Sarah Wynn Williams’ Careless People
Sarah Wynn Williams was a diplomat in New Zealand and an international lawyer. Inspired by what she saw as Facebook’s formidable potential, she lobbied the platform for months, before being hired and ultimately rose to Director of Global Public Policy at the platform. Promoted it seems because her idealism was a completely new approach.
It was to be a harrowing ride midst some talented people who refined a techno puzzle, had some wins and some failures, all of it enhanced by lavish lifestyles, while generating fantastical amounts of money.
The figure at the center of this whirlwind was Mark Zuckerberg, initially a feckless Harvard undergrad, fast becoming one of the world’s richest men.
Convinced that Facebook had the potential to remake the global communications universe Wynn-William’s pitches the powers at Facebook on their latent potential and helps shape the platform into a power base that will come to rival the nation-state.
But the world she enters, driven by her sense of its potential is to prove a minefield littered with the victims of Zuckerberg’s indifference, sexual predators male and female, and massive failures of character and vision.
An equity clause at the company insures some of the players will retire to millions should they survive the toxic corporate atmosphere. All of this is complicated by Wynn-Williams health problems which lead to hospital stays and coma.tales end she will be mother to three children and a husband bewildered by a wife snared between Zuckerberg’s ego and a male execs sexual harassment.
Facebooks failure to even comprehend the disaster in Myanmar is to have horrendous consequences: mass rape and murder, torture, and Zuckerberg’s indifference combine to produce a horror scenario thats never really fully understood.
Anxious for a Chinese market, the business cuts sub rosa deals and then fogs its tactics despite Congressional interest and interrogations.
There is much evidence of vulnerable teens targeted for their dollars despite statistical evidence that they are being exploited.
Zuckerberg’s political ambitions are aroused when one of his execs explains just what Trump’s team did with Facebook’s help to win his first election. Obama, enraged at Zuckerberg’s complicity in the Trump win, insults the CEO, whose fragile ego never quite recovers – despite his employees attempts to salvage the moment.
Wynn-Williams discovers that Facebook enthroned a Harvard boy elitism that would shame a Borgia Court. She is mindful that Facebook had its beginnings as a Harvard dating app that soon ballooned to world phenomena.
Employees are careful not to leave the room following a Zuckerberg meeting before the CEO-a protocol carefully observed by the compromised elite who head a company overseen by a vacillating billionaire. That Zuckerberg and Co have tried to suppress the memoir should not come as News.
From what has filtered to us from Facebook, Amazon and Silicon Valley-the high tech cultures are both complicated and ruthlessly profit driven enterprises in demand by interests both national and domestic.
And there are some surprises, as Wynn-Williams notes: Zuckerberg is at first shocked at Trumps first run win, and wounded that he is being dissed for this initial success-unaware that Trumps team had worked closely with Facebook employees. Trump paid Facebook huge amounts for access to its platform.
What seems strange midst Zuckerberg’s vacillating is the narrow mindedness of the Facebook operation, and its insistent low roading despite Wynn-Stewarts efforts to educate the company.
And yes it does all end badly-as Wynn-Stewart grows increasingly disenchanted with Zuckerberg and a sexually aggressive aide de camp who helps engineer her firing.
Lest you entertain any sympathy for Zuckerberg and Co……her computer was confiscated and she was escorted, by Security, from the building. It’s a sordid end to what had begun as the attempts of an Idealist and accomplished woman.
In the meantime,Zuckerberg, like Bezos, grows richer by the minute.