The Man No One Can Fire
Recently I read Careless People. Sarah Wynn-Williams spent seven years inside Meta's policy operation, close enough to the top to watch decisions get made.
Start with the title, because Wynn-Williams chose it carefully. It's F. Scott Fitzgerald, from the end of The Great Gatsby:
"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made."
It doesn't say they were cruel, or scheming, or evil. Tom and Daisy never set out to destroy anyone. They just lived at an altitude where the destruction happened somewhere below them, to people they'd never have to see, and the money meant there was always somewhere to retreat to. Carelessness isn't a lesser charge than malice. It might be the more damning one, because malice at least has to look at its victims.
The villain story about Meta — the one where a bad man sets out to do bad things — is everywhere, and it's never quite fit. The people Wynn-Williams describes aren't twirling mustaches. They're optimizing. They're chasing growth targets, managing quarterly narratives, treating each country the platform enters as a market to be opened rather than a society to be entered. When the consequences show up — and in the book's most harrowing stretch, the consequence is the platform's role in genocide in Myanmar — the response she describes isn't sadism. It's something closer to inconvenience. The mess is somewhere far away, happening to people no one in Menlo Park will ever meet. The harm lives at a distance the leadership never has to perceive. That's the thing about operating at planetary scale: you get planetary consequences.
Meta disputes her account. And the broader defense is real too: corporations aren't moral agents, they're incentive machines, and if Meta's incentives produced ugliness, so have Exxon's and Boeing's and every bank you can name. By this logic, singling out Meta for contempt is just choosing a fashionable target. For a long time, some version of this argument kept my own conclusions politely suspended.
What finally dissolved it, for me, is a fact that has nothing to do with any single scandal — a fact about structure. When Boeing's failures killed people, its CEO was eventually forced out. Not quickly, not gracefully, but the mechanism existed: a board that could act, shareholders who could pressure, and a leader who could in principle be fired. Meta was built so that this mechanism does not exist. Through the company's dual-class share structure, Mark Zuckerberg holds voting control that no coalition of shareholders can overcome. He cannot be outvoted. The board serves at his pleasure, not the reverse. He cannot, in any meaningful sense, be fired. The only person with the power to stop Mark Zuckerberg is Mark Zuckerberg, and he arranged it that way, deliberately, from the beginning.
Many other institutions have at least a theory of correction. Democracies have elections. Public companies have boards and proxy fights. Even monarchies had the occasional palace coup. Meta — a company whose products mediate the social lives of billions of people, that shapes what a meaningful fraction of humanity sees, believes, and feels every day — carries no theory of correction at all. If its judgment fails, there is no mechanism by which anyone inside corrects it. The carelessness isn't just a culture that might someday be reformed by better leadership. The structure guarantees the leadership. Tom and Daisy at least could have been shamed by their neighbors; Zuckerberg built a company with no neighbors.
The company gave a small, perfect demonstration of this around the book itself. When Careless People was published, Meta went to an arbitrator and won an order barring its own former employee from promoting it. Set aside whether the legal mechanics were sound. Watch the reflex: confronted with an unflattering account, the institution's first move was not rebuttal but silencing — accountability treated as a breach of contract. The attempt made the book a bestseller, which has a certain justice to it, but the reflex is the tell. This is what an organization does when it has forgotten, structurally, what it feels like to answer to anyone.
What do we do? "Delete your account" turns a structural problem into a consumer choice, and pretends the person who leaves Instagram has done something about the platform's role in a country they'll never visit. "Regulate them" is probably right but reads like a bumper sticker at this point in time.
So instead I'll just name the cold thing that arrived while I read, because I think naming it precisely is the useful act. It's contempt. Not hatred — hatred concedes a kind of standing. Contempt is what's left when an institution has forfeited the presumption of good faith: when you can no longer read its actions charitably, because you've watched the pattern long enough to know the charity is being farmed. I didn't start there. I started, years ago, with the ordinary ambivalence everyone has about these platforms, and I read and watched and waited to be wrong. The conclusion got earned the slow way. A company that mediates humanity's social life, run on a culture of consequence-blindness, governed by a structure built to ensure that no one — not shareholders, not the board, not its own conscience-stricken insiders — can ever make it answer for anything, is not a company having a bad decade. It is what it was designed to be.