> There's Zuck, whose underlings let him win at board-games like Settlers of Catan because he's a manbaby who can't lose (and who accuses Wynn-Williams of cheating when she fails to throw a game of Ticket to Ride while they're flying in his private jet).
Why does this seem to be a recurring pattern among the modern ultrawealthy? Does anyone who fails to bend over backwards for them just end up getting exiled? Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon?
If you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game? Being good at any kind of game is mostly a function of how much time and energy you've invested into it. If you claim to be an extremely hardcore worker who has any kind of family life there just aren't any leftover hours in the day for you to grind a top position in a game. And anyway, if you're playing games for fun and to bond with people, you probably shouldn't be playing tryhard optimal strategies every game, and should instead explore and experiment with more creative strategies. This is a lesson that took me a while to learn.
I’m only part of the way through the book, so have nothing to spoil here. But it’s entertaining. And shocking. The author will relate a scene that’s so absurd that you think “ah, this can’t be true, this is made up for dramatic effect, nobody would act like that” and then you Google it and you realize the absurd thing is totally true and was fully documented at the time. All the author is adding is a perspective from the inside.
I understand why Facebook people might have wanted the book to go away. That their attempt to do so comically backfired and resulted in entirely the opposite effect, well, that’s also pretty much what you’d expect from this crew after reading the book.
The book is a good read and she also testified in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee[0], repeating many of the claims from the book under oath. One of the striking things is that it's clear that Mark and several others from Facebook perjured themselves in prior hearings. I expect there will be no consequence for this.
This review is as naive as Wynn-Williams portrays herself in her memoir (which I enjoyed!)
In the book, Wynn-Williams described herself as a wide-eyed, almost helpless person, which doesn't align with her pre-Facebook career as a lawyer in the a diplomatic corps. And when at FB, she was in the rooms where it happened, and had a job enabling some of it. She could've quit, but did not.
She was one of the titular careless people at the time, and excuses it now by pointing at others who were even more careless. It's not atonement, it's whitewashing.
She didn't respond, which is fair enough, it's probably not big enough to be interesting to her. But then I got auto-added to her PR mailing list. I didn't ask or consent to be on the PR mailing list (all the page says as of now is "To contact Sarah, please complete the form below"). Seems I was just added because I used the "contact" form.
Auto-adding someone who contacts you to a PR mailing list is a dark pattern. Seems she learned something at Facebook. I found it ironic.
This may be a little naive from my side, but I'm wondering - is every big tech company the same as Meta and it's leadership? Or is there something special, a perfect storm of circumstances that we only hear so much about so many instances of outright - can't even find the right word here - evil, stupidity, brashness?
If we assume that every big (let's say FAANG) company is the same, why we hear about Meta time and time again?
It's nice to know that despite playing fast and loose with the facts, the film The Social Network does capture something fundamentally true about Zuckerberg's psychology. The pathological need to dominate can be disguised when you're the underdog, but the more power you accrue the more it becomes the sole motivation. To paraphrase Robert Caro, "power does not corrupt, it reveals."
Doctorow touches on this, but I really think the biggest problem with society today is simply that too many people in power simply don't experience consequences
This is a small bit, and I don't know anything about Zuckerberg's personal life, but "he refuses to get out of bed before noon" is normally more a sign of depression than laziness.
Wynn-Williams gets Zuck a chance to address the UN General Assembly. As is his wont, Zuck refuses to be briefed before he takes the dais
Holy moly! No matter what your feelings are towards the effectiveness of U.N, addressing the general assembly is a huge opportunity to stand out, send a message, do something good etc. What a waste
"When he gets to the mic, he spontaneously promises that Facebook will provide internet access to refugees all over the world. Various teams at Facebook then race around, trying to figure out whether this is something the company is actually doing, and once they realize Zuck was just bullshitting, set about trying to figure out how to do it.
They get some way down this path when Kaplan intervenes to insist that giving away free internet to refugees is a bad idea, and that instead, they should sell internet access to refugees. Facebookers dutifully throw themselves into this absurd project, which dies when Kaplan fires off an email stating that he's just realized that refugees don't have any money. The project dies."
I'm responding to TheAceOfHearts, I can't seem to reply directly to the original comment.
The question was "if you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?"
You kind of answered the question yourself. He cares so much because he is successful in something else and has extended that need for success into other areas of his life. It seems this is common among successful people, they try to be successful in everything else in their lives, perhaps not realizing they might have got lucky in one area and are convinced they can apply that to all other areas of their lives.
> Wynn-Williams's firsthand account of the next decade is not a story of these people becoming more reckless, rather, it's a story in which the possibility of consequences for that recklessness recedes, and with it, so does their care over those consequences.
I often feel similar when I witness rich people operate, and I’m sure others on different wealth scales observe the same in me. It’s wild to observe someone take risky/dangerous positions, fail, and then shrug it off when you would have been ruined. One of those observable moments of privilege. I feel like it would be something interesting to study.
It’s a good memoir and like the author of this review. I too only picked it up because of Mark/Meta’s attempt to suppress the promotion of it. Listened to a couple of chapters on an audiobook service before picking up physical copy and was hooked.
>Zuck learns Mandarin. He studies Xi's book, conspicuously displays a copy of it on his desk. Eventually, he manages to sit next to Xi at a dinner where he begs Xi to name his next child. Xi turns him down.
I do wonder what the point of amassing all that money and power is, if it means you end up grovelling to a despot like Xi (or a would-be despot like Trump).
Zuckerberg and co. always seem so basic. Settlers of Catan and Ticket To Ride? I can't imagine more flavorless, generic games.
Wait, those are the games that I play...
I remember listening to Zuckerberg speak at length about the various epochs of Facebook including the fast pivot to global, it's overall a fascinating and compelling story that the book surely capitalizes on well.
This book probably could have been written about any major company. Our corporate system's built-in moral imperative that profits must be optimized above absolutely everything else virtually guarantees that these kind of people end up at the top of each and every one of them.
Compliments to the author of this piece, Cory Doctorow, who I believe coined the useful term "enshittification". He has consistently championed consumer rights (presumably at a significant risk of having powerful people come after him) and lots of other worthwhile causes. And his writing is excellent.
here's a callous question: will it ever get to a tipping point where major businesses bail on react? is it already happening?
asking specifically because our backend is pretty much just esri and were heavily considering porting all of our web products to experience builder because of how robust it is these days. experience builder is on react, which sucks imo, but would be helpful to avoid getting the rug pulled on us
I don’t find the anecdotes very interesting—people with great power are or turn out to be assholes; sure, what else is new?—but this little gem stood out to me. Not that I’m surprised, just that it’s the first I heard of it:
> According to Wynn-Williams, Facebook actually built an extensive censorship and surveillance system for the Chinese state – spies, cops and military – to use against Chinese Facebook users, and FB users globally. They promise to set up caches of global FB content in China that the Chinese state can use to monitor all Facebook activity, everywhere, with the implication that they'll be able to spy on private communications, and censor content for non-Chinese users.
Trying to get Xi to name his child is both completely tone deaf to the point of being offensive, and incredibly debilitating for his child's self-esteem as just a bargaining chip.
Anyone else notice how losing at simple board games seems scarier to billionaires than losing millions in business? Makes you wonder if it's because they can't control the outcome with money or power...
After the part where she was giving a birth to her child, while still writing emails and doing work stuff, I take everything she said with a grain of salt. As a father, the way she prioritised work to family through out many years of her work at FB, I find it very repelling and disgusting.
I believe that Zuck&team are slimy greedy spoiled brats, but I could also say few things about her. Which make me wonder what is actual truth, book is very biased.
This is exactly the type of people the cultural purge in big tech came to flush out. Trying to change a multi billion dollar company from the inside is delusional, self serving, narcissistic and ineffective. Who the hell do you think you are in the great machine of 100,000+ employees companies, of billions invested in them.
The change is going to be political, regulatory. These companies always can't change until regulation is there, and then they miraculously adapt. If you took big tech money for 7 years you were not part of the solution.
The lengths some people will go to self explain why they were not egotistical is amazing! This is not an expose, everything is well known, this is a books worth of convincing herself she is a good person after all.
I look forward to reading the book, but I’m not anti-Zuck.
Individuals can change the world. Groups with ideology can change the world.
This is why many of us are here at HN- for the discussion of ideas and for idealism.
Few want to be supreme jerks that ruin things on a massive scale.
Zuck, if you’re reading this- thanks for being part of the thing that allowed me to continue communication with my friends when they weren’t nearby, and thanks for continuing to provide that for my children.
Are things fucked up? Were lives ruined? Sure. We all fuck shit up and ruin lives, some of us more than others. Then we own up to that as much as we can and use what we have left to try to continue doing what we did before to try to make the world a better place.
Careless People
(pluralistic.net)998 points by Aldipower 24 April 2025 | 526 comments
Comments
Why does this seem to be a recurring pattern among the modern ultrawealthy? Does anyone who fails to bend over backwards for them just end up getting exiled? Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon?
If you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game? Being good at any kind of game is mostly a function of how much time and energy you've invested into it. If you claim to be an extremely hardcore worker who has any kind of family life there just aren't any leftover hours in the day for you to grind a top position in a game. And anyway, if you're playing games for fun and to bond with people, you probably shouldn't be playing tryhard optimal strategies every game, and should instead explore and experiment with more creative strategies. This is a lesson that took me a while to learn.
I understand why Facebook people might have wanted the book to go away. That their attempt to do so comically backfired and resulted in entirely the opposite effect, well, that’s also pretty much what you’d expect from this crew after reading the book.
0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3DAnORfgB8
In the book, Wynn-Williams described herself as a wide-eyed, almost helpless person, which doesn't align with her pre-Facebook career as a lawyer in the a diplomatic corps. And when at FB, she was in the rooms where it happened, and had a job enabling some of it. She could've quit, but did not.
She was one of the titular careless people at the time, and excuses it now by pointing at others who were even more careless. It's not atonement, it's whitewashing.
https://sarahwynnwilliams.com
She didn't respond, which is fair enough, it's probably not big enough to be interesting to her. But then I got auto-added to her PR mailing list. I didn't ask or consent to be on the PR mailing list (all the page says as of now is "To contact Sarah, please complete the form below"). Seems I was just added because I used the "contact" form.
Auto-adding someone who contacts you to a PR mailing list is a dark pattern. Seems she learned something at Facebook. I found it ironic.
If we assume that every big (let's say FAANG) company is the same, why we hear about Meta time and time again?
Holy moly! No matter what your feelings are towards the effectiveness of U.N, addressing the general assembly is a huge opportunity to stand out, send a message, do something good etc. What a waste
"When he gets to the mic, he spontaneously promises that Facebook will provide internet access to refugees all over the world. Various teams at Facebook then race around, trying to figure out whether this is something the company is actually doing, and once they realize Zuck was just bullshitting, set about trying to figure out how to do it.
They get some way down this path when Kaplan intervenes to insist that giving away free internet to refugees is a bad idea, and that instead, they should sell internet access to refugees. Facebookers dutifully throw themselves into this absurd project, which dies when Kaplan fires off an email stating that he's just realized that refugees don't have any money. The project dies."
The question was "if you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?"
You kind of answered the question yourself. He cares so much because he is successful in something else and has extended that need for success into other areas of his life. It seems this is common among successful people, they try to be successful in everything else in their lives, perhaps not realizing they might have got lucky in one area and are convinced they can apply that to all other areas of their lives.
I often feel similar when I witness rich people operate, and I’m sure others on different wealth scales observe the same in me. It’s wild to observe someone take risky/dangerous positions, fail, and then shrug it off when you would have been ruined. One of those observable moments of privilege. I feel like it would be something interesting to study.
- Casual indifference at exec level to atrocities happening because of FB/ Meta.
- Money/power does make you insensitive
- Tech bro view of the world permeates most decisions that Meta takes.
- Casual sexual harassment for women ( follows from the tech bro worldview I guess )
- US centric world view influencing how execs treat world leaders.
All in all worth a read or two!
That said FB sounds evil not careless.
I do wonder what the point of amassing all that money and power is, if it means you end up grovelling to a despot like Xi (or a would-be despot like Trump).
Glad to see this on HN.
Wait, those are the games that I play...
I remember listening to Zuckerberg speak at length about the various epochs of Facebook including the fast pivot to global, it's overall a fascinating and compelling story that the book surely capitalizes on well.
Is this meant to be taken literally or is it an expression for arrogance?
Sounds like the work of Barbra Streisand's PR firm LOL
asking specifically because our backend is pretty much just esri and were heavily considering porting all of our web products to experience builder because of how robust it is these days. experience builder is on react, which sucks imo, but would be helpful to avoid getting the rug pulled on us
> According to Wynn-Williams, Facebook actually built an extensive censorship and surveillance system for the Chinese state – spies, cops and military – to use against Chinese Facebook users, and FB users globally. They promise to set up caches of global FB content in China that the Chinese state can use to monitor all Facebook activity, everywhere, with the implication that they'll be able to spy on private communications, and censor content for non-Chinese users.
Trying to get Xi to name his child is both completely tone deaf to the point of being offensive, and incredibly debilitating for his child's self-esteem as just a bargaining chip.
After the part where she was giving a birth to her child, while still writing emails and doing work stuff, I take everything she said with a grain of salt. As a father, the way she prioritised work to family through out many years of her work at FB, I find it very repelling and disgusting.
I believe that Zuck&team are slimy greedy spoiled brats, but I could also say few things about her. Which make me wonder what is actual truth, book is very biased.
The change is going to be political, regulatory. These companies always can't change until regulation is there, and then they miraculously adapt. If you took big tech money for 7 years you were not part of the solution.
The lengths some people will go to self explain why they were not egotistical is amazing! This is not an expose, everything is well known, this is a books worth of convincing herself she is a good person after all.
This is not a jab on this specific blogger but a general thing.
There should be a term for listening to an audiobook that’s not reading but does refer to a book on audio level, or just say you listened to the book.
Individuals can change the world. Groups with ideology can change the world.
This is why many of us are here at HN- for the discussion of ideas and for idealism.
Few want to be supreme jerks that ruin things on a massive scale.
Zuck, if you’re reading this- thanks for being part of the thing that allowed me to continue communication with my friends when they weren’t nearby, and thanks for continuing to provide that for my children.
Are things fucked up? Were lives ruined? Sure. We all fuck shit up and ruin lives, some of us more than others. Then we own up to that as much as we can and use what we have left to try to continue doing what we did before to try to make the world a better place.