Careless Folks by Fb whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams is among the greatest books for understanding how giant tech platforms truly behave when development, geopolitics, and energy collide. It jogs my memory of after I labored in Silicon Valley in the course of the Web growth. It’s like going to an island kingdom, stay amongst them and study their phrases.
The ebook chronicles Meta (then Fb) by means of roughly 2017, with specific consideration to its courtship of China, its willingness to construct surveillance-adjacent instruments engaging to the CCP, and its inside fixation on worldwide growth at virtually any value. This isn’t speculative futurism—it’s operational historical past advised from contained in the constructing. Sarah goes into most of the implications of the CCP connection in this interview with Bari Weiss.
What makes Careless Folks newly related is imagining the identical incentives in an AI-first world. Surveillance capabilities that when required bespoke methods at the moment are trivial at scale. Content material moderation turns into inference. “Security” turns into telemetry. And the irony is tough to overlook: the 2 most distinguished open-weight AI platforms right now are China’s DeepSeek and Meta’s Llama. That symmetry alone ought to give policymakers pause.
Zuckerberg’s “Little Crimson E book”
One of many extra revealing episodes within the ebook is Mark Zuckerberg’s promotion of what staff reportedly known as his “Little Crimson E book”—a deliberate nod to Mao Zedong. Fb staff had been required to learn it as a form of company catechism, distilling Zuckerberg’s views on mission, self-discipline, and the primacy of development.
The symbolism issues. This wasn’t simply quirky founder branding; it mirrored an admiration for centralized management and ideological coherence that maps uncomfortably effectively onto Fb’s China ambitions and its consolation designing instruments aligned with state surveillance priorities. In an AI period—the place fashions encode values at scale—the lesson is simple: tradition precedes code.
The infant-naming gesture
That theme is bolstered by broadly reported accounts that Zuckerberg, talking Mandarin at a 2015 White Home dinner, requested Chinese language President Xi Jinping to offer his unborn baby an honorary Chinese language title, a request Xi declined. Unclear which was extra humiliating. Nonetheless one reads the gesture, it was an extraordinary efficiency of deference in service of market entry.
Positioned alongside Sarah’s account, the episode underscores the ebook’s core perception: worldwide development in Huge Tech just isn’t merely a enterprise technique—it turns into a governing ideology, one that may normalize symbolic submission, political lodging, and product selections that will in any other case increase crimson flags.
Why this issues past Meta and helps us perceive Kadrey and Spotify
Careless Folks can be instructive far past geopolitics. Sarah exhibits how tech firms obsess over controlling the board, locking in development narratives, and prioritizing market capitalization over stakeholders. Sarah additionally clarifies how Mark Zuckerberg normalized rule-breaking in pursuit of scale—context that helps clarify allegations in Kadrey v. Meta that copyrighted books had been copied wholesale for AI coaching. When you scratch your head after studying Decide Chhabria’s ruling in Kadrey and say how on the earth did a company big like Meta stoop to outright theft the quaint approach, it’s rather a lot simpler to grasp. Sure, Zuckerberg actually is that juvenile. Sarah’s memoir makes these claims really feel much less aberrational and extra like customary working process (and fully doable at each AI lab if it may occur at Meta).
That lens interprets cleanly to music tech. To start with, I merely don’t imagine that Zuckerberg swore to forbear stealing music for coaching after he stole the books. If you wish to perceive how Spotify may inform Wall Road a development story and maintain costs flat for almost a decade whereas accumulating huge stock-market features that by no means circulation by means of to artists, Careless Folks supplies the governance blueprint. And don’t ever neglect that Daniel Ek sees himself within the panoply of tech billionaires as a Zuck wannabe.
The main points might predate right now’s AI growth, however the mindset hasn’t modified. If something, AI amplifies each threat the ebook describes.
Extremely beneficial.
