My plane reading...
Sarah Wynn-Williams began as a true believer.
Glassy-eyed. Palms up.
Almost begged her way in. Like trying to gain access to a system you weren’t invited to—but knew was running something big behind the interface.
It was early Facebook. Still coded with promise.
The mythos intact. The logo still meant connection, not corrosion.
Her arc:
A launch. Jet-engine ascent. Altitude. Heat shimmer.
Then: micro-stutters. Lag. UI glitches in the belief system.
Meetings start to feel like staged rituals. Authenticity begins to pixelate.
The platform grows. But something inside her starts to fragment.
And now—this book.
Told in flashbacks with emotional ghosting. Each chapter like a corrupted file opened under duress.
The tone? Mechanically filtered through something like PTSD.
Or maybe burnout at the molecular level.
Not grief, exactly. More like the delayed awareness that she handed over parts of herself to something big, synthetic, and hungry—
—and only much later realised what it had taken.
Not admiration. Existential collapse.
You don’t leave Facebook.
You eject.
You drift.
And the log-off screen never really loads.
Wynn-Williams was all in.
Hooked on Cheryl Sandberg like a TED Talk with frequent flyer miles.
The two of them pinballed around the planet in private jets without enough beds, evangelising the Facebook gospel to foreign leaders who smiled for the cameras and probably didn’t understand the terms of service.
But always found the photo-op.
With Sandberg, it’s performance. It’s sparkle. That strange gravitational field she carries— the kind that makes you stop listening to the meeting and start wondering if she’s running a higher, more optimised OS than you.
With Zuckerberg, it isn’t exactly dystopia.
It’s execution.
The system behaves precisely as designed. No deviation. No apology. Just the code, running clean.
No moral compass. He has a parser.
Feed him a deck—talking points, macro projections—and he’ll render the output.
Smooth. Compiled. Sweaty.
Sometimes.
Other times, he drifts. Goes off-script.
Karaoke with interns. Boy-band ballads at pastel-lit retreats.
The acolytes laugh. Not sure if it’s okay not to.
You don’t challenge him. You don’t debug the founder.
The inner circle—tight-knit, high-comped, brand-synced— operate like a neural net trained on dominance.
Every question is a threat. Every suggestion, a breach.
There’s belief there.
Crystalline. Unshakeable.
A faith in scale. In iteration. In the product.
Not morality. Not consequence. - Only deployment.
It’s covered in smiles, executive summaries and lies.
But if Congress or world leaders get in the way—so what?
You can leave the platform.
You can close your laptop.
But the system remembers.
It always remembers.
“Bring your authentic self to work.”
Printed somewhere. Probably on a wall. Possibly in Helvetica.
Early Facebook culture. Mantras instead of manuals.
A beta religion, with PowerPoint liturgy.
Returns from maternity leave.
Baby still liminal. Half-dreamed.
But the baby’s audio footprint leaks into calls.
Murmurs through AirPods.
Flagged as disruption.
“People feel uneasy,” they say.
She’s told to optimise.
Sandberg’s fix: hire a Filipino nanny.
Not a person—an HR patch.
A silence generator.
A clean solution for domestic noise.
She complies.
Compliance disguised as choice.
Then one day:
Husband Tom checks the home cam.
Sees a firefighter in the apartment.
The nanny’s locked out.
The baby’s locked in.
Emergency. Human. Messy.
She tells her colleagues.
No one laughs. No one reacts.
She’s off-brand.
“The expectation at Facebook is that mothering is invisible.”
Like latency. Like packet loss. Even blood loss.
Authenticity?
Not if it interrupts the feed.
Not if it slows the system.
The title? Careless People.
A line from Gatsby.
Tom and Daisy.
Smashed things.
Retreated into their money.
But this isn’t carelessness.
It’s systemic. Intentional.
“Move fast and break things.”
Not philosophy.
Protocol.
Facebook watches teenage girls delete selfies.
Regret flagged as behavioural data.
Advises to advertising partners.
And it's good practice for China.
Result: tummy-flattening teas.
Skin-perfecting creams.
Fixes for flaws they didn’t know had been logged.
Not dystopia.
Just business.
Just the code, running clean.
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