Macmillan to publish shocking memoir by former Meta executive
Sarah Wynn-Williams’s Careless People, published on 13 March, documents the company’s rise to global power at the hands of reckless leaders.
Macmillan, an imprint of Pan Macmillan, have announced that they will publish Careless People: A Story of Where I Used to Work, a deeply insightful and darkly humorous firsthand account of seven critical years at Meta (formerly Facebook) as the company grew from viral sensation to global powerhouse, and the destruction it left in its wake. Written by former Director of Global Public Policy Sarah Wynn-Williams, the book details the lengths to which Meta’s leaders were willing to go to achieve growth at any cost.
An explosive dispatch from someone who had a front-row seat to the inner workings of one of the most influential companies on the planet, Careless People takes readers inside Meta’s board rooms, private jets, and meetings with heads of state, revealing the appetites, excesses, blind spots, and priorities of executives Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and Joel Kaplan. Wynn-Williams paints a portrait of this group as profoundly flawed, self-interested, and careless human beings, callously indifferent to the price others would pay for their own enrichment. With an outsider’s perspective, she watched as the more power they grasped, the less responsible they became, with far-reaching consequences that continue to this day.
Among other never-before-told bombshell revelations, Wynn-Williams details the previously unreported lengths to which Mark Zuckerberg went to convince the Chinese Communist Party to allow Meta to operate in China, including providing briefings to CCP officials on new technologies like artificial intelligence, developing bespoke censorship tools with the CCP, and making efforts to hide Meta’s cooperation with the CCP from the United States Congress.
In a sharp and unflinching voice, Wynn-Williams provides an intimate story of Meta’s rise and her futile attempts to get the company to stop genocide-fuelling lies and hate speech to shocking accounts of workplace harassment and misogyny to the gruelling demands and humiliations of working motherhood during the same time that Sheryl Sandberg was winning international acclaim for urging women to 'Lean In.' With the audacity of The Trading Game, the emotional intelligence of Educated, and the dark humour of This Is Going to Hurt, Careless People exposes both the personal and the political fallout when unfettered power and a rotten company culture take hold – where a few people heedlessly hold the world in their hands.
Sarah Wynn-Williams worked as a diplomat for New Zealand, including in Washington, DC. She joined Meta after pitching a job and ultimately became Director of Global Public Policy. After leaving Meta, she has continued to work on tech policy, with a focus on artificial intelligence.