Careless People - Sarah Wynn Williams

I found the title of this book interesting. Interesting, because the word I would have reached for is offhand. Sarah Wynn-Williams could have called this book a lot of things: an exposé, an indictment, even a reckoning. Instead she reached for a quote from The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald. “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy, they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness.” The word she landed on wasn’t corrupt, wasn’t malicious, it wasn’t even dishonest.

It’s quite astonishing, when you stop to consider it, that a company built to help people stay connected could quietly influence some of the world’s most consequential geopolitical events without pausing, even briefly, to trace what those ripples might do.

This book is a first-person account from someone who carved a place for herself inside an organisation that genuinely did not reckon with the harm it was capable of causing. Wynn-Williams describes what she saw, and the precision of “careless” over “evil” is what makes the whole thing land so differently from the whistleblower memoir you might be expecting.