Zuckerbergâs increasingly bizarre war on whistleblowers
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
More than a decade ago, a group of young, internet-connected Belarusian dissidents launched a series of increasingly high-stakes, increasingly surreal confrontations with the corrupt, authoritarian government of Alexander Lukashenka, a man who is often called "the last Soviet dictator."
Lukashenka's secret police â still called the KGB â routinely terrorize and kidnap pro-democracy activists, and all forms of protest are banned. It was against the backdrop of this unrelenting oppression that the activists launched a series of whimsical "flash mobs" that challenged the Lukashenka regime's willingness to crack down on even the most innocuous behavior.
One of these flash mobs was an ice cream social: activists converged on a public square to eat ice cream cones. Lukashenka's thugs beat them and dragged them away:
The protestors thought that by daring Lukashenka to arrest people for eating ice cream, they could create a win-win situation: either Lukashenka would be revealed as the kind of asshole who thinks it should be illegal to eat ice cream, or he'd be revealed as the kind of weakling who couldn't keep a lid on dissent.
Lukashenka took the bait. And took it. And took it. In the years that followed, protesters would be arrested for smiling, clapping, and just standing silently:
The world learned that Lukashenka was a buffoon, and Belarusians affirmed their view that this buffoon would not hesitate to mete out the most vicious punishments for the most innocuous actions:
https://sci-hub.st/10.1080/25739638.2021.1928880
Speaking of thin-skinned, paranoid, wildly corrupt buffoons who will stop at nothing to silence their enemies, how about that Mark Zuckerberg, huh? Sure, all the headlines these days are about Zuck's intention to transform Facebook into a sports betting site:
But in the UK, Zuckerberg's war on whistleblowers keeps finding new, ice cream grade depths of absurdity to plumb. The whistleblower in question is, of course, Sarah Wynn-Williams, author of the internationally bestselling memoir Careless People, which details the criminality she witnesses during her years as the head of Facebook's international relations team:
Careless People is full of revelations about the gross institutional misconduct of Facebook, including its knowing encouragement of a genocide in Myanmar. But it's also full of stories about the severe personal failings of Facebook's executive team, especially Sheryl Sandberg, Joel Kaplan and Mark Zuckerberg.
These three come off as the most colossal of assholes, cruel, petty and predatory. Sandberg comes across as a sexual abuser who dreams of trafficking in poor people's organs. Kaplan is an oaf whose plan to provide paid internet access to refugee camps falls apart once he learns that refugees in camps don't have any money (he also takes points off of Wynn-Williams' workplace evaluation for being "unresponsive" over a period when she was in a near-death coma). Worst of all, though, is Zuckerberg, whose sins range from cheating at Settlers of Catan to endangering the Colombian peace process after a 50-year civil war because he refused to get out of bed before noon. Zuck is also revealed to have given the Chinese state access to all of Facebook and the power to censor content they disliked, as part of a failed bid to get permission to offer a Facebook service in China.
It's a terrible company, with awful products, run by the worst people. Wynn-Williams' conditions of employment required her to sign a contract that bound her to silence (nondisclosure), forbade her from speaking ill of the company (nondisparagement), and denied her access to the legal system in all her dealings with Meta (binding arbitration).
Together, these three clauses â routinely used by Meta to silence would-be whistleblowers â meant that after Wynn-Williams's book was published, Meta got its arbitrator â a lawyer who is paid by Meta to adjudicate contractual disputes instead of an actual judge â to order her to never promote or even speak about her book.
The arbitrator awarded Meta $50,000 for each criticism that Wynn-Williams levied, quickly coming to a total of over $11,000,000. This vastly exceeds the assets and lifetime earning potential of Wynn-Williams and her husband (a reporter with the Financial Times). If this bill ever truly comes due, they will be wiped out.
Which raises an interesting question: what else can they do to her? Once they've secured civil damages that exceeds her net worth several times over, why shouldn't she just flout her agreement? "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose," and all that.
Nevertheless, Wynn-Williams has scrupulously hewed to the arbitrator's rules, steadfastly remaining silent about her book, its contents, and her experiences at Facebook/Meta. When she and I appeared onstage together in London for the launch for my book Enshittification last year, she fell silent and assumed a blank expression any time the subject of Meta came up, and she didn't sign or sell books afterward:
When she won the British Book Award, she did not speak to accept it, and the cover of her book was blurred out on the overhead screen (she gave an acceptance speech on behalf of her co-winner, the late Virginia Giuffre, who was abused by Jeffrey Epstein and who accused Prince Andrew of sexual assault):
Nevertheless, when she was booked to speak â about a subject other than her book â at the Hay Festival on a stage with Tim Wu and Carole Cadwalladr, Meta sent a legal threat to the festival and Wynn-Williams, claiming that if by speaking about anything in public, she would violate the arbitrator's order. Accordingly, Wynn-Williams maintained total silence and a blank facial expression for an hour on stage, saying not one word, while Wu and Cadwalladr carried on a discussion. Careless People was withdrawn from the festival bookshop on the days she appeared there:
Nevertheless, Meta has informed Wynn-Williams that her silent, motionless appearance on a stage constitutes a further breach of her "agreement" and that they are going to seek even more damages from her. This act of anti-ice cream thuggery has pushed Wynn-Williams over the edge and now she's sued to invalidate her contract:
Her lawyers have posted their documents related to the suit, including a 285-page declaration by Wynn-Williams explaining the great lengths she's gone to in order to comply with Meta's demands, and the company's absolute intransigence and arbitrary menace:
Why would Meta be so intent on destroying this one high-profile whistleblower? Surely they've heard of the Streisand Effect. There is no better way to ensure that Wynn-Williams' book (already a NYT #1 bestseller) continues to attract readers than to continue to escalate these threats.
I think they're perfectly aware that they are convincing more people to read Careless People (you should read it, it's genuinely excellent):
But I think they've decided that this is a price worth paying, because:
a) They've done even worse things since Wynn-Williams parted ways with the company; and
b) They're laying off thousands of workers because their giant bet on AI has been a flop, leaving them with a massive cash crunch; and
c) By destroying Sarah Wynn-Williams, they can terrorize all those thousands of bitter ex-employees into silence about the even graver sins the company has committed.
Lukashenka knew that arresting children for eating ice cream would make him a laughingstock abroad. Zuckerberg knows that threatening Wynn-Williams for standing in wooden silence on a stage makes him look like history's most guillotineable billionaire. But both Lukashenka and Zuckerberg are willing to be thought a thin-skinned bully, so long as that means the people they oppress the most are too terrified to ever challenge their authority.
I read this book, and my main takeaway was that Sarah-Wynn Williams spent years trying to change Facebook from within, and ultimately learned the hard lesson that it is virtually impossible to change a corrupt organization from within, and that toxic culture is far more likely to change you than you are to change it, at which point she got out, and wrote a book about it.
I don't think any of the people criticizing her and calling her a monster have more moral fortitude than she did. They would fail just as badly as she did if they tried to do what she tried to do, but of course they would never try in the first place, because they would rather pass judgement on the internet from the comfort of their toilet seats.
Hey so as the economy continues to get worse in the next few years, gambling companies are going to go extra hardcore predatory as people become more desperate. Yes, even more than they already are. You have to promise me right now you're not going to fall for it. No gambling, okay?
This is going to be especially bad with prediction markets and sports gambling, and it's already really fucking bad. But it also goes for loot boxes, blind box collectables, trading card games, and ESPECIALLY gacha games.
If you are in WASHINGTON this is not yet law, this initiative will be on the ballot Nov 3 THIS YEAR. VOTE NO. You have the ability to prevent this from becoming law.
this video deserves at least three views per viewer, because there is no following both the belly dance and the added text at the same time while still giving either one the attention it needs for full appreciation, but watching only one or the other will miss more than half of the artistic intentions here
I have a BMI of 35. I am the cutoff for most of medicine.
My size or larger, we can't access:
Fertility treatment
Gender affirming surgeries
Most surgeries, in fact
bc we can't donate our bodies to science and drs don't study on larger bodies. Medications aren't made for us bc we're often excluded from scientific studies. We're systematically excluded and then blamed for poorer outcomes.
I don't care whether you 'like' looking at me or bodies like mine; we deserve equal access to healthcare [all caps].
Sidebar: I am 100% certain that the existence of Clintâs surprise family in the MCU was based on Ults and that Joss Whedon, who has a creepy raging boner for Ults, left the MCU after Disney let him introduce the family and then told him that no, he couldnât murder an entire family in a PG-13 film because it would be âcoolâ.
âI am 100% certain that the existence of Clintâs surprise family in the MCU was based on Ults and that Joss Whedon, who has a creepy raging boner for Ults, left the MCU after Disney let him introduce the family and then told him that no, he couldnât murder an entire family in a PG-13 film because it would be âcoolâ.â
JESUS FUCKING CHRIST HELL NO EW EW EW WHY WOULD HE DO THAT ULTRON ALREADY HAS SO MUCH CONFUSING CONVOLUTED BS, KILLING HIS FAMILY AND MAKING HIM ANGST FOR THAT WOULD HAVE ACTUALLY MADE ME *HATE* THAT MOVIE.
Oh my god, I would have considered dropping the entire MCU if they pulled that shit⊠đ°
I canât prove it. Itâs a personal theory. But itâs assembled from facts:
a) We know Joss Whedon loves Ults, heâs talked about it fairly frequently and used elements of it (like the Chitauri, who previously didnât exist in 616) in the first Avengers film.
b) In Ults, Clint had a wife and two children that he kept very separate from his work, and they were murdered as part of a âSteve in conflict with SHIELDâ arc.Â
c) We know that Whedon came into conflict with the powers that be at the MCU over the farmhouse. He wanted more farmhouse and to cut the âThor In The Prophecy Wellâ arc. They said no, you leave the Thor scenes in or we will make you cut the farmhouse out entirely. Which means that Disney didnât give a shit about Clintâs surprise family, and Joss Whedon gave way too many shits about it.Â
d) Itâs not proven necessarily, but itâs fairly obvious from context, that this conflict and the lack of creative control it represented is why Whedon left the franchise. In some sense I get that â some directors donât like someone else having that much control over the narrative â but I think if you sign on for a franchise like the MCU, you have to know going in that your powers will be limited by the larger scope of the multi-film narrative. Â
So the speculation comes into it where I believe that the âmore farmhouseâ Whedon wanted was to kill Clintâs family. Whedon has a long tradition of motivating X character through the senseless death of Y character, stretching back to Jenny and Taraâs deaths in BtVS, including highly climactic moments like Washâs death in Firefly, and running on up through Coulsonâs death in Avengers (Whedon was reportedly livid that they brought him back for AoS and has said in interviews that AoS is TV and therefore âdoesnât countâ). Admittedly I havenât seen Dollhouse, but it seems to me that Whedon has trouble writing stories where someone doesnât die in a senseless manner in order to motivate their loved ones. (His pissiness over his reputation for killing people, to me, is evidence that heâs embarrassed his writing has stagnated so badly that he has to keep resorting to the same narrative tricks he was using fifteen years ago.)Â
HEY EVERYONE HOW WOULD YOU LIKE SOME MEDIA CRITICISM FOR YOUR SATURDAY MORNING.Â
Every other year I go searching for this exact post and have to do the shame of searching âJoss Whedon raging b*ner Marvel Ultimatesâ in an effort to find it
On the one hand Iâm genuinely sorry you have to search that, but on the other Iâm vaguely proud to have produced a phrase so memorable that it actually helps you find the post. :D
Dude it's been four weeks and Venezuelans are still looking for their friends and family under rubble. Four weeks.
Ftr, Doctors Without Borders (MSF), Project HOPE, and World Central Kitchen are still actively helping survivors; those links are to their respective donation pages fyi. A lot of other NGOs have gone home. I'd strongly suggest donating to MSF specifically because the healthcare and sanitation infrastructure in the affected areas is basically decimated and disease is a very real danger.
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