Book recommendations: Drax & Meta
How money from the slave trade is still influencing British politics — and the inside story of the people in Facebook that ended up upending society.
Drax of Drax Hall
Drax of Drax Hall is not, despite the name, a Guardians of the Galaxy ti-in novel, but a seriously long-form piece of investigative journalism by my colleague Dr Paul Lashmar. Drax of Drax Hall tells the story of how one family made money hand over fist from the slave trade in the Caribbean — and how that still impacts us today. The latest scion of the Drax family, Richard Drax, was a Tory MP until the last election, and contributor to the pro-Brexit European Research Group.
Paul held a launch for the book at City St George's journalism department last week, and was joined by Luke Daniels, president of Caribbean Labour Solidarity, who talked about the long-term impacts on the Caribbean community of slavery. He made an interesting and compelling argument for targeted reparations, not as a form of punishment, but as a practical measure to directly address the long-term harms done.
Luke Daniels and Dr Paul Lashmar talking about the long-term impact of the sugar and slave trades.
The gathering of the great and the good from two distinct communities made for a fascinating evening — and powerful reminder of how impactful journalism can be in whatever from it's published.
Many journalism worthies celebrating the launch of Paul's book.
Careless People
It's astonishing that people who have worked in digital as long as the senior leadership at Meta have, apparently managed to avoid learning about the Streisand Effect. Yet, by trying incredibly hard to shut down a memory by a former staffer, they've managed to propel it into the bestseller lists. Sarah Wynn-Williams spend years as, effectively, Facebook's diplomat to the countries of the world, until she was eventually fired in 2017. But that job? She campaigned long and hard to get it, to persuade the company that they needed somebody in the role.
The picture she paints is of someone consumed by the techno-utopianism of the early 2010s, but with enough practical experience to see the political roadblocks ahead. And, nearly a decade after she left, she's chosen to write a memoir of her experiences, much to Meta's anger and, it appears, panic.
As soon as I hear about it, a grabbed an ebook, and have been (largely) loving it. There are a couple of quite difficult moments of body horror (a shark attack and a birth), but the deeply unsettling experience of seeing the scales dropping from the eyes of a Facebook True Believer as she realises quite how little her fellow senior leadership care about the impact of their work on society as a whole is really what the book is about.
The Cold and the Hypocritical
As for the careless people of the title? (Yes, it's an allusion to a quote from The Great Gatsy that reproduced at the beginning of the book.) The portrait of Mark Zuckerberg as a distant, coding-focused dictator shouldn't surprise anybody, but the picture Wynn-Williams paints of Sheryl Sandberg is probably the most shocking — someone whose Lean In book is deeply hypocritical, a lecture to other women from someone whose extreme wealth is able to isolate her from any of the difficult bits of childrearing.
If you ever thought that the company whose self-declared mission was connecting people was oddly inhuman — this book will explain why.
As journalism — and journalists — get into bed with other platforms owners, be they Bytedance or Substack — this book is a timely reminder of how little their interests align with ours.
The News Agents did a great interview with the author:
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