Two faced Facebook?
Careless People. Power. Greed. Madness .
A Story of Where I used To Work.
by Sarah Wynn-Williams, Macmillan. ISBN 978-125039123-0. Published under the Flatiron Books imprint. Kindle Edition reviewed here.
NYT cartoonist Chappatte.
Sarah Wynn-Williams, it is safe to say, does not get on with the natural world. The moment she steps out of a solid building she is savagely attacked. This is what happens when she tries to open a gate …I’m being attacked by wasps, she writes, The crippling pain in both my knees means that I can’t walk or even stand. So I drag myself along ground towards the car, part human, part wasp…
Earlier in her life she had been attacked by a shark - a force so powerful and unexpected. A shark attack is like being hit by a knife attached to a freight train.
It makes sense, therefore that she wants to work indoors, with the law; using it to make the world a better place. Later she decides that emerging technology will be the tool to do this . It will use logical, unemotional algorithms that will tame the mad, savage jungle of politics and other miseries that lurk outside.
She is young. She is enthusiastic. She talks her way into a job at Facebook - the one company, she believes, who can achieve her vision. True to her word she pushes poor introverted Mark Zuckerberg into meetings with world leaders. Slowly he too grasps how powerful Facebook can make him on the world stage. Too late, she realises, she has created a monster and the sharks that swim in the wide blue seas are as nothing compared with the creatures that prowl the grimy corridors of Facebook HQ.
At times darkly comic, at others truly horrifying; Sarah Wynn-Williams throws an unrelenting spotlight on the atrocities that Facebook has allowed to take place on its watch. She explains technical challenges very well and her passage on Unicode and the reasons why it fed the atrocities in Myanmar are truly shocking. Their development of systems designed to make adolescents miserable is jaw dropping. Facebook and its team are not careless people like Daisy and Tom Buchanan; they are careless on the scale of Lucifer who encouraged us poor mortals to eat from the tree of knowledge.
Often, you want to shake Sarah and scream, run girl, RUN. But she gamely carries on, hoping to turn the shiny ship around.
I read with a prickling sensation of recognition. I too have been young, I too talked myself into a job (the new desktop PCs were revolutionising the office) and I loved the idea of a printing press to hand. Like Sarah, I worked for a company that I thought was great and found it was a bankrupt collection of individuals who were up to their necks in it. Like Sarah, I worked with creepy people who thought my biology was troublesome and would get in the way of my ability to work. To be fair I don’t have children - but here is the feedback Sarah had on her return to work following a traumatic birth. She is told she was difficult to contact while on maternity leave. (illegal). She replies… you mean, you know, I was in hospital, in a coma, near death… Still her performance review marked her down.
In the eighties I was a young woman who wanted to do more than be a wife in waiting. I wanted to be independent and break down barriers for other women in the workplace. I was ambitious and I wanted to contribute to the world. It is beyond depressing that this current generation of women is facing the same dismal set of problems that we did. And worse. The great algorithm that Sarah put such faith in - has been created by men for men. The sooner political leaders grow up and shut this stuff down the better.
Read this book. Be furious. Choose better online friends. End your tenancy agreement with Meta et.al. Trash the place on the way out.
Enchanted England.