Careless People, Careless AI

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925), Ch. 9

Sarah Wynn-Williams borrowed that line for the title of her memoir, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism (2025). It is one of the better books I have read recently — a first-hand account of the culture inside Meta that is as readable as it is alarming.

The AI revolution genuinely excites me — it changes what we do, how we live, how we work. But the people currently shaping it matter as much as the technology itself. The culture Wynn-Williams describes at Facebook is not unique to Facebook but, presumably, hard-baked into the culture of the Silicon Valley. From what I can read in the media, OpenAI and other companies building the most capable AI systems resemble Meta closely: The unchecked power, the retreat into certainty, the willingness to let others clean up the mess. That is the part worth losing sleep over.