I wonder what’s behind the curtain? To quote Metallica: “All that I see, Absolute Horror!”
Meta has notched an early victory in its attempt to halt a surprise tell-all memoir from a former policy executive turned whistleblower. An arbitrator has sided with the social media company, saying that the book’s author should stop selling and publicizing the book, which went on sale earlier this week.
The drama stems from Careless People, a new book by Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former policy official at Facebook who Meta says was fired in 2017. Described by its publisher as an “explosive insider account,” Wynn-Williams reveals some new details about Mark Zuckerberg’s push to bring Facebook to China a decade ago. She also alleges that Meta’s current policy chief, Joel Kaplan, acted inappropriately, and reveals embarrassing details about Zuckerberg’s awkward encounters with world leaders
The book was only announced last week, and Meta has waged a forceful PR campaign against it, calling it a “new book of old news.” Numerous former employees have publicly disputed Wynn-Williams’ account of events that transpired while she worked at Facebook.
What could possibly be so bad Facebook needs the full PR blast? Well, not great… (CW: NYT article)
During her time at Facebook, Wynn-Williams worked closely with its chief executives Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg. They’re this book’s Tom and Daisy — the “careless people” in “The Great Gatsby” who, as Wynn-Williams quotes the novel in her epigraph, “smashed up things and creatures” and “let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
Wynn-Williams sees Zuckerberg change while she’s at Facebook. Desperate to be liked, he becomes increasingly hungry for attention and adulation, shifting his focus from coding and engineering to politics. On a tour of Asia, she is directed to gather a crowd of more than one million so that he can be “gently mobbed.” (In the end, she doesn’t have to; his desire is satisfied during an appearance at a Jakarta shopping mall with Indonesia’s president-elect instead.) He tells her that Andrew Jackson (who signed the Indian Removal Act into law) was the greatest president America ever had, because he “got stuff done.”
Sandberg, for her part, turns her charm on and off like a tap. When Wynn-Williams first starts at Facebook, she is in awe of Sandberg, who in 2013 publishes her best-selling corporate-feminism manifesto, “Lean In.” But Wynn-Williams soon learns to mistrust “Sheryl’s ‘Lean In’ shtick,” seeing it as a thin veneer over her “unspoken rules” about “obedience and closeness.”
Wynn-Williams is aghast to discover that Sandberg has instructed her 26-year-old assistant to buy lingerie for both of them, budget be damned. (The total cost is $13,000.) During a long drive in Europe, the assistant and Sandberg take turns sleeping in each other’s laps, stroking each other’s hair. On the 12-hour flight home on a private jet, a pajama-clad Sandberg claims the only bed on the plane and repeatedly demands that Wynn-Williams “come to bed.” Wynn-Williams demurs. Sandberg is miffed.
Sandberg isn’t the only person in this book with apparent boundary issues. Wynn-Williams has uncomfortable encounters with Joel Kaplan, an ex-boyfriend of Sandberg’s from Harvard.
Wynn-Williams describes Kaplan grinding up against her on the dance floor at a work event, announcing that she looks “sultry” and making “weird comments” about her husband. When she delivers her second child, an amniotic fluid embolism nearly kills her; yet Kaplan keeps emailing her while she’s on maternity leave, insisting on weekly videoconferences. She tells him she needs more surgery because she’s still bleeding. “But where are you bleeding from?” he repeatedly presses her. An internal Facebook investigation into her “experience” with Kaplan cleared him of any wrongdoing.
The rest of the article tells about Facebook’s involvement with Myanmar and employees embedded in DJT’s 2016 campaign. I’ll definitely have to read this book and just be 
the whole time.
Hello I am techbro science man I know all the science I talk about genes and birth rates and the DNA of smart people and could you tell me where a woman might be bleeding after giving birth?
Why are they all like this
I think I can can kind-of answer this… In short “class morality”.
At this point in my life I live in the shadow of the world’s richest, depraved, and frankly moronic city NYC. One thing I tend to notice is that people who live inside its core vs its periphery quite literally “talk different”. They relate differently to people around them. When I visit friends who I have had for a long time in the city and we’re alone everything seems normal. We relate, we talk, in much the same way we have always done. The problem is that once the party gets larger things start changing.
They don’t start changing in the way of “personal vs group dynamics” because these changes don’t happen when I am at a large gathering with my fellow provincials. These changes include not just “what” is talked about, but “how” it’s talked about, and how social value is formed around the members of the group. To summarize it derisively I hate these gatherings because they are “Reddit”.
They aren’t “Reddit” in the way we use
here. They’re “Reddit” in the inherent structure and valuation of how posting on Reddit works. Essentially each participant is encouraged to show their “value” in the conversation by “speaking” (read posting) shortly with a quick interesting factual statement that is contemporary in nature. In essence the conversations have the same structure as browsing the title of posts on the Reddit front page. In fact most of the actual topics are ripped straight from Reddit or from something popular on social media. This is the end-all be-all of conversation with cosmopolitans. You may be thinking “what’s so bad about this”? Well the problem is that the interest in these topics is not authentic. These conversations only scratch the surface because they are field reports of consumption. Topics get brought up for about 30 seconds, there might be 2 or 3 people following up on a topic, and then it’s dropped. True to form the follow up are quite literally the same if not word for word stole from top upvoted comments on posts that the topics are scraped from. “Reddit” in a sense has turned into a “class morality”, an understanding of value of each other’s worth, position, and correct form of relation for these people. They do not relate to one another on personal levels, it’s gauche to have feelings and problems in a group setting. This social relation is simply a display of “value” derived from one’s media consumption. It’s the most boring book-report ass way of talking to another human being. Imagine you had a friend and the sum of your interactions with them is that in a few short sentences over 5 or so topic they summarize what they read on the internet that day – and that’s the only way you communicate. Awful.
Conversely among provincials in my friend groups there is space for personal vulnerability in group settings. Though people talk about what they’re watching on TV, the conversation does not revolve around the consumption of media. It revolves around our lives, hobbies, families, and interpersonal relations. What’s really interesting to me is that the “Reddit” class morality of cosmopolitans has literally overtaken gossip. They do not gossip about their friends! If they gossip they do “big gossip” like deuxmoi style. Another popular style of gossip is the style you find on
. The same ceaseless conversations about guys called “Ethan Klien” and “Hasan Abi”, who are apparently locked in an immortal battle for the fate of the world as if they’re Dio Brando and Joseph Joestar. Either way the “gossip” is entirely consumptive and parasocial, it’s not actually social.
So techbros are often subcultures to these cosmopolitans. Much like the greater cosmopolitan, the diminutive techbro has the same “Reddit” social relation. Despite their characterization as “smart” or “nerds” in the greater culture, these people are often no smarter than the average of their superset of internet addled email job city dwellers. They simply work in something ostensibly called “tech”. So their “Reddit” based dialogues are tuned much more around the bullshit that the rich guys they want to be like enjoy. As an autistic person I often get trapped by a techbro who is talking about something I have or can find interest in (I’m computer / systems / mechanical autistic, take apart and put a stereo back together at 5 years old autistic). Then at one point the conversation falls out from under me as I realize they are only presenting as “smart” because they have stolen all their talking points, and do not even understand them practically.
I appreciate the effort post you have made on the subject. Plumbing the depths of these people is endlessly fascinating.