Mark Zuckerberg Doesn't Want You to Read This Book
Hi!
“Sarah Wynn-Williams’s insider account of her time at Facebook arrived nearly under cover of darkness, with no promotion from the author or publisher until a week before its publication on March 11,” writes Jonathan Zavaleta at Rolling Stone. “Shortly after its publication, Facebook successfully won an emergency ruling from an arbitrator to block Wynn-Williams, the former director of global public policy at Facebook, from promoting the memoir.”
Facebook didn’t stop at suing the memoirist into silence. Their PR firm also harassed Washington Post book critic Ron Charles in an unprecedented pressure campaign which Charles said he had never encountered in his nearly three decades at the Post.
God knows what else Facebook is doing to try to get you to not read Careless People, Wynn-Williams’s memoir. Mark Zuckerberg clearly doesn’t want you to read it, and we all have heard stories about what Mark Zuckerberg will do to get what he wants: According to some accounts, he’ll buy a competitor outright, he’ll steal an idea for a website, and he’ll even allow bad actors to throw elections.
I don’t know about you, but when a billionaire doesn’t want me to read a book, I am overpowered by an urge to read the damn book. So I bought Careless People, and I read it. Regardless of how you may feel about the subject matter of the book, I urge you to do the same. When Facebook expends resources to silence an author, it’s up to the book-loving public to make sure that book gets in front of as many people as possible. (And I understand if you don’t have the money to buy Careless People—times are tough and the president is driving the economy into a ditch—but you can and still should request it from your local library.)
For what it’s worth, I really enjoyed Careless People. It’s Wynn-Williams’ account of how she basically tricked Facebook into hiring her as a foreign policy advisor, back when Facebook was just small enough that it didn’t realize it needed a foreign policy advisor. I swallowed the book in two big gulps. Wynn-Williams sprinkles enough breadcrumbs of gossip and lurid details in every chapter to keep a reader happily following along to the very end.
Basically, here’s the takeaway: Think of the dumbest boss you’ve ever had—the absolutely most thoughtless, casually cruel person you’ve ever met on the job. Now multiply that idiocy by a thousand, and you’re still not close to approaching the cluelessness of Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, and the damage that those two do on a micro and macro scale over the course of this book.
For instance, Zuckerberg never questions why he always wins every board game he plays with his employees on long flights on his private jet—he just assumes he’s better at everything than everyone else. It never seems to occur to him that he’s surrounded by sycophants and terrified underlings. Sandberg performs feminism in public while gleefully stomping on women who fail to cater to her smallest whim. It would be hilarious if it weren’t so goddamned terrifying.
Let’s be clear: This isn’t some smarmy tell-all. But it is cleverly disguised as a smarmy tell-all. Wynn-Williams knows that people want to read the lurid details of what it’s like to be in the Facebook inner circle, and she knows how to utilize those details to maximum narrative effect.
But what she really wants to do, as someone who cares deeply about the health of international relations, is send up a warning flare that Facebook is committing unbelievable harms in nations around the world—particularly developing nations. Once you’ve consumed all the salacious details, at the end of the book Wynn-Williams makes a clear-headed case that Facebook desperately needs to be regulated around the world, because these are not people you want to trust with your data.
They’re more than careless people; they have enough power that their lack of caution and high self-regard have transformed them into monsters. People have died because of their actions, and more will die unless someone takes a stand. Wynn-Williams deserves our respect for taking this principled stand, and this is a book that deserves to be read by everyone.
I’ve Been Writing
Last month, I wrote about Hex Enduction Records and Books, a tiny bookstore in the corner of a small record store on Lake City Way that punches way above its weight. If you miss the small cultural hubs that used to be in every neighborhood of Seattle that carried zines, records, and counterculture literature, you’ll be pleased to discover that their spirit is alive and well at Hex Enduction.
I also highlighted some of the best new paperbacks to be released in March.
And on the Pitchfork Economics podcast, Goldy and I interviewed Lainey Newman, the co-author of a book titled Rust Belt Union Blues, which argues that the decline of unions is more than just an economic and policy failure. She says that unions have declined in part because they’ve stopped filling the social needs of members. Union halls used to be places where people would gather to play pool with neighbors and host weddings and big birthday parties. Unions used to march in parades and participate in communities. As that civic participation declined, Newman argues, so did union membership.
I’ve Been Reading
Crumble is a graphic novel for young readers about a young girl in a family of bakers who imbue their baked goods with emotions that other people can feel. When there’s a death in the family, the grief in her baked goods start to emotionally harm other people. I liked this one a lot. The artist, Andrea Bell, is a new favorite of mine. She also illustrated a graphic novel for young readers about journalism called The Leak that I really enjoyed.
Obviously we’re in a period of reinvestigating Huckleberry Finn right now. In the flood of tributes and homages and critical reassessments, I don’t want you to miss the graphic novel Big Jim and the White Boy, which is written by David F. Walker and drawn by Marcus Kwame Anderson. It spins together multiple narratives to look at Huckleberry Finn from many different angles, including a framing story in which an elderly Jim and Huck argue over the details of the Mark Twain novel. I know Percival Everett kind of has the last word in this particular subgenre right now with his blockbuster novel James, but I don’t want this beautiful comic to get lost in the flood of press attention that book has (rightfully!) gotten.
When I was at Hex Enduction Records and Books, I picked up a staff recommendation called Jellyfish Have No Ears by Adele Rosenfeld, a novel about a Deaf woman who is struggling with the question of whether to get cochlear implants. There have been a few interesting films, TV shows, and comics that have used their particular qualities to convey the world without sound—silent episodes, comics pages with no word balloons, that kind of thing—but I think this book does a good job of that by just putting us inside the Deaf woman’s head and letting her explain her experiences directly.
Chelsea Cain’s Heartsick is a thriller about using a serial killer to catch another serial killer that is not going to join the pantheon of great serial killer fiction, but I enjoyed it just the same.
This month, NYRB released another Tove Jansson novel that had not previously been available in America. Sun City is by no means my favorite of hers—that’s still The Summer Book, which I re-read every summer—but I’m glad that I read it. It’s a novel about a retirement community in Florida and a pair of young burned out hippies who live in the orbit of those older folks. I especially loved Chapter 6, in which a woman writes a letter to her son that actually tells the truth, for once in her life. It’s a beautiful little standalone story that evokes the bittersweet perfection of Jansson’s best work.
The novelist Geoff Nicholson died last month. I went through a period in the early 2000s when I read pretty much everything he wrote. I guess you’d call him a midlist author—he never broke big, but he had a small and reliable audience. One of his obituaries mentioned he wrote a nonfiction book called The Lost Art of Walking that I had never read, and so I had to track it down. It’s a slight non-fiction book of the kind that was published frequently in the late 90s and early 2000s—one chapter is pretty much Nicholson just listing songs that mention walking, which feels like a very before-the-internet kind of thing to do—but I was happy to be surrounded by his voice one more time, and to learn that he and I shared a love of long hikes in non-traditional hiking places.
Stuff Is Messed Up
It’s bad. It’s really bad. Students being pulled off the streets by masked thugs for cosigning an op-ed, experts in the history of fascism fleeing the country, an economy sliding into bad territory.
But I’ve seen some signs of life. Trump won’t let Elise Stefanik go to the United Nations because he’s worried Democrats would win in a Republican stronghold district, for instance. Wisconsin leaders are finally pushing back against Elon Musk’s blatantly illegal vote-buying scheme. And of course, the protests against Musk’s businesses are still going strong.
I don’t want to make any predictions, but it does seem as though Trump is already at a point where he’s starting to take on water—his polling on the economy is below 50% for the first time ever, for instance. If the economy continues to slide, his popularity is likely to tank along with it.
In the meantime, the question in my mind is this: How many people are going to just roll over and let Trump have what he wants? Those executive orders he’s signing that strip workers of union power and end voting by mail have no legal standing. But how much will states and the courts let him get away with, and how often will they push back?
In the end, I think the most important factor is not whether Trump takes control over the United States—it’s whether our institutions let him take control. If more people refuse to comply, that becomes a positive feedback loop and all of a sudden Trump looks a lot more fallible. Once people start to see a would-be demagogue as a human with human weaknesses, it’s almost impossible for them to reclaim an air of invincibility.
That should be the goal of everyone who stands against the fascists: You don’t have to beat them, you just have to reveal their humanity. That’s the way to win.
Take care,
Paul