I cannot pretend that on some level anything in this book feels like new information to me - Meta is a cancer on society; Mark Zuckerberg is at best short-sighted and uninterested, at worst sociopathic; Sheryl Sandberg is a wild hypocrite. Like, on an instinctual level, I wouldn’t have told you that Careless People could have informed me any further on those points. But, christ. The idea that Instagram was tracking when teenage girls posted and then immediately deleted selfies and in that moment advertising them beauty products is just abominable. I do agree with Wynn-Williams that even if not coming from top-down, bottom-up I do think Facebook (later Meta) was full of idealists who thought they were making the world better, or at least one day could. I don’t know when the turning point was between “not realising the deep impact this stuff could have” and “realising and exploiting that”, but it clearly happened. Wynn-Williams writes compellingly about her own role in this, understands her part in it, so Careless People is plenty readable. If you’ve paying attention, most of this won’t be new to you, but the insider account has its own merits and even those following the saga most closely will still find new things in it to feel uncomfortable about.