The humour and morality void at the heart of Meta

Over the weekend, inspired by Meta’s campaign to silence the author, I picked up the new Facebook whistleblower book Careless People, by former executive Sarah Wynn-Williams. And it’s bloody great. So well-written, so well paced, and laugh-out-loud funny in places. (I have a strong sense that it will get darker, though.)

Even in the early stages, the quotes are just killer:

Javi’s my favourite of the coworkers here tonight; Javier Olivan, in charge of “growth” at Facebook, which means he’s the person responsible for getting the billions who still aren’t on the platform to sign up. Javi’s a laid-back Spaniard and one of the few people in top management with a sense of humour.

Yeah, the fact that it has a management board with no sense of humour explains an awful lot about the company. I hate to play to the stereotype of Zuckerberg, but sometimes you just have to: “humour is illogical”…

But most days, working on policy at Facebook was way less like enacting a chapter from Machiavelli and way more like watching a bunch of fourteen-year-olds who’ve been given superpowers and an ungodly amount of money, as they jet around the world to figure out what power has bought and brought them.

Zuckerberg once famously described Twitter as a clown car that drove into a goldmine. Facebook is a clown car that’s smashed its way through the world’s social and political systems.

Why Careless People matters

Books like this are important. We need these insights into the tech behemoths that have reshaped the world. Understanding how they operate matters, for reasons John Naughton outlined in The Observer over the weekend:

… perhaps the most useful thing about her whistleblowing is that it provides an intimate picture of what a major tech company is really like. . What strikes the reader is that Meta and its counterparts are merely the digital equivalents of the oil, mining and tobacco conglomerates of the analogue era. And they’re all US companies that have cosied up to Trump, which means that their interests are now inextricably intertwined with those of the American state.

This has major implications for the UK. It means, for example, that any attempt by the government to regulate Meta, X (née Twitter), Amazon et al will be regarded by Trump as an act of economic warfare. The time has come for Starmer & Co to grow some backbone and stop drinking the Kool Aid about AI so liberally dispensed by the Tony Blair Institute. And to recognise that the servile cringing of the technology secretary, Peter Kyle, when in the presence of US tech bros has become a national security issue.

Right, back to the book…