Careless People Summary & key ideas explained

At thirteen, on a family beach holiday in New Zealand, Sarah Wynn-Williams was bitten by a shark. The wound was stitched, and she was sent back to the campsite. Then she nearly died there, because the grown-ups around her were slow to believe how much trouble she was in.

She opens her memoir with that day, and it's hard not to read it as a warning. The rest of the book is about another set of people who didn't take danger seriously until it was far too late.

Wynn-Williams grew up to be a diplomat. She worked for New Zealand's foreign service and spent time at the United Nations in New York. Then she became convinced that a website in California had more power to shape politics than most governments. From 2011 to 2017 she worked at Facebook, rising to director of global public policy. She traveled with Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg to summits and on private jets.

What she describes isn't a cartoon of evil. It's something more ordinary and, she argues, more dangerous: brilliant, very rich people who simply didn't care enough about the consequences of what they built.

Meta strongly disputes her account. It calls the book false and out of date, and it went to arbitration to stop her promoting it. What follows is her story, as she tells it.

So how does an idealistic diplomat end up inside the room where all of this was decided?