Facebook tried to shut it down, so obviously like so many others I had to read it!
Careless People covers the period of 2011-2017, the author pitches a job to Facebook working in policy, and was there from the inception of Facebook getting involved with governments. It’s a well written, engaging story. The author knows how to grab your attention and keep it.
It’s also the kind of book that stayed in my head even once I had finished it. Asking myself what I believed and what I didn’t. In the end, I think of it as a composite of three pieces.
The first, the gossipy stories. These are obviously cherry picked in support of the bigger narrative. For instance, there’s a lot about Sandberg’s behavior in 2015 and no mention of her husband’s death. These stories are certainly part of what makes it a good read, but I don’t know how much weight to give them.
Second, is Zuck and Sandberg’s villain origin story. Essentially that Sandberg’s was always a status obsessed megalomaniac, and that Zuckerberg became that way over time. Reading the book, this makes for a good narrative arc, but having left that narrative and come back to the reality of this being two people with tremendous power, I don’t really care about their villain origin stories.
Third is the real thing, which is the way that the pursuit of growth and money has done untold harm to democracy. The stories about working with China demonstrate a kind of moral bankruptcy that is appalling but also by that part of the book, par for the course. I did not realize the full extent to which Facebook had enabled Trump’s first election win, but it is all laid out. The part I found most horrifying was the dark ad targeting designed to suppress voters. A close second to Facebook embedding staff in the Trump campaign because they were spending so much money. (As an aside, as a European, I do find US election spending absolutely horrifying. It re-enforces why it is illegal elsewhere.) Now Musk buying Twitter and the existence of Truth social make so much more sense.
Well worth the read.