things should be done was different from her superiors and this sparked her "riot" against Facebook upper management.
I suppose this book was largely motivated by revenge which does not change the fact it's a good thing that was written.
Overall we kind of learn what we already knew. If you are not paying for a service it means you are the product. The only motivation for companies like Facebook is to be green on NASDAQ. Does not matter what price we have to pay.
I would recommend this book to everybody.