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), and the fit is exact. 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.

I mentioned it in a recent interview with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, when asked what keeps me up at night:

“The problem is, you have the same people who are described in Careless People at Facebook. I presume that the same kind of people are running OpenAI, and that is not good news. It’s the same kind of unchecked power. If you realize the power that is coming out of the big AI companies, and then read Careless People, that will keep you awake at night.”

The AI revolution genuinely excites me — it will change what we do, how we live, how we work. But the people currently shaping it matter as much as the technology itself. Fitzgerald’s Buchanans smashed up things and retreated into their money. The question worth losing sleep over is whether the people building the most powerful systems of our time have a fundamentally different character — or just more sophisticated tools.