One of the most lasting contributions the internet has made to culture is, of course, providing a name for the phenomenon known as the Streisand effect1. While it’s probably unfair to saddle Barbra Streisand with that memetic legacy, I suspect that her name will survive much longer for it.

Streisand’s lawyer was one of the first to run afoul of the shifting online/offline dynamic that was only just beginning in the early 2000s. A picture of Streisand’s house was part of a photo collection demonstrating coastal erosion in California, and the photographer used Streisand’s name in the caption. Four people in the world had ever accessed the photo. When Streisand’s lawyer filed a $50 million (!!) lawsuit for the alleged violation of privacy, literally hundreds of thousands of people rushed to see and/or download the photo, and Streisand was meme-mortalized for the foreseeable future.

The latest high-profile example of the Streisand effect came in March, as the media reported on a lawsuit that Meta had filed to prevent the publication and circulation of a book written by a former employee. Setting aside the hypocrisy surrounding Zuck’s claims of “free expression,” the New York Times (who’ve apparently never heard of the Streisand effect) declared it a “legal victory” for Meta that the book’s author (Sarah Wynn-Williams) was temporarily enjoined from promoting or distributing the book. Unsurprisingly, Meta’s lawsuit ended up being far more effective promotion for the book than anything Wynn-Williams could have imagined, and less than 2 weeks after its release, Careless People reached the top slot on the NYT bestseller list.

I have a love/hate relationship with what I think of as “access journalism.” On the one hand, I generally like learning about the things that insider access provides, but I also believe that a great deal of the gatekeeping and privilege that was decried as part of traditional media has simply been translated into unequal access. And that puts things like accurate information, truths, and principles in the hands of even fewer people, particularly those whose priorities don’t include accuracy, truth, or principle2. Wynn-Williams’ book, as its subtitle maintains, is not access journalism but rather “a memoir.” This limits the book to an extent, to what the author herself experienced in her time with Facebook. But as their Director of Global Public Policy for seven years, Wynn-Williams writes her memoir with inner-circle access, and that gives her far more credibility than Meta is comfortable acknowledging. Hence their lawsuit inadvertent promotional campaign on its behalf.

Careless People is incredibly accessible, and it reads really quickly. It’s a book that reveals that just about every negative thing you might imagine regarding Facebook is not only true, but probably even worse than you thought. There’s no overarching ideology to be found, other than perhaps the “growth-at-all-costs approach,” but Wynn-Williams charts how that approach ends up cannibalizing everything else, from legal constraints to morality and even FB’s own public facing standards, promises, and claims (and Congressional testimony3). She explains that “There is no grand ideology here. No theory about what Facebook should be in the world. The company is just responding to stuff as it happens.” When anything happens that might slow the company’s growth, those obstacles are circumvented, regardless of the legality or morality in doing so.

As Wynn-Williams reflects on how the company’s changed during her time there, she writes

Five years earlier when I arrived at Facebook, Mark didn’t have a theory of how he and the company should be in the world; he didn’t really have developed opinions about policy or politics, beyond “sign up more users.” The rest of Facebook’s leadership wasn’t very different. Mark really couldn’t be bothered to care. Now he’s developed priorities, and they’re mostly pretty horrible and ignorant of the human costs.

The consequences of those priorities are just awful. They include identifying, targeting, and exploiting vulnerable (non-adult) users, sharing technologies secretly with oppressive regimes, or providing little to no oversight in countries like Myanmar, where thousands of people died as a result of Facebook’s presence.

Perhaps the most consequential impact that Facebook has had on our culture and politics was its support for the first Trump campaign. While Careless People doesn’t go into great detail, it makes it clear that great detail did in fact happen:

Over the course of the ten-hour flight to Lima, Elliot patiently explains to Mark all the ways that Facebook basically handed the election to Donald Trump. It’s pretty fucking convincing and pretty fucking concerning. Facebook embedded staff in Trump’s campaign team in San Antonio for months, alongside Trump campaign programmers, ad copywriters, media buyers, network engineers, and data scientists. A Trump operative named Brad Parscale ran the operation together with the embedded Facebook staff, and he basically invented a new way for a political campaign to shitpost its way to the White House, targeting voters with misinformation, inflammatory posts, and fundraising messages. Boz, who led the ads team, described it as the “single best digital ad campaign I’ve ever seen from any advertiser. Period.”

It’s important to note that this conversation followed public remarks from Zuckerberg, who insisted (out of apparent ignorance) that the “idea that we had any impact in the election is pretty out there.”

One of the most sympathetic and persuasive things about Wynn-Williams is that she pursued employment with Facebook out of a conviction about its importance and potential impact. In that, I saw echoes of the same sorts of things that many of us were talking about in the late 2000s. She saw it as a potential force for good, and committed herself to manifesting that vision. But one of the persistent themes of her memoir is that the top brass at Meta were neither far-sighted in that way nor did they share Wynn-Williams’ commitments. Time and again, she portrays them not as particularly evil, but as banal, greedy, and just kind of shitty people. Towards the end of her book, she observes that “At every juncture, there was an opportunity to make different choices…” but that “They’re happy to get richer and they just don’t care. It feels crude to put it that way, but it’s true. They profit from the callous and odious things they do.” At another point, in reference to Myanmar, she characterizes it as a “lethal carelessness,” which feels about right.

There’s one episode in the book that I found particularly interesting, perhaps in part because it had to do with board games. Wynn-Williams plays Catan with Zuckerberg and a couple of other staffers on a long flight, and she wins the game, which was apparently verboten. No one’s ever allowed to beat Zuck. He accuses her of cheating and she proceeds to explain how he was actually positioned to win the game until the final turn. He was so focused on winning every single element of the game4 that he ended up giving the overall game away.

“But this is like everything,” I say ill-advisedly. “You’re so focused on winning every single battle you forget the war. You were so focused on winning the longest road just then, you weren’t paying attention to the rest of what was happening on the board.” I fail to stop. “Sometimes you have to lose something to win the more important thing. If you try and win everything, you end up losing. You could be strategic about giving some things up. I mean, some people call it compromise, but if you don’t like that word you can think about it as a ‘strategic loss’ or ‘strategic retreat’ or whatever. But this is why we keep having massive issues. You’re so used to being the winner who takes all.”

And he’s surrounded himself with people who support that mission (to let Mark win, always and at everything) wholeheartedly. Zuck’s response to the revelations about the Trump campaign’s reliance on Facebook isn’t to fix the problem but to begin fantasizing about doing the same thing himself, about running for President. When Wynn-Williams tries to appeal to a senior colleague, his response is less than encouraging. “I think he’s telling me to be quiet, to drop it, to know my place. And I realize that everyone around Mark is like this. No one’s going to try to talk him out of it.” Perhaps more than anything, what comes across is Zuck’s arrested emotional and social development. When he and his staff begin crisscrossing the country as part of his secret Presidential campaign, “His speeches take on a new tone, like what a kid thinks a president sounds like.”

I’ve focused mostly here on Zuckerberg, but we get a sense of Sheryl Sandberg as well, and she doesn’t come across much better. She doesn’t seem really to understand much about Facebook, despite being its COO, although she’s more than happy to use its resources (and employees) to promote her book (and her own celebrity status). Wynn-Williams cites a couple of the principles outlined in Lean In, noting that “Over the coming years at Facebook, I’ll see both of those tested, chewed up, and thrown aside.” At Women’s Day, an annual retreat for the female employees of Facebook5, after watching a series of videos of impossibly wealthy women who have allegedly achieved the “work-life balance” that Sandberg advocates, Wynn-Williams realizes that “They don’t discuss the real secret behind maintaining their work-life balance, mothering as if they don’t have children: it’s undergirded by their multimillion-dollar paychecks.”

It’s hard to read this book from a certain perspective and not feel a certain amount of schadenfreude, I have to admit. Careless People is nothing if not a confirmation of just how banal, petty, and rotten tech billionaires can be. In that way, it provides a partial roadmap of how our culture (and our politicians) have enabled corporations (and the people who run them) to arrive at the point where they’re too big to care, as Cory Doctorow puts it.

If there’s anything that gave me a bit of pause, it was that the entire book is written through the regret-colored glasses of Wynn-Williams. It’s genuinely hard to know how much friction she actually experienced personally while she was a part of this activity. Were her reservations about her colleagues emerging organically, or are they an effect of hindsight? Considering how horrible some of her experiences were (sending Sheryl talking points while she was literally just about to give birth to her first child, e.g.), I’m inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt. But my own skepticism about techbro motives predisposes me in that direction already. Towards the end of the book, she writes

Now I’m consumed by the worst of it. The grief and sorrow of it. How Facebook is helping some of the worst people in the world do terrible things. How it’s an astonishingly effective machine to turn people against each other. And monitor people at a scale that was never possible before. And manipulate them. It’s an incredibly valuable tool for the most autocratic, oppressive regimes, because it gives them exactly what those regimes need: direct access into what people are saying from the top to bottom of society.

She closes by emphasizing her conviction that “something else was possible,” despite her best efforts. I think it’s fair to imagine that something else is possible, but it should be clear to us that expecting solutions from the people who created and profited off of our current mess is not the way to go.

One last note, and that’s that Careless People has its own paragraph on the “Streisand Effect” Wikipedia page. That’s something, at least. More soon…