Sarah Wynn-Williams’s memoir documenting her seven years working at Facebook opens, unexpectedly, with a shark attack. The New Zealander was 13 years old and swimming in the sea when the shark bit her torso and shook her from side to side. She lived to tell the tale, but her near-death experience awakened in her a desire to leave the world better than she found it.
Wynn-Williams went on to take a job at Facebook’s public policy department in 2011, having seen the potential of the platform as a global meeting place. But what she found was a senior staff high on power and untroubled by ethical concerns such as privacy or the dissemination of hate speech and misinformation. All were resistant to political interference and dedicated to rapid expansion, no matter the consequences, claims that Meta has called out of date and false. The author also encountered a working culture where employees enjoyed perks but had to be available around the clock – a situation that led to her responding to emails while in labour.
The book, which last year won a British audio award for nonfiction, is narrated by Wynn-Williams, who blends dark humour and astonishment at the outre situations in which she finds herself. There is also an introduction written and read by The Power author Naomi Alderman, who reveals how Meta, the company behind Facebook, gagged Wynn-Williams by using a contractual clause to stop her promoting the book on publication. Alderman adds, sardonically, that “there are people in the world … on whom the normal ideas about values and ethics do not seem to weigh. But like novelists, we can only guess that this is what’s going on. If only we had someone brave enough to tell us what she saw.”
Available via Macmillan, 13hr 26min
Further listening
The Illegals
Shaun Walker, Profile Audio, 14hr 19min
Walker tells the remarkable real-life story of the Russian sleeper agents embedded in the US 20 years after the end of the cold war, whose real identities remained hidden to their friends and neighbours. Read by Paul Thornley.
Atmosphere
Taylor Jenkins Reid, Cornerstone Digital, 9hr 57min
Kristen DiMercurio and Julia Whelan narrate this romantic thriller set against a backdrop of the 1980s space programme in Houston, in which two female Nasa workers find love and jeopardy among the stars.