It's bleak. I always imagined that rich/powerful people only created suffering if that suffering was required for certain goals. It's easier for me to bear injustice when it's a zero-sum game. But the story of Facebook is not that. Facebook didn't make ethical sacrifices for profit -- its executives just didn't care to understand the consequences of their actions.
I wish those folks could feel how much harm they've caused.
I felt it more being naive idealism in the beginning coupled with the thrill of achieving things before the realization.
Yet certain things stand out like her trip to Myanmar. Why to subject oneself through that in that condition.
The title is very apt, the executives, they simply didn't care. That was a fascinating glimpse
Literally anyone with the access to these people would be someone making bank. Do you think Cheryl Sandberg would bother to talk to a poor person?
That's kinda the nature of whistle-blowing. You're complicit, you have inside knowledge and THEN you choose to do the right thing. Snowden worked for the NSA before he exposed their lies about spying on US citizens, you think he did literally no work towards that end before blowing the whistle?
If you read the book it becomes clear the author was a key enabler of Mark and Sheryl. Should she be allowed to comment? Of course. But don't think for a second she's a good person for doing so.
I have read the book, I didn’t mind her conscience surfacing at all. I’m not sure I’d want to go up against an organisation like Meta, and having first hand accounts of how these people love money and power more than they do values and people.
That pretty much describes confidential informants (used by the police, all the time). Many of these CIs are risking a lot more than just getting sued, and they are seldom angels. Many of them do it, so they won't go down with the ship, or because the cops have real leverage over them.
One of the (very valid, IMO) criticisms of the book is that the author tries to set herself apart from the culture she was deeply embedded within. I think it's becoming a trap to hold the author up as a hero when she was clearly part of it all to the very core. It was only after she got separated from the inner circle club that she tried to distance herself from it.
So while reading it, be careful about who you hold up as a hero. In a situation like this it's possible for everyone to be untrustworthy narrators.
We would have no book if the author was a hero: they would say "I'm not doing this," quit, and that would be the end of it. By this definition, only an unheroic person could've written it. By the same definition, an firsthand expose of Meta could never be written by a trustworthy person.
This obviously protects the company: you are ceding this ground to them, "No trustworthy person could work at your company and write an expose." I don't think we should cede that to them.
Why is it that the only people willing to testify against the cartel are murderers, drug dealers, and bank robbers? These are not trustworthy witnesses.
GP's point is not that only heroes should tell the tale, but rather that in this case the whistleblower was also an active part of the problem, but sought to distance herself from her then behavior by swapping it down instead for a more passive lack of situational awereness. That is, she reached for stupidity as an escape hatch from having to reckon with her own malice. And she's now being celebrated for it.
The lack of accountability paired with the celebration of the "hero" are the problem. Not the fact of her testimony.
EDIT: Some people who have similarly testified acknowledged the part they played in the situation they later denounced. So, it is possible for the story to be told and for the teller to also say "I knew what was up. I said nothing. I did nothing. I'm sorry."
The fact that she did end up setting herself apart is what's remarkable. For every one of her who was able to self-reflect, become horrified of the ethics of what she was doing, and took the hard steps of stopping and breaking away, how many current and former Meta employees don't do this reflection and remain contributors to the problem? 1:100? 1:1,000? 1:10,000?
A few years ago I had a date with a backend engineer at Meta.
I asked if they'd ever considered the societal implications of the work they did. They said "Oh wow I've never even thought about it". Probably a solid hire from Meta's perspective.
I know an ex-Facebook employee who told me that "Nobody at Facebook ever makes a conscious decision about whether something is good or bad. You are given a metric, and your job is to make that metric go up. If it turns out that making the metric go up has negative consequences [for the business, I don't think it's anyone's job to worry about the rest of society], then somebody else is given another metric to ameliorate the negative consequences of you making your metric go up."
He didn't last all that long, he had a conscience. I've heard similar things, but not quite in such clear words, from several other people I know who have worked at Facebook/Meta.
I know couple of people who said exactly same thing. One of them is quite smart and I asked what was his/her personal opinion and I've heard: "I'd rather not talk about it ever again"
That's a really effective way to get a group of people to do horrible things. Break it up into small pieces where each one isn't that bad in and of itself.
Basically how a corporation is structured. The whole point is limited legal liability, so that the corporation as a whole can do things that would be blatantly illegal if any one person did them.
Governments too. The defining characteristic of a state is the monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Some more recent theories on state formation come down to the state being the biggest bandit of them all, the one that subsumes and threatens to kill all other organized sources of violence, and hence becomes the "legitimate" one simply because it has eliminated all other contenders. One of the most popular courses at my college was entitled "Murder", and the syllabus was largely devoted to this tension between how the worst crime of all, when talking about individuals, is simply how states do business.
Maybe I'm just a wacky Bleeding-Heart, but I don't think it's unreasonable to expect someone who worked on a product that amplified hate, leading up to a massacre in Myanmar, to at least address that without sarcasm while getting to know them.
Getting to know the views and values of your date is not a weird thing to do on the first date. If it’s a question that annoys them, they should consider why.
Imagine dating someone who works at Facebook, though. I can't imagine who would be so utterly dense as to offer so presumptuous a complaint, but he'd better be at least a 13 out of 10 or I'm not even bothering to pretend to go to the bathroom and then sneak out the back.
That can only be a sarcastic answer, don’t you think?? You really believe people would get a job at former Facebook, after lots of scandals have been exposed, and not even think about that?? Sorry no way.
Even if she was fired it was an act of courage and a step in the right direction to write a book about it. The company is cancer, no wonder they named it Meta.
Did you read the book? Because that's not the story, she way too many opportunities to do that, yet didn't. Only after she stopped getting paid, she did an "expose".
I hate facebook more than the next guy but this person just helped Facebook to accomplish usual evil things, and only stopped once she cannot profit. I'm pretty sure she didn't start that way or maybe even saw it that way, but objectively (in her own narrative, if you only take actions and ignore her own emotional justifications) that's what happened.
If we require every whistleblower to be a saint, then we’ll never hear a whistle. If you have a serious criticism of their credibility, that’s potentially different, but arbitrary criticisms of someone’s moral worth is mostly irrelevant.
The fact that someone actively worked against the welfare of society as a whole, in significant and impactful ways, _is_ a criticism of their credibility. It speaks to their morals and empathy for others.
It doesn't mean that what they're saying is a lie, but it puts them firmly in the bucket where what they say needs to be verified.
The message is that they're bad and the fact that they did these bad things proves they're bad.
And the key thing here is that we need to decide if we believe "they did these bad things". If the person reporting them is well known as someone the is truthful and trustworthy, we're likely to believe them with little proof. If the person reporting them is well known as a bad person that does things to harm others for their own benefit... we're less likely to believe them until we can verify the truth of their statements.
You're completely skipping over the "is this person telling the truth" part; I assume because they're saying things that fit in with your pre-existing view of the world. And that's not a good thing.
Because recognizing the author as conflicted and an unreliable narrator changes how you should weight and consider the information they are providing. It doesn't necessarily mean anything is untrue - but it does add extra, valuable information to how much you trust it.
If someone tells me something, I'm mostly likely to believe it without further investigation. But not always.
I think the point is that up until she was fired, she was Meta. She wasn’t a random employee, she was their global public policy director. She wasn’t just implementing policy, she was responsible for creating it.
The question remains whether or not she would have written this book had she not been fired.
It’s not like she quit due to her ethical objections
The question does indeed remain, but is it a question whose answer matters?
If someone exposes a shady organization why should I care if they did it for ethical reasons or for something less noble like revenge for getting kicked out of that organization?
I think it does? "scummy person loses job, finds another way to cash in" almost seems to becoming a trope? I think it raises questions about what is left _out_ of the book, not just what's in it - are the issues raised the worst/most important, or just the ones that will sell the most books? Did we really need someone to 'tell us' meta/social media can be evil?
There are reasons that (some) criminals are not allowed to profit from books/movies about their crimes.
Anyway, that's just my general feelings about this sort book - I've never heard of the book or the author. And I honestly have no interest in reading it. Based on what I'm reading here - that would basically be rewarding/enriching one of the 'bad actors' ?
Yes. 100%. And the fact that you're not seeing why it does is confounding to me.
This person has shown that they are willing to harm society (for their own benefit, presumably); by active choice. And, as such, anything they say needs to be viewed through the lens of "is this person lying for their own benefit".
1. Their previous actions do mean that we should not trust what they are saying outright, we should do (more) work verifying the information they provide.
2. Their previous actions to _not_ mean we should avoid holding other accountable when the information provided turns out to be true.
You're asking your question like someone is arguing that this person's information doesn't matter (2); but the point being made is that we should (1).
Knowing something is happening and reading detailed descriptions of them actually occurring is different, IMO. I learned things I didn't know while reading it, at least.
Many of the juicy stories from the book have no supporting evidence other than the claims of the author. Their credibility is all we have to go on here. If someone wrote a message here saying that they were a fly on the wall at the publisher’s office where they had a workshop inventing these stories to sell more books, you’d be right to question their motives.
Even justice system considers the trustworthiness of a witness, evaluating incentive, conflict of interest.
Having worked in another FAANG, I realize a large number of criticisms do come from imaginations, since I could see the contrast first hand. Nobody could tell exactly the consequences of all actions, most of the time it's just a buncha folks trying to figure out what to do, experimenting, iterating. Have you tried executing a conspiracy, like a surprise party? Good luck keeping a secret with more than 5 people.
There's also the problem of perspective. To a less technical engineer who don't know what they don't know, having their deliverable rejected time and again could feel like a conspiracy against them. If you read a blog post from them you'd think the culture is very toxic when everyone is doing their best juggling to be considerate while keeping the quality high.
As with others commenting on this, I've no idea how true the book is, in fact I have never read it. OTOH, even without the book, researches saying social media is making teenagers depress look convincing to me, and, although it's a losing battle, privacy matters a lot to me so I've personally stopped using social media for many years.
None of these give me full confidence to trust nor distrust the narrator, for things that you can't observe externally. It's all percentage.
I believe what Sarah Wynn-Williams wrote in Careless People.
I also think she's shown herself to be a person I'd want to stay away from.
The reason this matters to me is because the more media attention Ms. Wynn-Williams gets, the more her ideas of what we should do about Meta will spread and be given credence. The more she will be given credence outside of simply reporting what she saw. I can both believe what she says and think it's best to stop fanning the flames and giving her personal attention.
This entire saga reads to me as intra-elite fighting: Ms. Wynn-Williams is representing the cultural/educational elite, and obviously the Meta execs are the tech elite. As an ordinary person, I'm not under any delusion that either side has my best interest in mind when they fight, or when they advance policy, regulatory, or other suggestions. The derision and disdain Ms. Wynn-Williams has for people not in her milieu throw up a lot of red flags for me.
It comes down to believing that Ms. Wynn-Williams wants to hurt Meta, not to help us.
I also believe that blindly supporting people or organizations just because they also hate people or organizations you hate is a very bad idea. The enemy of your enemy can still be your enemy. In this case, regarding technological politics, Zuck and co. want us to become braindead addicted zombies, and Ms. Wynn-Williams will want us to have no control or access at all, because we can't handle it and it's for our own good. She's from the cultural group pushing for things like age restriction and verification, devices you can't root/restricting what you can install on your own device, etc. Both are bad. One sees us as cattle and the other sees us as toddlers.
Yeah, the fact that she realized what's going on and still worked tirelessly to give Mark / Facebook more negotiating power speaks volumes. I also can't buy the whole "I have financial woes and can't escape" spin that she puts on her situation.
“I only make $4M/ year in RSUs and am an attorney, however will I pay for daycare for my three kids and teacher husband. I better continue acting unethically and profiting from hosing people.”
This was such a weird argument. I think the author may actually be self-deluding herself as I can’t imagine her or her editors think anyone buys this argument.
I don't know if anyone is holding the author up as a hero, least of all herself. The book reads as a masterclass in grooming, manipulation and abuse.
If anything, the title "Careless People" does a disservice to its message: the people above and around her clearly knew exactly what they were doing, and took great care to evade any and all responsibility for anything.
I haven't read the book, but I don't think there's anything dishonest about needing distance to see the context of what she was a part of. Now, if she is trying to paint herself as completely outside of that even while she was knee-deep in it, that's a different matter but hindsight isn't something to be dismissed.
You are probably right that she was part of it all. There what money and power do to you. We need to limit it. The eat the rich stuff is the wrong messaging but the right goal. We need to reduce concentration of wealth and power.
> I think it's becoming a trap to hold the author up as a hero
Cool, then don’t do that.
Every single employee at Meta is still vile and making the world a worse place every single day, and anything exposing the depths of their shittiness, no matter the source, is a good thing.
Understanding takes effort too, effort that might be better spent creating value.
Also, understanding creates culpability. So that's a downside. It's like people who walk in front of you on the road and pretend to not notice you. If I don't see the badness then I am not responsible for the badness.
And thirdly, never underestimate people's power to ignore.
One of the hardest things to do is to put yourself in the place of those you see as villains and recognize that they generally see themselves as heroes. The human capacity for self-justification is extremely powerful.
It's the flipside of focus/concentration of attention. Which is the key trick underlying all science, engineering, scholarship etc. The foundation of our civilization.
So you might say that a vast ignorance is implicit to our way of life.
I read this book thinking that it'll be some expose but honestly it was underwhelming in a sense, it's almost better than I thought. Everything in the book either was obvious for anyone who worked in the industry, or better than I thought it'd be. There were some weird personal things about Zuckerberg, but even those were expected or given.
It was an OK read, however as I read it all I can think of author is just a naive person who didn't know what she was getting into, and remained naive for a long time. Author herself say this in the book couple of times as well.
Maybe this is a book that's "eye opening" to someone who's an outsider but if you are somehow in this business the book is practically nothing burger, or even worse actually make Facebook look better than I actually have imagined they would be.
Another similar book is : "Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble", I read it expecting some crazy story, but it was yet another case of an outsider's take of the standard industry practice. I'm sure this is interesting for those never been in these circles, but for everyone else it's just another day in today's tech world. (Just to be clear, I don't support or condone any of this stuff but it's such a common place and given, unfortunately not even interesting at this point).
It's like saying "Today's big companies follow lots of dark patterns such as forcing customers to call them to close their accounts, which became a standard practice in banks, SaaS and other businesses." It's an observation, nothing more than that.
You posed it as an observation only known to insiders of the industry. This book was targeted to the general public. By saying 'its no big deal' to anyone who thinks it is, you are are saying that those in the industry are normalized to it, and that the normalization should be the status quo. Like working in a factory farm slaughterhouse and saying everyone should be normalized to the suffering that goes on in there, instead of trying to change it.
That's a strange outlook. How often do you still get shocked that a politician lied? Do you cultivate the surprise effect by fear of feeling complicit if your reaction instead is "what else is new?"
when people do disgusting things, it's okay to be disgusted - saying "what else is new?" is nearly "this does not disgust me" which is essentially condoning it.
not being shocked because it reinforces a negative stereotype you'd already assumed is not the same as dismissing it as uninteresting/expected behavior
Because at least someone benefits. It's why theft is arguably better than vandalism. If you steal the thing, at least someone gets to use it. If it's vandalized, no-one does.
There are more productive ways to vote with your money than tax evasion.
You can make tax-exempt donations, or start your own non-profit organization.
Some people hoard money without building businesses, without participating in government, without contributing to welfare. People who take more than they give are assholes.
It sounds like you're navigating a really dark time, man.
Some things that have helped me reset in the past:
• the easiest way to make friends is to go volunteer somewhere. doing hard things with people is the only way i've found to deepen relationships. you will want to hang out with people you've picked up trash with, but maybe not folks you've played pickleball with
• spend 12 hours bicycling in one direction on Saturday, and then bicycle back home on Sunday
• no booze, no weed, no cigs
• it sounds like you also want companionship. the way to find a life partner comes naturally from the other things: making deep friendships via volunteering, resisting the algos, being healthy, etc.
• all of these probably require energy that you don't think you have. set a 5:00am alarm and your brain will eventually accept that your body wants to do the new thing
Dude. This comment of yours made me quite angry. I feel insulted, sort of like Dostoyevsky would feel getting writing advice from an average run-of-the-mill, unsuccessful chicklit writer. Also made me realize that I'm in a much better spot than you, and wouldn't trade with your position for all the money in the world.
Because it sounds like you're just clueless, or have the emotional intelligence of a teenager, or just lacking life experience. All of the things you mentioned are useless, some are harmful, to the point that I wonder what exactly was in your mind when you made this thread.
Was there a genuine desire to help? Then I should probably mail you a bank account. I'd use the money for people in need, not for myself. But I think it's more likely that you just felt some sort of a need for validation, that seems to be the main driving force behind it.
Yeah, I'm admittedly pretty clueless! I'm trying to learn
Very sorry I rubbed you the wrong way. I wanted to share some things that have helped me, but it may have come off as prescriptive/condescending. Sorry about that
If we build everything right, only library maintainers should really ever feel the borrow checker.
For example, I've been experimenting with a new primitive that creates a sort of Agent/GoFunc thing:
But I'm really not sure where this whole thing is headed yet :)reply