Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams (May 2026 Rebel Book Club)

There are books you read carefully and books that read you. Careless People is the latter. I finished it faster than almost anything I've picked up recently, propelled by a combination of disbelief, recognition, and genuine rage. Sarah Wynn-Williams spent years as Facebook's director of global public policy, and what she witnessed from the inside is both more mundane and more terrifying than you might expect.

The book's central argument is really a story of transformation. Facebook began, at least in spirit, as a place animated by genuine idealism — connecting the world, fostering innovation, doing something that mattered. But somewhere along the way the mission curdled into something uglier: growth at any cost, market dominance as the only metric, and a culture where legal or illegal, ethical or not, simply ceased to be meaningful distinctions. The question stopped being should we and became can we get away with it.

Part of what enabled that rot was who was actually running things. The inner circle at Facebook wasn't assembled on merit. It was assembled on loyalty, proximity, and personal connection — a kind of Silicon Valley nepotism that ensured the people with the most power were also the least likely to challenge it.

Sheryl Sandberg is one of the book's most striking portraits, precisely because of the gap between her public persona and the reality Wynn-Williams describes. Lean In was being preached to women everywhere while, on a private jet, Sandberg reportedly propositioned Wynn-Williams and then held a lasting grudge when she declined. The hypocrisy isn't incidental — it's load-bearing. It explains how a company could project progressive values externally while quietly making the lives of its own female employees quite difficult. That difficulty is made personal in one of the book's most quietly devastating details. Wynn-Williams returns from maternity leave and is handed a performance review on her first day back. A review that wasn't particularly glowing. The lean in gospel, applied in practice.

Her account of sexual harassment at the company is where the personal stakes get highest. She raised a complaint against Joel Kaplan, a senior executive, and rather than any formal process being triggered, it was resolved through a backroom deal: she stays quiet, the problem gets handled. The deal failed. Joel didn't back off. She was fired. What she gave up — the right to formally pursue her complaint — she gave up for nothing. The book itself feels, in moments, like the accountability that process was supposed to provide.

What struck me throughout all of this was how Facebook treated its own employees as extensions of the mission rather than as people. They were expected to absorb whatever risk the company demanded — legal jeopardy, professional harm, even physical danger. Wynn-Williams' trip to Myanmar is a case in point. She went alone, as a woman, into a politically unstable country to meet with authoritarian leadership, with little oversight and nowhere near enough support. The company sent her in and left her to figure it out. That kind of recklessness — the sense that employees had no real choice but to do whatever was asked of them — runs underneath every story in this book.

Then there's Diego Dzodan, Facebook's VP for Latin America, who was briefly detained in Brazil over the company's refusal to hand over WhatsApp data to law enforcement. He went to jail for Facebook. Zuckerberg posted about him publicly — solidarity, acknowledgment, support. They later met in person. Zuckerberg had no idea who he was. By that point in the book, I wasn't even surprised. Profit was all Facebook cared about. Not human life, and certainly not the people doing the dirty work on their behalf.

And then Myanmar. Facebook was effectively the internet for a huge portion of the country's population, and the platform was being used to spread anti-Rohingya hate speech and incitement to violence at scale. They were warned repeatedly. The response was woefully inadequate — too few moderators who spoke the language, too little urgency, too much willingness to treat mass suffering as someone else's problem. The genocide that followed killed tens of thousands and displaced hundreds of thousands more. It left me genuinely sad more than anything else. They knew the chaos and hatred they were enabling and did nothing. A platform with that kind of reach and power should be as close to neutral as possible. Instead it became a weapon, and they handed it over willingly in exchange for growth numbers.

This book genuinely changed how I see Meta as a company. I had suspicions going in, but reading this crystalised something: this is not a company that wants what's best for people. It wants division, engagement, and profit — in that order. I don't really use Facebook anymore, but the AI situation on Instagram and Facebook is something I think about a lot. The manipulation is blatant and it's dangerous. I've watched people in my own life share images and stories on Facebook that are completely fabricated — AI generated content being reposted as real, and spreading fast because most people simply won't stop to fact check. It takes effort, and these platforms are designed to bypass that effort entirely. That's where the political imbalance starts — whoever controls these platforms, controls the information, and whoever controls the information shapes how people vote, what they fear, and who they trust.

What makes Careless People so unsettling is not that the people running Facebook were monsters. It's that they were careless. Careless with power, careless with consequences, careless with human lives they would never have to look at. And in that carelessness, they built the world the rest of us live in.

Essential reading.