Careless People Themes

Sarah Wynn-Williams’s memoir Careless People is titled after a famous quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and the book argues that like the characters in Gatsby, the people at Facebook use their immense wealth and power carelessly.  The book is a condemnation of the culture at Facebook and the effect that the tech company had on the world, but while Wynn-Williams presents Facebook leaders like Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg…

Sarah Wynn-Williams’s Careless People is the story of how she went from an idealistic person who believed in the power of technology to improve the world to someone with a much more jaded view of technology’s effect on society. The crux of this transition is the time she spends at Facebook, where her inside view of how social media gets made forces her to question the way it impacts people’s lives. Wynn-Williams first becomes…

One of the big transitions in her life that Sarah Wynn-Williams makes in Careless People is going from more staid and traditional bureaucratic work for the UN and at embassies to the fast-paced, modern work environment at Facebook. Initially, Wynn-Williams welcomes the change, having become fed up with how slowly and incrementally institutions like the UN make progress, if they make it at all, with discussions all dominated by older men. When Wynn-Williams ditches that…