CARELESS PEOPLE: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism, by Sarah Wynn-Williams

《漫不经心的人——一个关于权力、贪婪和失去理想主义的警世故事》(Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism,)，莎拉·韦恩-威廉姆斯著

The publisher of “Careless People” kept the existence of this memoir a secret until a few days ago — with good reason, it turns out.

《漫不经心的人》的出版商一直对这本回忆录的存在保密，直到几天前才公之于众——事实证明这是很有必要的。

For seven years, beginning in 2011, the book’s author, Sarah Wynn-Williams, worked at Facebook (now called Meta), eventually as a director of global public policy. Now she has written an insider account of a company that she says was run by status-hungry and self-absorbed leaders, who chafed at the burdens of responsibility and became ever more feckless, even as Facebook became a vector for disinformation campaigns and cozied up to authoritarian regimes.

从2011年开始，本书作者莎拉·韦恩-威廉姆斯在Facebook（现在叫Meta）工作了七年，最终成为该公司的全球公共政策主管。如今，她写了一本书揭露这家公司的内幕，她说，公司由一群渴望地位的、自我中心的领导人经营，他们对责任的负担感到恼火，变得越来越不负责任，即使Facebook成为虚假信息宣传的载体，并与威权政权亲近时也是如此。

“Careless People” is darkly funny and genuinely shocking: an ugly, detailed portrait of one of the most powerful companies in the world. What Wynn-Williams reveals will undoubtedly trigger her former bosses’ ire. Not only does she have the storytelling chops to unspool a gripping narrative; she also delivers the goods.

《漫不经心的人》暗藏幽默，真切得令人震惊：它为世界上最强大的公司之一描绘了一幅丑陋、细致的画像。韦恩-威廉姆斯透露的信息无疑会激怒她的前老板。她不仅有讲故事的本领，能把一切讲得扣人心弦；而且还能爆出真正的猛料。

During her time at Facebook, Wynn-Williams worked closely with its chief executives Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg. They’re this book’s Tom and Daisy — the “careless people” in “The Great Gatsby” who, as Wynn-Williams quotes the novel in her epigraph, “smashed up things and creatures” and “let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

在Facebook工作期间，韦恩-威廉姆斯与公司首席执行官马克·扎克伯格和谢丽尔·桑德伯格密切合作。他们就是这本书中的汤姆和黛西——《了不起的盖茨比》(The Great Gatsby)里那对“漫不经心的人”，正如韦恩-威廉姆斯在本书题词中引用的那样，他们“砸碎了东西、毁灭了人”，“让别人来收拾他们制造的烂摊子”。

Wynn-Williams was so eager to work at Facebook that she pitched herself to the company for months before it eventually hired her. Born and raised in New Zealand, she had been working as a diplomat at her country’s embassy in Washington and, before that, at the United Nations. She was drawn to human rights and environmental issues.

曾经韦恩-威廉姆斯非常渴望在Facebook工作，她花了几个月的时间向公司推销自己，最终得到聘用。她在新西兰出生和长大，曾在新西兰驻华盛顿大使馆任外交官，此前曾在联合国工作。她对人权和环境问题格外关注。

Relying on Facebook to stay connected with her friends back home, she believed the platform “was going to change the world.” As governments realized what Facebook could do, she sold herself to the company by telling its officials they could use a diplomat. When they finally hired her, she was elated: “I can’t believe I have the opportunity to work on the greatest political tool of my lifetime.”

她依靠Facebook与家乡的朋友保持联系，相信这个平台“将会改变世界”。在各国政府意识到Facebook可以发挥怎样的作用之际，她向公司高管自荐，说一个外交官在这种时候能派上用场。当他们最终聘用她时，她非常高兴：“我简直不敢相信，我有机会为我的时代最伟大的政治工具工作。”

What follows is a book-length admonishment to be careful what you wish for. Any idealism about Facebook’s potential as “the greatest political tool” sounds bitterly ironic now, 14 years later. By the end of her memoir, Wynn-Williams is told that her superiors have “concerns” about her performance; she feels so beaten down by her tenure at the company that she describes getting fired as a “quick euthanasia.”

接下来，她将用一本书的篇幅告诫读者，许愿的时候要考虑到后果。14年后的今天，任何关于Facebook有潜力成为“最伟大的政治工具”的理想主义听起来都极具讽刺意味。在这本回忆录的结尾，韦恩-威廉姆斯被告知，她的上司对她的表现“感到担忧”；她对自己在这家公司的工作感到非常沮丧，她把自己被解雇的过程形容为“快速安乐死”。

Wynn-Williams sees Zuckerberg change while she’s at Facebook. Desperate to be liked, he becomes increasingly hungry for attention and adulation, shifting his focus from coding and engineering to politics. On a tour of Asia, she is directed to gather a crowd of more than one million so that he can be “gently mobbed.” (In the end, she doesn’t have to; his desire is satisfied during an appearance at a Jakarta shopping mall with Indonesia’s president-elect instead.) He tells her that Andrew Jackson (who signed the Indian Removal Act into law) was the greatest president America ever had, because he “got stuff done.”

韦恩-威廉姆斯看到扎克伯格在Facebook的改变。他极度渴望被人喜欢，越来越渴望得到关注和奉承，把注意力从编程和工程转移到了政治上。在一次亚洲之行中，她被指示召集一百多万人，让他可以被“温柔地包围”。（最终她无需这么做；他的愿望在与印尼当选总统一起在雅加达一家购物中心亮相时得到了满足。）他告诉她，（签署了《印第安人迁移法案》的）安德鲁·杰克逊是美国有史以来最伟大的总统，因为他“能把事办成”。

Sandberg, for her part, turns her charm on and off like a tap. When Wynn-Williams first starts at Facebook, she is in awe of Sandberg, who in 2013 publishes her best-selling corporate-feminism manifesto, “Lean In.” But Wynn-Williams soon learns to mistrust “Sheryl’s ‘Lean In’ shtick,” seeing it as a thin veneer over her “unspoken rules” about “obedience and closeness.”

至于桑德伯格，她的魅力就像水龙头一样随时开关。刚开始在Facebook工作时，韦恩-威廉姆斯对桑德伯格十分敬畏。2013年，桑德伯格出版了她最畅销的企业女权主义宣言《向前一步》(Lean in)。但韦恩-威廉姆斯很快就学会了不信任“谢丽尔的《向前一步》噱头”，认为这只是她关于“服从和亲密”的“潜规则”的一层薄薄外衣。

Wynn-Williams is aghast to discover that Sandberg has instructed her 26-year-old assistant to buy lingerie for both of them, budget be damned. (The total cost is $13,000.) During a long drive in Europe, the assistant and Sandberg take turns sleeping in each other’s laps, stroking each other’s hair. On the 12-hour flight home on a private jet, a pajama-clad Sandberg claims the only bed on the plane and repeatedly demands that Wynn-Williams “come to bed.” Wynn-Williams demurs. Sandberg is miffed.

韦恩-威廉姆斯吃惊地发现，桑德伯格让她26岁的助手为她们俩买情趣内衣，不用考虑预算（一共花了1.3万美元。）在前往欧洲的一次长途旅行中，助理和桑德伯格轮流枕着对方的腿入睡，抚摸对方的头发。在乘坐私人飞机回家的12个小时中，穿着睡衣的桑德伯格占据了飞机上唯一的一张床，并一再要求韦恩-威廉姆斯“到床上来”。韦恩-威廉姆斯拒绝了。桑德伯格很恼火。

Sandberg isn’t the only person in this book with apparent boundary issues. Wynn-Williams has uncomfortable encounters with Joel Kaplan, an ex-boyfriend of Sandberg’s from Harvard, who was hired as Facebook’s vice president of U.S. policy and eventually became vice president of global policy — Wynn-Williams’s manager. A former Marine who clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia and who was part of the “Brooks Brothers riot” of 2000, which helped bring George W. Bush into office, Kaplan went on to serve as a deputy chief of staff in his administration.

桑德伯格并不是本书中唯一一个在边界感方面明显有问题的人。桑德伯格在哈佛读书时的前男友乔尔·卡普兰被聘为Facebook负责美国政策副总裁，最终成为负责全球政策的副总裁，是韦恩-威廉姆斯的上司，两人相处很不愉快。曾在海军陆战队服役的卡普兰作过安东宁·斯卡利亚大法官的助理，并参与了2000年的“布鲁克斯兄弟骚乱”，那场骚乱帮助乔治·W·布什入主白宫，他则成为布什政府的副幕僚长。

Wynn-Williams describes Kaplan grinding up against her on the dance floor at a work event, announcing that she looks “sultry” and making “weird comments” about her husband. When she delivers her second child, an amniotic fluid embolism nearly kills her; yet Kaplan keeps emailing her while she’s on maternity leave, insisting on weekly videoconferences. She tells him she needs more surgery because she’s still bleeding. “But where are you bleeding from?” he repeatedly presses her. An internal Facebook investigation into her “experience” with Kaplan cleared him of any wrongdoing.

韦恩-威廉姆斯说，在一次工作活动中，卡普兰在舞池里紧挨着她，说她看起来“很撩人”，并对她的丈夫发表“奇怪的评论”。她生第二个孩子时几乎因为羊水栓塞丧命；但在休产假期间，卡普兰仍在给她发邮件，坚持每周举行一次视频会议。她告诉卡普兰，自己需要更多手术，因为她还在流血。“你是哪里流血呢？”他一再追问她。Facebook对她的这段“经历”做了内部调查，声称他没有任何不当行为。

Such scenes of personal degradation are lurid enough, but Wynn-Williams also had a front-row seat to some of Facebook’s most ignominious episodes. In the lead-up to the 2016 election, Facebook employees embedded with the Trump campaign helped it micro-target potential voters, feeding them bespoke ads filled with “misinformation, inflammatory posts and fund-raising messages.” (The Clinton campaign declined Facebook’s offer to embed employees.) The following year, in Myanmar, a country heavily reliant on Facebook, hateful lies propagated on the platform incited a genocide against the minority Rohingya ethnic group.

这些个人的堕落场景已经非常耸人听闻了，但韦恩-威廉姆斯还亲眼目睹了Facebook一些最不光彩的事件。在2016年大选之前，与特朗普竞选团队密切相关的Facebook员工帮助该团队对潜在选民进行精准投放，向他们投放充满“错误信息、煽动性帖子和筹款信息”的定制广告。（克林顿的竞选团队拒绝了Facebook为其植入员工的提议。）第二年，在严重依赖Facebook的缅甸，该平台上传播的仇恨谎言煽动了对少数民族罗兴亚人的种族灭绝。

Wynn-Williams says she started raising the alarm about Myanmar several years earlier, trying to persuade Facebook to beef up its monitoring operations when she learned that hate speech was circulating on the platform. Content moderation was painfully (and lethally) slow, she writes, because the company relied on one contractor who spoke Burmese: a “Burmese guy” based in Dublin, multiple time zones away from both Myanmar and Facebook’s California headquarters. “Myanmar demonstrates better than anywhere the havoc Facebook can wreak when it’s truly ubiquitous.”

韦恩-威廉姆斯说，她在几年前就开始对缅甸问题发出警告，当她得知Facebook上流传着仇恨言论时，她试图说服Facebook加强其监控行动。她写道，内容审核过程缓慢得令人痛苦（甚至致命），因为该公司依靠的是一个会说缅甸语的承包商：一个住在都柏林的“缅甸人”，与缅甸和Facebook的加州总部相隔多个时区。“缅甸比任何地方都能更好地证明，当Facebook真正无处不在时，能造成多大的破坏。”

The book includes a detailed chapter on “Aldrin,” the code name for Facebook’s project to get unblocked in China. According to Wynn-Williams, the company proposed all kinds of byzantine arrangements involving China-based partnerships, data collection and censorship tools that it hoped would satisfy China’s ruling Communist Party.

这本书中有一章详细介绍了“奥尔德林”，这是Facebook寻求在中国解禁的项目的代号。据韦恩-威廉姆斯称，该公司提出了各种错综复杂的安排，包括寻找中国合作伙伴、数据收集和审查工具，希望能让执政的中国共产党满意。

Knowing that Zuckerberg would probably face questions about China from Congress, his team gave him cleverly worded talking points. “There seems to be no compunction about misleading Congress,” Wynn-Williams writes. “Senators will need to ask exceptionally specific questions to get close to any truth.” When Zuckerberg eventually appears before a Senate committee in 2018, a senator asks him how Facebook is handling the Chinese government’s unwillingness “to allow a social media platform — foreign or domestic — to operate in China unless it agrees to abide by Chinese law.” In his reply, Zuckerberg states, “No decisions have been made around the conditions under which any possible future service might be offered in China,” to which Wynn-Williams comments: “He lies.”

扎克伯格知道自己可能会在国会面临有关中国的质询，他的团队为他提供了措辞巧妙的论点。“对于误导国会，他们似乎毫无愧疚感，”韦恩-威廉姆斯写道。“参议员需要提出非常具体的问题，才能接近真相。”当扎克伯格最终在2018年出现在参议院委员会作证时，一名参议员问他，Facebook如何处理中国政府不愿意“允许国内外社交媒体平台在中国运营，除非它同意遵守中国法律”的问题。扎克伯格回答说，公司“还没有就未来可能在中国提供服务的条件做出任何决定”。对此，韦恩-威廉姆斯评论说：“他在撒谎。”

Wynn-Williams has filed a whistle-blower complaint to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Professionally, she has moved on, to work on policy issues related to artificial intelligence and to pour her gallows humor into this book. “Careless People” may contain a cast of careless people, but it’s ultimately Zuckerberg who “wants to be the decider.” She shows him replacing the imperfect system of checks and balances that her policy team developed over the years with his decrees, which typically coincide with his business interests: “Facebook is an autocracy of one.”

韦恩-威廉姆斯已向美国证券交易委员会提交了举报人投诉。在职业方面，她已经转向研究与人工智能相关的政策问题，并且在这本书中倾注了她临危不惧的幽默。《漫不经心的人》可能描写了一群漫不经心的人，但最终是关于“想成为决策者”的扎克伯格。她在书中展示了扎克伯格如何用他的命令取代了她的政策团队多年来形成的不完善的制衡体系，这些命令通常与他的商业利益相吻合：“Facebook是一人专制。”

And autocracies aren’t bound by term limits. In 2016, during a summit of world leaders in Peru, Wynn-Williams noticed that many faces were familiar; a number of other leaders were gone. “I’m struck by the impermanence of importance,” she writes. “Yet Mark could conceivably continue to hold his place chairing world leaders for another 50 years. He’ll see these leaders off and the generations of leaders that follow them. Like the queen.”

而且这样的专制不受任期限制。2016年，在秘鲁举行的世界领导人峰会上，韦恩-威廉姆斯注意到许多熟悉的面孔；也有许多领导人不见了身影。“我对政要的无常感到震惊，”她写道。然而，可以想象，马克还可以在未来50年继续担任世界领导人的主席。他将看着这些领导人和他们的继任者走马灯似地在眼前经过。就像英女王那样。”

CARELESS PEOPLE: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism | By Sarah Wynn-Williams | Flatiron | 382 pp. | $32.99

《漫不经心的人——一个关于权力、贪婪和失去理想主义的警世故事》|作者：莎拉·韦恩-威廉姆斯|382页|Flatiron出版社|32.99美元