Hello and Welcome. This page is a collection of 19 quotes from Careless People book by Sarah Wynn-Williams that I liked and saved while reading this book. I hope you will like these quotes too.
By the way, I am Deepak Kundu, an avid book reader, quotes collector and blogger.
Quotes on Facebook
- 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.
- Facebook is an elite product, born in an elite college, fronted by elite Harvard grads who show up for other elite Harvard grads, who are decision makers in all sorts of places. A pragmatist accepts that and moves forward.
- 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.
Quotes on World Economic Forum
- Davos is what people call the World Economic Forum – the annual meeting of the high-flying people who think they run the planet – billionaires and world leaders and celebrities (the Clooneys, Kevin Spacey back in the day, Bono of course). It’s a festival for the important and the self-important, held in the ski town of Davos, Switzerland. One of the conceits of Davos is that the logistics are incredibly difficult, and that’s if you’re a billionaire with a large staff. It’s a ridiculous place to hold anything. The location is high up in the remote Swiss mountains in the dead of winter. Getting there requires a flight to Zurich followed by a long drive through treacherous icy, windy roads, or train, or – if you’re one of the top attendees (and not staff like me) – helicopter. The town is tiny, one main street surrounded by ski chalets. The scarcity of hotel rooms, restaurants, and convenience stores seems to be the point.
- 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.
Other 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.
- It’s clear that in these next few years, Facebook and governments all over the world are going to be figuring out the rules of the road for these giant, globe-spanning internet companies. What they set in place will determine how social media is used for decades to come. It will affect elections, privacy, free speech, taxes, and so much else. I want to be part of that.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Facebook rewards outsider candidates who post inflammatory content that drives engagement. We charge less money for ads that are more incendiary and reach more people. Trump is using our system the way it’s designed to be used. From my point of view, that’s incentivizing and rewarding the worst kinds of political ugliness.
- 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.
- 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.
- Anyone who has worked closely with technology can tell you how buggy it can be. How an innocuous snippet of code can break a robust system. How technology can behave in ways that the humans in charge could never expect. How technology can create unexpected harms. That’s one thing when it’s a social media platform that serves over three billion people. And quite another when it’s second-strike capability in the South China Sea.
- 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.