Careless People: Sarah Wynn-Williams

You should read “Careless People: A story of where I used to work”. The author is Sarah Wynn-Williams. She spent a lot of time at Facebook, at a level high enough to get to fly around with the boss in the corporate jet. Her story starts with a shark attack and then gets properly exciting.

Having identified a need for an ethical framework at Facebook and persuaded the company to take her on board to build it, she learns that the company doesn’t actually care about ethics. It cares about numbers. The number of users, the amount of their engagement, and the amount the company can earn from monetising all of this. Her carefully constructed checks and balances become just part of the campaign to get to more people and organisations and make bigger numbers.

People have reacted with surprise at some of the things revealed in this book. Not so much me. One of my theories (I have many) is that some people will try to get away with anything a given situation will let them. Great Power might come with Great Responsibility, as Peter Parker’s uncle said, but you can choose not to exercise any responsibility. If it takes time, costs money and reduces numbers you can just do what you like instead of worrying about bad things like law breaking and getting folks killed.

I’d love to think that there is an ending coming up where some of these chickens come home to roost. Where people find out that they are not above the law and that actions have consequences. But I don’t see that happening any time soon. And it will only happen if enough people read books like this one and start to think more about where the world is heading.