New Orleans Some people might not call this a plus, but one benefit of foreign travel where you’re strapped into a plane seat for 8 or 10 hours or more, as well as not having a TV to watch. or even if one is available, not comprehending the language, is that you can get a lot of reading done or listening to audiobooks. If not, some of us would fall in a deep hole with Facebook or YouTube or any number of dangerous time sucks.
Like many, many people, I use Facebook both personally and professionally, but don’t trust it as far as I could spit. I have always found Mark Zuckerberg kind of creepy, a money hungry geek detached from reality. And that was before he once again tried to change his spots and suck up to Trump II, as little more than a crude opportunist. When Sheryl Sandberg was the #2 there, and supposedly the classic “adult in the room,” I was distrustful of her time with Larry Summers, the economist and former Harvard president. I found her self-promotion and her Lean In book and philosophy a modern example of blaming the victim and a neoliberal excuse for not demanding systemic and structural change. Feminist, it was absolutely not, no matter her pretense. Zuckerberg and Sandberg seemed to be match made in some dark counting house in hell.
All of which tweaked my interest when I read there was an insider account by a Facebook manager and veteran that upset Zuckerberg and Facebook so much that they sought an injunction to stop distribution of the book. Who does that? Don’t they have any PR or comms folks in Facebook able to stand straight and warn them that such a tactic would blow up in their face? Obviously, not. Predictably, they propelled Sarah Wynn-Williams tell-a-lot book, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism to the top of the New York Times best seller lists for nonfiction and in front a Congressional committee that was already investigating Meta.
I bought the book on Kindle and read it on trains across France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. My review is simple. I came to the book not trusting Facebook and its principals, and came away from the book shocked at how much worse it was, than I had always suspected. These are not just carless people. They are bad people without any moral compass. The damage that Facebook has caused globally from Trump to Myanmar is inestimable, and reading Careless People, it’s a miracle it hasn’t been worse, even though it may be getting there now since Zuckerberg has unleashed his fake claims about free speech and stopped even really trying to police content.
To keep it short, if Elon Musk in recent months has managed to make himself the industrialist, rightwing mirror doppelganger of Henry Ford, the book makes the case for Mark Zuckerberg as a robber baron in the image of George Pullman, John D. Rockefeller without the foundation, Andrew Carnegie without the libraries, and J.P. Morgan without a prayer. Sheryl Sanberg might give Donald Trump a run for stratospheric narcissism.
The Facebook double-dealing and outright falsehoods about their concessions to China likely cost lives and prison sentences there, and at the least abetted censorship and surveillance as a full partner with the government, all the while saying the opposite in the USA. It’s not just me saying this, when US Senators of both parties, holding a hearing on the issues recently, have their views summarized to a sharp point, as the San Francisco Chronicle reported,
U.S. Sens. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., and Josh Hawley, R-Miss., are in the middle of an investigation into Meta’s dealings with China. The hearing was announced April 2 as a result of Wynn-Williams’ accusations and culminated in senators from both parties seemingly agreeing that Zuckerberg and the company pose a threat to the security of free and civil discourse in the U.S.
It’s sad to have our worst fears about Facebook-Meta confirmed, but this is a dangerous company run by people only a hair removed form evil. What goes around, come around, and we owe Sarah Winn-Williams thanks for being willing and finally able to stand up point out that these emperors have no clothes.