Hello and Welcome. This page is a collection of 17 quotes that I liked and saved while reading the Careless People book by Sarah Wynn-Williams. I hope you will like them too.
By the way, I am Deepak Kundu, an avid book reader, quotes collector and blogger.
Careless People Quotes
- Most days, working on policy at Facebook was way less like enacting a chapter from Machiavelli and way more like watching a bunch of fourteen-year-olds who’ve been given superpowers and an ungodly amount of money, as they jet around the world to figure out what power has bought and brought them.
- I’ve learned enough about America in my time here that it’s clear to me that it operates on a “who you know” basis.
- Most countries like Facebook. Germany’s an outlier. The Germans disapprove of everything Facebook stands for. It wasn’t very long ago that Germans lived with networks of spies and informants in their country – the Stasi in East Germany and the Gestapo before that. As a result, they have a fundamental suspicion of anyone who wants to gather lots of personal information – which of course is Facebook’s business model. Where others see a website that’s good for wasting time, Germans see a comprehensive surveillance tool that needs muscular oversight.
- One thing you learn as a diplomat, or maybe just as an adult: there are times to keep your thoughts and feelings to yourself.
- I’ve been at Facebook for a few years now, and I’ve hit a point like the phase of a romance where you still see everything great that attracted you to the person in the first place. You’re still excited by the future you’re building together. But you’ve spent enough time together that you also see their flaws. And wonder how deep they run.
- Silicon Valley is awash in wooden Montessori toys and shrouded in total screen bans. Parents at work talk about how they don’t allow their teens to have mobile phones, which only underscores how well these executives understand the real damage their product inflicts on young minds.
- Facebook’s American leadership believes the “values” it defines can trump national laws when they conflict.
- Facebook’s leadership includes a web of people all entangled as bridesmaids, best friends, neighbors, and exes. Their fealty is seemingly to each other, their tribe, ahead of any ideology or anything else. Their pasts, presents, and futures are all deeply intertwined in a way that mine are not. They hire each other for jobs with big salaries, responsible for each other’s promotions and bonuses. A tiny enmeshed group of people increasingly responsible for shaping the attention of billions.
- We escalate all difficult decisions to Sheryl and Mark for them to decide. Although in reality it’s just Mark. Facebook is an autocracy of one.
- The WEF has weaponized the concept of status envy to create a Hunger Games for the 0.001 percent. Maybe that’s why they all seem to love this place. It’s like the status Olympics – a chance for them to measure themselves not just against their own industry but across business, politics, entertainment, and media.
- I’m still a true believer in Facebook’s mission to change the world. And I had thought my role in it – my contribution – would be to get Mark to engage internationally, meet with real heads of state. I thought that would teach him to exercise political power responsibly. Make reasonable compromises when needed, on privacy, protecting children, and whatever mattered. Build a company that would make money, sure, but also be a good citizen of the world. But now it occurs to me that maybe Mark isn’t on the same page at all. Somehow, introducing him to global leaders and putting him on the world stage at the United Nations is having the opposite effect of what I’d hoped. He seems to be giving less of a damn. Saying things because they sound good. Posting things because they look good. Looking back now, I regret having enabled this. It gives me a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach.
- Up till now, I’ve done everything I could to help Facebook grow. But now is a turning point. For the first time since I pitched this job to Facebook, I won’t exhaust everything I have to deliver what my bosses want. I won’t do all I can to develop creative strategies to advocate and convince governments and civil society that they’re wrong because I don’t think they are. Instead, I’ll focus my efforts on Facebook’s leadership, keep raising objections in meetings and emails at Facebook. I’ll execute Mark’s orders halfheartedly – focusing on the ones I agree with and not putting particular effort into the others. I’ll no longer try to do the impossible to make things happen for Facebook.
- 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. My original hope that when he started to exercise power on the world stage, meeting with presidents and prime ministers, it would be an education in responsibility and accountability – that’s really turned out to be a bust. He disappoints again and again.
- Trust is gone between staff and leadership at Facebook. The lingering discontent over Facebook’s role in Trump’s election, the Feminist Fight Club’s issues, and the broader silence and lack of contrition about the harm Facebook is causing globally have changed how so many people feel about working here. Before all this, you felt proud to be at Facebook. That’s gone.
- 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.
- You’d hope that people who amass the kind of power Facebook has would learn a sense of responsibility, but they don’t show any sign of having done so. In fact I see the opposite. The more they see of the consequences of their actions, the less of a fuck Mark and Facebook’s leadership give. Instead of fixing these things, this ongoing suffering they caused, they seem indifferent. 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. Which seems so crazy. They could’ve tried to fix these things and still been insanely rich and powerful. They were in the rare situation where the money was there in abundance. They could have afforded to do the right thing. They could have told the truth. They could have exercised basic human decency. It was all within their power. Instead, they focused on commencement speeches, vanity political campaigns, vacation properties, raising artisanal Wagyu beef from macadamia-eating cows, whatever their latest plaything was.
- Mark went all in on the metaverse, so committed to it he changed the name of the company, spending tens of billions of dollars on its creation. And now that is his brand. Which is curious. The metaverse is looking more like Internet.org, or Facebook’s efforts in hardware – the Facebook phone, the Facebook Portal, Building 8 – or Facebook’s crypto currency. Although building Facebook more than two decades ago proved he could have the right idea at the right time, these subsequent efforts (the ones where he builds rather than acquires based on data from spyware) show he is also capable of the opposite.