Thoughts on "Careless People" by Sarah Wynn-Williams

What can we learn from a new tell-all memoir by Facebook's former Director of Global Public Policy?

If you make a habit of asking people who work in media what motivates them, there’s one answer you’re likely to hear over and over. “I want to make the stuff I wish was there for me when I was younger.” Even John Reith, the first Director-General of the BBC, seemed to feel this way, and he presided over the birth of both radio and television in Britain.

Reith was the youngest child of a very large family, but he was a late, unexpected addition. By the time he showed up, his brothers and sisters had mostly already left home and started families of their own. Reith was therefore the nineteenth-century equivalent of a latchkey kid, spending a historically unprecedented amount of time sitting by himself in a quiet, empty house. When confronted with the invention of broadcasting and asked to run the BBC, Reith intuitively understood that the programming his organization produced would break that silence and fill up all of that empty space. That radio receivers and television sets would become surrogate parents for the latchkey kids of the twentieth century.

Reith’s high-minded, eat-your-vegetables approach to programming was borne out of his own personal ideas about what sort of parents these machines should aspire to be. His philosophy was derided as “paternalistic” by detractors, who believed Reith was making decisions for the entire country that each individual ought to be free to make for themselves. Isn’t “I want to make the stuff I wish was there for me when I was younger” kind of a paternalistic statement, too, though? If we all believed, as Reith’s detractors did, that markets are the most honest and accurate representation of human wants and needs available, wouldn’t we just trust the market to shape the future of media? Those of us who decided to intervene directly and spend our adult lives trying to shape that future with our own hands - aren’t we paternalistic, too?

For context, maybe it would help to look at the opposite extreme. The legacy of the BBC shows us what it looks like when incredible power to shape the future of media is handed to a paternalist. To someone who thought children need to be protected from the excesses of ad-supported, market-driven media. What happens if you hand that kind of power to someone who doesn’t believe that children should be protected from anything? Someone who has no problem introducing market competition into every single part of the entire global population’s everyday life?

Sarah Wynn-Williams used to work in media. For about seven years, she was the Director of Global Public Policy at Facebook. Her time at the company is the subject of her new memoir, Careless People, as well as the testimony she recently offered to a U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee at the invitation of Senator Josh Hawley.

In a way, Careless People is a bit like Goodfellas or The Devil Wears Prada, but for geopolitics. It’s a story about a wide-eyed, idealistic youth who gains access to the inner circle of some fiercely private power players, gets caught up in the rush of it all, and then eventually turns snitch in order to tell the rest of us how the Sunday Gravy really gets made. In this case, rather than the Lucchese crime family or Anna Wintour, the dirt that Wynn-Williams dishes out is about her old bosses at Facebook: CEO Mark Zuckerberg, COO Sheryl Sandberg, and Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan.

The personal animus that Wynn-Williams seems to harbor towards these people is the engine that drives Careless People’s most cathartic, involving chapters. There’s something almost therapeutic about watching someone who worked closely with these people, who have done so much to shape the internet, tear so unapologetically into their personal flaws and failures. Larger-than-life figures with unthinkable power are briefly rendered small and pitiable enough for the rest of us to look down on.

Less compelling are Wynn-Williams’ professional reasons for writing Careless People. Historically, the dishiest, most satisfying dirt comes from those with nothing to lose. Miles Davis has one of the all time great autobiographies because he was at the end of a long, full life when he sat down to tell his story. He knew he wasn’t going to be around much longer, and most of the people he was talking about were dead already. He had no compelling incentive to hold back anything. Wynn-Williams, on the other hand, is still young and ambitious. The specter of her new career therefore haunts Careless People just as much as the one she left behind.

As origin stories go, Wynn-Williams’ is quite a bit less placid than John Reith’s. The journey that led her to Facebook began at thirteen, when she was nearly killed by a shark. The shark attacked her suddenly while she was swimming at a beach with a friend, leaving her bleeding on the shore with a shredded swimsuit and a portion of her torso missing.

Had this happened in Jacksonville, or San Diego, a lifeguard would have called the relevant authorities and an ambulance would soon have appeared to whisk her away to the nearest hospital. Unfortunately for her, in this case, Wynn-Williams is from New Zealand, perhaps the smallest and most remote examples of what many people call a “western country.” It’s geographically closer to China than it is to Europe, and if a bunch of British settlers hadn’t showed up there in the middle of the nineteenth century, we would probably think of it as being part of “southeast Asia” instead. It is mostly known to the rest of the world as a place that is extremely beautiful and mostly empty. That’s why Hollywood film studios have relied on it to stand in for pre-industrial fantasy settings, and that’s why American billionaires like the idea of retreating there after the apocalypse.

So, there was no lifeguard on duty to help Wynn-Williams after the shark almost killed her. There was no one around at all, actually. Just miles and miles of the pristine natural wilderness that New Zealand is known for. She describes laying there alone on the beach for over an hour waiting for her friend to come back with help, ultimately to no avail. Some local fishermen eventually discovered her, and she was taken to a local country doctor, who stitched her up as best as he was able to.

Her family was startled by the experience, but confident that the doctor had resolved the issue. In reality, the holes that the shark left in Wynn-Williams’ gut were causing the contents of her guts to leak out internally. The pain was intolerable, and she insisted to her family that she felt like she was dying, but they didn’t believe her. There was no higher authority she could appeal to for a second opinion, no alternative source of expertise she could rely upon. All she could do was continue to advocate for herself until her body gave out from the strain.

Days later, Wynn-Williams awoke from a coma in a hospital. A nurse immediately ran to fetch her family, who quickly rushed to her side. “Aren’t you lucky the doctors saved you?” her mother asked, eyes quivering. Even in her weakened state, laying in a hospital bed on life support, breathing through a ventilator, Wynn-Williams felt enraged by what she was hearing. She asked for a pen and paper and wrote out her response in big, bold, underlined letters:

I SAVED MYSELF.

Like many others who work in media, Wynn-Williams seems to want to make the stuff that she wishes was there for her when she was younger. In this case, however, the “stuff” in question is infrastructure. Connective tissue that could have allowed her to access resources she could have used to prevent the worst of what happened to her. Information that could have helped her to avoid the shark in the first place, emergency services that could have helped her find medical attention, and the expertise necessary to make sure her internal injuries were properly addressed.

At first, she thought the best way she could help build this stuff was to go to work for the United Nations. Although it was briefly thrilling to arrive in New York City and engage in marathon late-night policy-planning sessions in the bowels of the organization’s iconic international headquarters, Wynn-Williams soon became frustrated with the lack of impact her work was having. During one particularly long meeting about marine biodiversity, an older colleague from Argentina asked her what she thought the “single most impactful thing to actually protect the oceans over the last decade” was. When she professed ignorance, he laughed and said “Nemo.” As in, the fish they have to find in the movie.

“I had to concede that he was right,” she later wrote. “They system was broken. I was wasting my twenties toiling long hours with a collection of bureaucrats in their fifties in the twilights of their careers, arguing about punctuation but telling ourselves we were saving the environment. When you realize a cartoon fish can achieve more than the United Nations, it’s time to go.”

Diplomacy is Wynn-Williams’ original background. Her area of expertise is geopolitics. Her interest in culture and media came about partly out of frustration with the slow-moving bureaucracy of the rules-based international order. Still green enough to be capable of reckless, self-centered idealism, she wanted to try moving faster and being more willing to break things. She got very into Facebook very early on, and found herself fixated on the long-term implications when she noticed a few local New Zealand elected officials join the platform. As she watched them answer questions directly from constituents in the comments, she started to realize the extent of the impact social media would eventually come to have on politics. She became convinced that Facebook, unlike the United Nations, was actively going to transform society in very short order.

Careless People chronicles the incredible lengths that Wynn-Williams went to in order to convince Facebook’s ambivalent, U.S.-centric leadership of the need to hire someone like her to run global public policy for them. It tells the story of how they eventually relented and brought her on to assuage the insecurity they felt when considering the implications of their role in the Arab Spring revolutions of the early twenty tens. Then, it describes the way that her bosses came to outgrow that insecurity and reject her guidance, dismissing, humiliating, harassing, objectifying, mocking, and eventually firing her in twenty seventeen.

Since she left Facebook, Wynn-Williams has been working on what she describes as “Track II” discussions about “AI-enabled military systems.” The “track” thing is diplomatic terminology. Track I dialogues are negotiations between official representatives of actual governments. Track II dialogues happen between experts who are not actively in government. Participants like Wynn-Williams try to imagine what kind of arguments a particular government would make in a real negotiation in order to try to get ahead of and develop resolutions for any problems that come up in the process. Sometimes these Track II dialogues are organized by think tanks like Brookings, in the hope that the results will influence future foreign policy decisions. A cynical person might describe Track II as a jobs program for wonks.

The specific Track II negotiations that Wynn-Williams says she’s working on are taking place between representatives of the United States and China. This makes sense. Remember that New Zealand is geographically closer to China than it is to Europe or the United States. In a theoretical military conflict between the U.S. and China, New Zealand would become extremely important simply by virtue of where it’s located. Someone with Wynn-Williams’ background, both as a member of New Zealand’s close-knit bureaucratic elite and as a former Director of Global Public Policy at Facebook, would be well-positioned to take advantage of the career opportunities that would surely open up as a result.

Essentially, Sarah Wynn-Williams is now a professional China hawk. Her job is to come up with arguments about how conflict with China is imminent, inevitable, or otherwise desirable that lobbyists can then use to put pressure on actual policymakers. She’s kind of a cheerleader for international alliances and military build-up that, coincidentally or not, would probably be very good for her professionally. That’s why Careless People’s central argument against Mark Zuckerberg has very little to do with the usual complaints about political polarization or the effects of social media on children. Not much point in a diplomat from Christchurch focusing on issues that fall outside her area of expertise. No, according to Wynn-Williams, the biggest problem with Zuck is that he’s soft on China.

While Wynn-Williams was writing Careless People, she also composed and submitted a shareholder resolution asking Facebook’s board of directors to investigate the company’s activity in China, and a formal whistleblower complaint to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to much the same effect. These complaints, as well as the controversy surrounding the release of Careless People, led to Wynn-Williams being invited to testify before a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee hearing by Josh Hawley, a Republican Senator from Missouri. The subject of her testimony, according to a press release from Hawley’s office, was Facebook’s “long-term collusion with the Chinese Communist Party.”

She started her statement by declaring that “we are engaged in a high-stakes AI arms race against China” and claiming that she had witnessed Facebook executives “repeatedly undermine U.S. national security and American values.” She suggests that Facebook’s commitment to open source LLMs “has contributed greatly to Chinese advances in technology like DeepSeek.” She says Facebook’s explicit goal in their dealings with the Chinese government is to “help China outcompete American companies.” This should alarm us all, Wynn-Williams maintains, because of “recent revelations that China is developing AI models for military use.” Mark Zuckerberg, with his Chinese wife and his Chinese children, is apparently an un-American traitor who is going to side against America in the next world war and force us to salute Xi Jinping under threat of nuclear fire.

To the extent that Careless People has a thesis, that’s it. The book is full of shocking and thought-provoking moments that it’s great to have in the public record, but they’re all deployed carefully in the service of an overarching point that would be more at home in a pitch deck than a dishy tell-all. The chapters she devotes to the subject are so painfully pedantic and finger-waggy that it feels like they were ghost-written by bored McKinsey interns, not a whistleblower with actual skin in the game. To make matters worse, these chapters are rolled out at a point in the book where the reader is expecting a climax.

All the passionate aggrievedness and personal vulnerability exhibited during the earlier chapters turns out to have been bait - a tactic to get as many eyes as possible on the real meat of the book, which ends up being little more than a cover letter to prospective employers about how deeply she’s always cared about preparing for great power conflict with China. The deeper, thornier problems that Careless People occasionally, thrillingly risks touching on get flattened into a binary choice between “good for the author’s career” and “evil.” Narratively speaking, it’s kind of a drag.

I also don’t think it’s a particularly convincing or satisfying conclusion to her argument. Even American centrists are now fearlessly cracking jokes about the “Chinese century” and wondering aloud about why we’re not building things as effectively as China is. Americans of all ages love to pass time by using Chinese apps and ordering Chinese products online. One of the most popular American streamers, IShowSpeed, just embarked on a tour of China that dazzled his millions of followers. Some young people are even joining Chinese social media networks to do their own research directly. The conversation has shifted. The neo-Cold War framing of China as America’s dangerous, evil opposite doesn’t match up with the relationship most Americans have with either country today.

Furthermore, Wynn-Williams’ lazy invocation of Falun Gong and Tibet as examples of China’s authoritarian overreach just doesn’t hit the same way at a time when the American government she’s holding up as a bastion of liberty and justice is shipping legal residents off to a prison in El Salvador without due process. How disturbed does she expect the American public to be by whatever is happening in Xinjiang while American bombs and tax dollars are actively being used to wipe Gaza from the face of the Earth? How is the possibility that the Chinese government might gain access to my data scarier than what American corporations and law enforcement agencies can do with it now? Is Xi Jinping going to call ICE on me? What sort of incentive does the average American really have to scapegoat China for problems our government caused? What gives a diplomat from New Zealand more authority to speak on what America values than the Chinese workers who make all our stuff?

If Instagram wasn’t available in Chinese app stores and Mark Zuckerberg had no interest in doing business in China, nothing would be different for the vast majority of Americans. Zuck would still be a power-hungry billionaire who doesn’t believe in privacy. Phones would still be ubiquitous, and social media platforms would still be using them to terrorize children on behalf of advertisers. The American electorate would still be bitterly polarized, and Western governments all over the globe would still be moving to the right. The “careless people” that Wynn-Williams’ book ostensibly exists to impugn would still be running the internet, and she would still be working for them. The book never really succeeds in making a convincing argument as to why that would be a better outcome for the rest of us. Which makes sense: we probably aren’t the target audience.

At the outset of the twenty tens, I, like Sarah Wynn-Williams, was an idealistic, unemployed twentysomething who wanted to make a mark on the world. I, like Sarah Wynn-Williams, also developed a compulsive posting habit much earlier than the rest of the world did. This helped both of us see the future well enough to know what the next big thing was going to be, but not well enough to be able to anticipate how badly it was all going to turn out in the end.

I remember standing on the Williamsburg waterfront in September of twenty ten, looking at the WTC memorial lights right after my band finished playing a show at Glasslands Gallery, one of the venues that got shut down when Vice bought the building. We had driven all the way there from Minneapolis just for the one show, and I don’t think what we got paid even came close to covering the cost of gas. Just across the river, in Manhattan, Kanye West had just introduced “Runaway” to the rest of the world for the first time on stage at the MTV Video Music Awards. I felt like I had reached the center of the world after spending my entire life subsisting on the fringes. It was a rush, and I didn’t know what else to want but for the ride to keep going. So, I kept posting, and for better or worse, the ride kept going. For me, and for Kanye.

On some level, then, I find Wynn-Williams relatable. Her lofty ideals about what she thought she was going to accomplish at Facebook weren’t really any stupider than the fantasies I had back then about what I was going to do with music. Her willingness to believe that a bunch of amoral, power-tripping executives might have meaningful potential for good was a failing that most of us probably shared in some capacity during the twenty tens, and our collective naïveté started blowing up in our faces around the same time her career imploded. The most compelling thing about Careless People is the glimpses it occasionally offers into the bigger story of the twenty tens: the one we all experienced together.

Wynn-Williams spent a big chunk of that decade perched directly at the epicenter of an earthquake that eventually went on to rattle everyone on the planet, after all. There are moments in the book where her story intersects with ours, which are worth considering regardless of whatever motivated her to share them with us. These are a few that stood out to me.

(a)

The pivotal moment of Careless People, as well as Wynn-Williams’ entire career at Facebook, is a private flight to Lima in November of twenty sixteen. Donald Trump has just recently become President-Elect after pulling off a stunning upset and defeating Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the polls. The surprise result sent even hardened politicos reeling, but by mid-November, they’ve begun to process the implications. Pundits have begun to suggest Facebook may have played a decisive role in Trump’s victory, and Zuckerberg is furious about it.

Before Zuck gets on the plane, his biggest concern is the heat he’ll draw from regulators if the media starts blaming him for Trump. He had dismissed the theory as a “crazy idea” during his remarks at a recent tech conference, and the New York Times responded by running an op-ed entitled “Mark Zuckerberg Is in Denial.” Governments across the globe were beginning to investigate the company from every angle, threatening taxes and regulations. Zuck didn’t think he could afford for the pundits to be right. According to Wynn-Williams, though, he just needed some perspective:

Over the course of the ten-hour flight to Lima, Elliot [Schrage, Facebook’s VP of Global Communications and Public Policy] patiently explains to Mark all the ways that Facebook basically handed the election to Donald Trump. It’s pretty fucking convincing and pretty fucking concerning. Facebook embedded staff in Trump’s campaign team in San Antonio for months, alongside Trump campaign programmers, ad copywriters, media buyers, network engineers, and data scientists. A Trump operative named Brad Parscale ran the operation together with the embedded Facebook staff, and he basically invented a new way for a political campaign to shitpost its way to the White House, targeting voters with misinformation, inflammatory posts, and fundraising messages. Boz, who led the ads team, described it as the “single best digital ad campaign I’ve ever seen from any advertiser. Period.

It turned out that Mark Zuckerberg had been underestimating the power of his own platform. According to Schrage, Donald Trump won the election precisely because he did not make that mistake. His campaign heavily outspent Clinton’s on digital advertising, and the Trump campaign was one of the top advertisers on Facebook globally in the lead-up to election day. This assessment mirrors the conversations that happened in the aftermath of Trump’s second victory last November, when pundits agonized over his embrace of Twitch streamers and “manosphere” podcasters.

By the time Zuck’s plane touched down in Lima, he was no longer worried about regulators. Wynn-Williams had always imagined that Facebook would change the world in a way that was complementary to existing institutions, by expanding access and making them more efficient. Somehow, Trump was able to intuitive understand that social media was going to replace our existing institutions, not complement them. His triumph helped Zuck see the light himself. He immediately began planning visits to early primary states with an eye towards running for president and succeeding Trump in the White House.

Wynn-Williams’ life was never the same after that. Facebook’s executives had hired her in a fit of panic, worried that their self-interested, America-centric worldview might cause them to run afoul of the rules-based international order. She was there to help them understand what politicians wanted, so they could avoid taxes and regulation. On the flight to Lima, Zuck realized that it didn’t matter what politicians wanted from him. He had grown so powerful that the rules-based international order was now running afoul of him. They kept her around for a little while longer, the way that millennials often hold on to iPhone boxes they no longer have any practical need for, but dropped her without hesitation after she tried to transfer away from a boss who had been sexually harassing her.

Recently, Semafor’s Ben Smith posted an extensive report about elite group chats in which Facebook board member Marc Andreesen worked hard to engineer an ideological realignment towards Trump among tech executives while Biden was in office. This so-called “tech right” that rose up to help Trump take the White House a second time is comprised of investors and executives who have all undergone the same conversion that Zuck experienced on the plane to Lima. No matter what they believed at the beginning of the decade, evangelists like Andreesen and Peter Thiel are all preaching the same gospel now: there is no need for us to fear the end of the world, because we are what comes next.

(b)

Towards the end of his trip to Lima, Zuck has a fateful meeting with Barack Obama at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, where he had just finished doing a town hall - one of the final public appearances of his presidency. Wynn-Williams says Zuck had always admired Obama, and had even inquired about going on some kind of “spiritual retreat” to Macchu Picchu with him during the planning stages of the Peru trip. After the meeting, however, Zuck was incandescent with rage.

“Fake news, he kept going on about fake news and misinformation,” Mark steams. “He doesn’t get it. He’s got it totally wrong, totally out of proportion. He said that Facebook’s playing a destructive role globally. And I think he actually believes that.”

Elliot shakes his head sympathetically.

“‘Not taking it seriously.’ That’s what he said. I’m not taking these threats seriously enough.” Mark quivers, furious. “I told him fake news wasn’t a big thing on Facebook. It’s less than one percent of what’s on the platform. That it wasn’t fake news that swung the election for Trump. And that realistically there’s not an easy solution. I mean, what does he want me to do?”

Elliot agrees. “I think we’d very quickly run into free speech issues with any action we take.”

“And you know what Obama’s focused on?” Mark says incredulously. “The next election … already.”

“They’ve only just lost this one,” Elliot says.

“Yeah, he said he was ‘warning me’ that we need to make serious changes or things are going to get worse in the next presidential race,” Mark says.

“Warning me,” he repeats, incensed.

Before Trump’s election, Obama’s presidency seemed like the definitive case study on the impact of celebrity on American politics. His election had symbolic importance that pundits struggled to quantify. Obama’s post-presidency, by contrast, seems to be a story about the limitations of celebrity. A parable designed to teach us about all of the ways in which Barack Obama the man was inevitably going to fall short of the expectations that were set for him by Barack Obama the symbol.

That story arguably began in Lima, when Obama tried to rein in Zuckerberg and succeeded only in radicalizing him further against the Democratic coalition. It continued in twenty twenty, when he intervened in the Democratic presidential primary in order to save Joe Biden from being routed by Bernie Sanders, and recently culminated in a failed attempt to block Kamala Harris from replacing Biden as the party’s nominee by engineering some kind of “mini-primary.” Every time he tries to put his thumb on the scale, he doesn’t ever quite seem to get the result he wants.

In much the same way that the South Korean dictatorship of General Park Chung Hee used state power to transform Korean chaebols like Samsung and LG into global supowerpowers, the Democratic Party under Obama’s leadership helped create the “tech right” with subsidies and ego-stroking. When Obama tried to pull rank on Zuck and failed, it was a bit of a Grizzly Man moment - a situation where a guy who has become accustomed to hanging around with dangerous beasts suddenly discovered how little they ever actually cared about him. It’s a realization that the rest of the world has been gradually waking up to ever since.

(c)

In twenty seventeen, Australia’s only nationally-distributed daily newspaper obtained a pitch deck that Facebook’s advertising team made for potential clients. The document revealed that Facebook was “using sophisticated algorithms to identify and exploit Australians as young as fourteen, by allowing advertisers to target them at their most vulnerable.” By monitoring user activity, Facebook’s engineers had worked out how to detect when teenagers on the platform are feeling anxious, dysphoric, and self-conscious, a service which they could then offer to advertisers who wish to take advantage. A company that sells weight loss drugs, for example, could pay to target users in the moments immediately after they post, then quickly delete a selfie on Instagram.

After the paper’s reporting went public, Wynn-Williams was put on a team tasked with determining how the company should respond. She discovers that not only is the reporting likely accurate, but that similar documents had been prepared for so many different advertisers that figuring out which one leaked was like trying to find a needle in a haystack. This sort of emotional targeting wasn’t a mistake that could be corrected, it was the core of Facebook’s whole business. Despite the veracity of the claims, and despite widespread knowledge of these practices within the Facebook, the company responded by issuing a series of progressively more aggressive denials.

“Facebook does not offer tools to target people based on their emotional state,” one statement read. It went on to claim that the leaked pitch deck was simply “analysis” intended to “help marketers understand how people express themselves on Facebook” and that “it was never used to target ads” and was in fact “based on data that was anonymous and aggregated.”

Wynn-Williams knew the statement was a lie, as did countless others, but by then her belief in the utopian potential of Facebook as a service or as a company had completely evaporated. One night, a colleague she describes as “one of the top ad executives for Australia” called her up aghast, demanding to know why the company wasn’t standing behind the product.

“Why are we putting out statements like this?” he wants to know. “This is the business, Sarah. We’re proud of this. We shout this from the rooftops. This is what puts money in all our pockets. And these statements make it look like it’s something nefarious.” It looks bad in front of our advertisers, he says, for Facebook to pretend it’s not doing this targeting. He’s out there every day promoting the precision of these tools that hoover up so much data and insight on and off Facebook so that it can deliver the right ad at the right time to the right user. And this is what headquarters is saying to the public? “How do I explain this?” he asks. And thirteen-to-seventeen-year-olds? “That’s a very important audience. Advertisers really want to reach them. And we have them! We’re pretending we don’t do this?”

Wynn-Williams makes her disgust with these practices very clear to the reader, but doesn’t spend much more time on the subject, which I think is a shame. If there is any one thread capable of tying all of the disparate elements of her story together in a satisfying way, I think it’s this one.

Consumption is labor. Watching television or listening to the radio is labor, and so is scrolling through posts on Instagram. In every case, platforms sell that labor to advertisers. Mass media platforms are like big Home Depots parking lots full of workers who can be reliably expected to do this labor for cheap. That’s you, every time you spend time scrolling through thumbnails on Netflix or Tubi or Microsoft Game Pass. You’re standing around waiting to be picked up and whisked away, so that you can trade hours of your life for the opportunity to feel entertained.

Historically, we don’t take advertising and mass culture very seriously. A Marxist might make the argument that this is because these things are consumed primarily by the working class, which causes them to be dismissed and overlooked by bourgeois intellectuals. A feminist might argue that consumption is not just labor, but feminized labor - that the deleterious effects of advertising aren’t taken seriously because it is primarily women and children who have to endure exposure to it. Either way, Wynn-Williams’ memoir suggests that Hillary Clinton lost a winnable election because she wasn’t taking advertising as seriously as the other guy. She warns that Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of one of the biggest and most consequential advertising platforms in the history of the world, might now want to use that same playbook to take political power for himself.

In her book Radio Active, which chronicles the history of consumer activism in the radio era, Kathy Newman describes a “fight between intellectuals and the producers of mass culture over its control” that took place in the U.S. back in the thirties, which is where and when ad-supported mass media first flourished. “Needless to say,” she wrote. “the intellectuals lost.”

It is tempting to speculate that this loss is one of the reasons that progressive intellectuals are still grappling with mass culture. While many of us will admit to indulging in it, and even enjoying writing about it, most of us have eschewed advertising-sponsored mass culture as a realm for practical intervention, seeing it either as morally bankrupt or as economically imbedded in a system we wish to transcend. And thus the production of mass culture has been almost entirely ceded to the people who really like capitalism, or at least who don’t mind it very much. At this point, then, the question becomes not a negative one, as in “How do we move beyond good and evil in our discussions of mass culture?” but, rather, “Can mass culture be of any use to progressive politics?” If mass culture, like capitalism, isn’t going away any time soon, do we shun it, or do we try to intervene?

What now? What happens if we start taking this stuff seriously? What happens if, instead of scapegoating the Chinese because they had the temerity to exploit American consumer excess for profit, we start really digging deep and thinking hard about how we actually got here? What if, instead of trying to transcend this system on an individual basis or carve out safe, comfortable little niches for ourselves to wait out the storm in, we go outside and get in the mud with everyone else? What if we develop a coherent answer to the question Newman articulates? If an organized, widespread effort to shun mass culture and commit fully to alternatives is the right path, what does that actually look like in practice?

Since the nineties, internet access has been out of reach for most residents of the city of Havana, in Cuba. Users would share pirated media or play online games with one another over small local intranets, which were sometimes constructed out of ethernet cables strung between apartment buildings like clotheslines. In twenty eleven, Cubans worked to knit these intranets together into the SNET, or street network. In an interview with Rest of World magazine, SNET’s founders explained how they pulled this off:

Yenier Medina Chávez, another SNET founding member, told Rest of World that they “used $60 equipment for something that would require a $500 machine.” Routers meant for households were made into primary links to the system; 100-meter cables connected houses. Chávez also contacted the devices’ manufacturers. “When we told them the details of what we were doing,” he recalled, “they did not believe us.”

SNET in time became a kind of citywide internet, one divided into neighborhoods with sites of all kinds. Some resembled social networking sites like Facebook; others offered copies of Wikipedia and video game platforms, like Steam. Members hacked popular multiplayer games, such as World of Warcraft and Dota, and ran them on SNET. Artists would release their latest works there, and cinephiles could stream their movies of choice. Users would contribute monthly to a tip jar to cover the costs.

At the peak of SNET’s popularity, there could be as many as one hundred thousand people using it at once. It was the largest such network ever created. Similarly scrappy, volunteer-run networks do exist in the United States: at the turn of the millennium, amateur radio enthusiasts in the Pacific Northwest worked to build a citywide community Wi-Fi network called Seattle Wireless. Today, volunteers in New York City are building a network called NYC Mesh. There’s a massive one in Barcelona called Guifi.net that serves over eighty thousand users.

The primary goal of these networks is to provide access to the internet, but SNET’s example, as well as the proliferation of “internet in a box” libraries, shows us that networking infrastructure can be used in other ways, too. It can connect us directly to information, or to others in our own local communities, without subjecting users to the surveillance, algorithmic manipulation, and relentless advertising that now plagues the commercial internet.

Users of Guifi.net have access to their own community-run servers for email, instant messaging, internet relay chat, VoIP, and videoconferencing that would continue to function even without access to the wider internet. In Oaxaca, Mexico, indigenous communities are able to make VoIP calls to one another using a non-profit, community-run cellular network called TIC-AC for a fraction of the cost of normal domestic phone calls. These networks allow people to experience connectivity on their own terms.

Do we need Facebook and Instagram? Do we need advertising, or the ad-driven mass culture that baits us into subjecting ourselves to it? “Social media is trash” is hardly a controversial opinion at this point, but what if that characterization is unfair to trash? At what point should we consider the possibility that we could build a superior alternative, something that does most of what we actually want the internet to do, out of what we have lying around?