An Amazing Book

 Last week I spent two three-hour flights reading Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams, an account of her six years working at Facebook, aka Meta, from 2011 to 2017.  Combined with the whole Trump phenomenon and with Walter Isaacson's biography of Elon Musk, which I have already reviewed here, it taught me an enormous amount about big tech, our corporate climate, our new ruling class, and the state of our world.  Born in New Zealand around 1980, Ms. Wynn-Williams worked in the New Zealand diplomatic corps and for an international nonprofit before joining Facebook to help it develop relationships with governments around the world.  She also happens to be a terrific writer, who begins the book with two rather striking anecdotes: a disastrous encounter between her boss Mark Zuckerberg and several heads of state in Panama, and the shark attack she suffered as a child that nearly killed her because of an undetected perforated colon.  She joined Facebook, she explains, believing idealistically that its ability to reach billions of people around the world could do a great deal of good.  By the time she was fired in 2017 she had discovered that Zuckerberg and his senior team care only about money and power, and that they will cooperate with any government to increase their share.  Meanwhile, she endured appalling treatment from many of her bosses, including sexual harassment which led to her discharge after she reported it.

I am not going to summarize the book from start to finish.  It is very detailed, makes many interesting detours into Wynn-Williams's personal life, and, unfortunately, lacks an index, which would make a reviewer's job a good deal easier.  It occurs to me that publishers are probably dispensing with indices because those who read electronically don't need them.  Instead I am going to discuss the main things that I learned from the book about one the institutions that is transforming social, emotional, economic and political life all over the world.

Let me begin at the top, with Zuckerberg himself.  I define a dysfunctional family as a family in which one member is a god whose needs invariably take priority over all the other members.  Meta fits that definition, and Zuckerberg is the god.  He keeps very irregular hours and generally refuses to make any appointments before noon--even, as Wynn-Williams discovered, with heads of state.  Everyone around him focuses on keeping him happy.  He cannot stand to hear any bad news.  Nor is this all. Like most people, I imagine, I got my image of Zuckerberg from Jesse Eisenberg's portrayal of him in Aaron Sorkin's film, The Social Network.  That Zuckerberg was clearly a sociopath, but he was also very smart and had real charisma.  I did not see those qualities in Wynn-Williams's portrayal of  him (and I believe that she never mentioned the movie.)  Like Trump, his self-image seems to be all out of proportion to his actual abilities. He also has enormous difficulty handling the ordinary details of life, and once caused a crisis in a visit to Peru when he came to an airport terminal without his passport.  He blamed his staff for the mistake. Once, on a long plane ride, Zuckerberg asked Wynn-Williams to play two board games with him, and she--knowing her boss--makes him stipulate that she does not have to let him win.  When she does win, repeatedly, he accuses her of cheating. This is how Trump plays golf. 

This leads me to one of the biggest revelations in the book, one which apparently never made its way into the media.  Zuckerberg in 2016 did not think much of Donald Trump, but Facebook, Wynn-Williams argues convincingly, played a critical, active role in getting him into the White House.  Facebook employees, she says, worked directly with Trump campaign officials to explain how they could use Facebook to identify and reach potential voters in the same way that advertisers use it to reach potential buyers.  The company itself devoted enormous resources to use the election to increase its reach and influence.  The whole Russiagate affair, one could argue, simply distracted us from a much more important election story.  

That, however, is not all.  After the election, when senior Facebook leadership realized how much they had helped Trump, one of Wynn-Williams's bosses, Elliot Schrage, wanted the company to issue what amounted to an apology.  In a subsequent Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit (the occasion of the aforementioned trip to Peru), Wynn-Williams noticed that various important heads of government were treating Zuckerberg much more respectfully--because they now understood how  much Facebook could do to influence their own electoral fates.  And  Zuckerberg, Wynn-Williams explains, was inspired by Trump's victory to believe that he could reach the White House himself.  He immediately began scheduling appearances in key primary states during 2017, and told her that his annual personal challenge for 2017 would be to visit as many states as possible during the year. He simultaneously began talking about transforming the media landscape by wiping out established media institutions.  He made stops around the country during 2017, but by the end of that year Wynn-Williams was gone from Facebook and can't tell us what happened to his political ambitions during the next three years.  I suspect they will revive in 2028.

Facebook from its beginning obsessed about increasing its clientele--which I have to admit includes myself.  The clientele allowed it to secure advertising revenue, which it has increased by giving advertisers what they want.  This, we learn, includes letting them know when teenage female users are showing anxiety about their appearance, for instance by deleting a selfie.  Having made every user emotionally involved with the whole world's reaction to them, Meta not only feeds their addiction to attention, but helps corporations profit from it.  And that is why, as Wynne-Williams tells us, top Meta executives brag about keeping their own children away from Meta.  Like the oil companies reinforcing their coastal buildings against flooding, they know what they are doing. And at the same time, Meta has tried to get China to open up its social media market by supplying the government with tools to track dissent among its people--a real marriage made in hell.

Meanwhile, Wynn-Williams's personal story answered some long-standing questions of mine about corporate America, and especially about the roles of women in high positions.

I have been struck in recent years by the spread of a certain type of corporate female in popular entertainment such as Yellowstone:  women determined to show that they can be just as ruthless and abusive as any man.  I am not referring to Beth Dutton on that show--she was sui generis--but to several other women representing corporate interests.  These and other such portrayals struck me not only as over the top, but as echoes of older, mysogynistic stereotypes of ball-busting women in the workplace.  To judge from Careless People, however, such female managers do indeed exist, and exhibit A is Zuckerberg's long-time second-in-command, Sheryl Sandberg.  Her ego is so sensitive that when then-Chancellor Angela Merkel declines to meet with her, another female subordinate tells Wynne-Williams not to tell Sandberg about it--and when Sandberg does find out, she throw a long-running tantrum.  After Wynne-Williams's first child is born and begins making demands on her time, Sandberg virtually orders her to order a Filipina nanny.  And on trips on the company jet, Sandberg invites subordinates--both female and male--to take naps with her.  Thinking about all this, I am inclined to think that it's not surprising that women in power can be as abusive as men.  Such abuse, I think, reflects insecurity, and women in my experience suffer from at least as much job performance anxiety as men do.

And meanwhile, Wynne-Williams' own life during these tumultuous five years is a case study in what some feminists have called "having it all."  She has a husband, an attorney, who agrees to tailor his life to hers when her bosses insist that she move to the Bay Area, and gives birth to two children during her Facebook years.  Her determination to breast feed after the first birth despite a heavy work traveling schedule leads to many painful complications which she details at length, and she seems to accept the idea that she is entitled to no special consideration while raising an infant.  Then the birth of her second child nearly kills her when she begins hemorrhaging uncontrollably and goes into a coma for weeks--only to return to work before she is fully recovered.  And meanwhile, she endures inappropriate sexual remarks from her boss, Joel David Kaplan, a lawyer, one-time Supreme Court clerk, veteran of the Brooks Brothers riot that stopped the Miami recount in 1992, and official in the Bush II administration.  A Harvard graduate Sandberg (though not Zuckerberg, who dropped out), he seems surprised one day when Wynne-Williams has to tell him that Taiwan is an island.  Eventually she complains officially about her treatment, and that leads to her dismissal.   According to Wynne-Williams, she had been trying to arrange her departure for some time because of unhappiness with the way things were going, but a mixture of financial and emotional pressure, it seems to me, kept her in place until she took the action that provoked her dismissal. I will live it to every individual reader to draw whatever lessons they can from this part of the story, which is hardly a unique one.

It seems that Wynne-Williams still had some obligations to Meta after her dismissal, and the company forced her accept arbitration over whether she had defamed them.  The arbitrator banned her from promoting the book--which nonetheless reached the top of the New York Times best-seller list early this year.  It is no longer there.  On April 9 last, Wynne-Williams testified before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism, whose members included chairman Josh Hawley of Missouri, Chuck Grassley of Iowa, Marcia Blackburn of Tennessee, Dick Durbin of Illinois, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut.  Hawley and Blackburn are fervent Magaites and Blumenthal and Klobuchar are liberal Democrats, but every member shared Wynne-Williams' anger over Facebook's relationship with the Chinese government, about Zuckerberg's denial before congressional committees of much of what she had said, and about the exploitation of teenage angst practiced by Meta and advertisers.  It turned out, indeed, that a bill to stop that last practice had overwhelmingly passed the Senate last year, only to fail in the House after intensive lobbying by Meta.  I have not watched the video of the hearing but it is available online.

I am most struck, as I conclude this lengthy post, by the increasing dominance of a particular personality type in American life.  Gordon Gecko in Wall Street exemplified that type forty years ago, and the actor Michael Douglas was shocked at the hundreds of strangers who said they had been inspired by his performance.  Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg all combine the same mixture of overdeveloped ego, abusive behavior, and extraordinary entitlement, and it has worked for them all.  That could not happen if that archetype didn't somehow appeal to large segments of the US public--including some of our best-educated young people.  Wynne-Williams represents a completely different type, and I thank her and wish her and her family well in years to come for having done so much more my education.

And meanwhile, Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Musk, and others like  them are having more impact on American life--and life all over the world--than Donald Trump ever will.  Our elite educational system now funnels more than half of our most driven young people either to Wall Street or into enterprises like theirs.  They continue to transform how we shop, how we interact, and how we amuse ourselves simply because they can.  AI is now transforming how people work intellectually, and AI and robots will have a tremendous effect on workplaces, with consequences that we cannot foresee.  One of my sons recently rewatched Back to the Future, and was struck by how little life had changed, actually, between 1955, when most of the action takes place, and 1985, when it was set.  The last forty years have been far more transformative, and we have no idea where their changes will lead us in the next 20-30 years.

 

  

Events at home and abroad

In 2023 I attended and participated in a panel at an Old Parkland Conference in Dallas.  (That panel can be viewed here.)  Justice Clarence Thomas spoke at that conference, which was dominated by black centrists and conservatives.  At an evening reception, with a stiff gin and tonic under my belt, I approached Justice Thomas.  I indicated that I was on the opposite side of the political fence from him and had disagreed with many of his opinions, but that I agreed with him about two important issues.  The first was that the concept of "substantive due process" was an invention that had allowed both conservatives and liberals, in different eras, to find things in the constitution that are not there.  (I agree with the results of some decisions based on that concept, such as the gay marriage decision, but I think that they could have been reached on simple equal protection grounds.)  The second was that I agreed with his dissenting opinions that a single federal district court judge should not be able to block a law or policy all over the country.  It was a very polite conversation across party lines, which was my intention.

Last week Chief Justice Roberts's majority opinion endorsed Thomas's view on nationwide injunctions, which have been issued against policies of both Republican and Democratic presidents.  The specific injunctions in question had overturned President Trump's denial of birthright citizenship.  I agree with the judges who issued them that his executive order on that subject is flagrantly unconstitutional, and the Supreme Court made clear that it was not at this time ruling on the merits of the case.  I feel pretty confident that the court will sustain the interpretation of birthright citizenship that it laid down back i the 1890s, and which by the way had been common law since the founding of the republic, long before it had been stated in words of few syllables in the 14th Amendment.  But unlike New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie--who admitted his own doubts about nationwide injunctions in principle, but attacked the specific decision because it allowed Trump's policies to continue in some jurisdictions--I am not willing to reject a decision that I agree with in principle because it has a momentarily negative effect.

Let's be clear about the precise effect of this decision.  Cases can be brought on behalf of particular infants in a given jurisdiction, and a district court judge could issue an injunction reserving their right to citizenship (and to remain in the country) while the case is heard and winds its way through the court system.  The Roberts opinion even invited class action suits that could theoretically apply to all babies born in the US.  But the principle could not be reaffirmed and the administration forced to abandon its policy until a case reached the Supreme Court.  I deeply regret that Trump's policy was issued in the first place, but I can accept the need to wait in order to overturn precedents that have allowed individual district court justices to veto actions by the executive or legislative branch all over the country.   Too many Democrats, including most of their representatives in Congress, have committed themselves to the proposition that anything Trump does must be overturned by any possible means.  I don't think we deserve to win the ongoing political struggle if we can't at the same time stand for generally sound principles.

Now to another matter entirely.

 I am sad to be writing this part of this post.  More and more information confirms what I have suspected for at least a year.  The government of Israel is not fighting in Gaza to get the remaining Israeli hostages back, or simply to destroy Hamas.  It is fighting to make the Gaza strip uninhabitable and to force most or all of the Palestinians to flee to some other territory.  The official explanations for Israeli tactics have never made much sense to me.  The government claims to be striking at Hamas fighters, but we have all known from the beginning that Hamas fighters are living in tunnels underground, and I have never been able to understand how leveling most of the buildings in Gaza could really help get at them.  They have obviously used violence pretty indiscriminately, leading to the deaths of at least 60,000 Palestinians in the last 20 months, most of them civilians.  Within just a few months after the outbreak of the war, Jared Kushner, who has worked closely with the Israeli government, suggested to a Harvard audience that this war, like the recent wars in Iraq and Syria, would lead to the relocations of many thousands of people.  In recent weeks news stories have confirmed this Israeli goal and provided more details about the tactics that Israel is now using to achieve it.

The first piece, written by an academic named Shadi Hamid, appeared in the Washington Post in late May.  It cited a May 11 report in the Israeli centrist newspaper the Jerusalem Post of blunt remarks that Prime Minister Netanyahu made to the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee.  "We are destroying more and more homes, and Gazans have nowhere to return to. The only inevitable outcome will be the wish of Gazans to emigrate outside of the Gaza Strip," Netanyahu said.  President Trump, of course, had already proposed the resettling of the Gazan population in some other territory such as Egypt or Jordan.  Hamid also quotes the Agriculture Minster, Avi Dichter, saying, "We are ow rolling out the Gaza Nakba"--a reference to the forced removal of Arabs from the new Israel in 1948--just a month after the current war began.  A further month after that, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said, "what needs to be done in the Gaza Strip is to encourage emigration" and looked forward to the day when only 1-200,000 Arabs, not two million, would live there.  More recently Smotrich told supporters that Gaza would be totally destroyed within a few months and the remaining population concentrated in the southernmost part of the Gaza strip.   

Two days ago, the leftwing, anti-government Israeli paper Haaretz published a well-sourced account of what the Israeli Defense forces are doing in Gaza today.  Many readers will have read the almost daily reports of dozens of Palestinians being killed while waiting at new food distribution centers set up by private groups after Israel stopped the international aid effort in Gaza.  The Hamas-dominated Gaza Health Ministry now claims that such deaths have reached 549 people.  Several Israeli soldiers told Haaretz that troops are routinely opening fire on groups of Palestinians waiting for the distribution of aid without either warning or provocation.  I quote from the article:

"It's a killing field," one soldier said. "Where I was stationed, between one and five people were killed every day. They're treated like a hostile force – no crowd-control measures, no tear gas – just live fire with everything imaginable: heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars. Then, once the center opens, the shooting stops, and they know they can approach. Our form of communication is gunfire."

The soldier added, "We open fire early in the morning if someone tries to get in line from a few hundred meters away, and sometimes we just charge at them from close range. But there's no danger to the forces." According to him, "I'm not aware of a single instance of return fire. There's no enemy, no weapons." He also said the activity in his area of service is referred to as Operation Salted Fish – the name of the Israeli version of the children's game "Red light, green light"

Several other soldiers confirmed all this, detailing incidents in which Israeli sources opened up artillery fire on waiting groups of Gazans.  And another veteran fighter described another Israeli tactic.  "Today, any private contractor working in Gaza with engineering equipment receives 5,000 [roughly $1,500] shekels for every house they demolish," he said. "They're making a fortune. From their perspective, any moment where they don't demolish houses is a loss of money, and the forces have to secure their work. The contractors, who act like a kind of sheriff, demolish wherever they want along the entire front."  Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz have denied these accusations, calling them "blood libels," but there were too many sources in the Haaretz article to dismiss, and the numbers of dead speak for themselves.

Meanwhile, since October 7, 2023, Israeli settlers and the Israeli army have escalated their pressure on Palestinians in the West Bank, which Smotrich promised to annex within the next year or so.  Israeli heavy equipment routinely begins raids into refugee camps by tearing up paved roads, and settlers are trying to empty more and more territory of Palestinians.  

Israeli supporters within the United States have continued to argue that Israeli tactics in Gaza are a necessary response to October 7, and that Hamas and the Palestinians have brought all this upon themselves.  They have not reassessed their position in light of these revelations, and I don't think that they will.  And I am not writing this piece in a the belief that I or anyone else can stop what is happening.  A recent poll of the Israeli people found 82 percent of respondents in favor of driving the Palestinians out of Gaza, and the Trump administration will not stand in the Israeli government's way.  This looks like the climax of almost 80 years of struggle between the Israeli government and the Palestinian population--intermittently backed by various Muslim governments in the region.  And Jared Kushner, sadly, was right: we do live in a new age of ethnic cleansing and population transfers, in Myanmar, in Sudan, and in the Middle East.