Careless People: A Mirror To Moral Drift

A career in the tech industry often means you develop a certain cynicism. You sit in boardrooms where candidates are not judged on skill, but their likelihood of taking parental leave. You attend meetings where the big question is not whether to engage in unethical behaviour, but the weighing the consequences of getting caught. You’ve watched colleagues endure sexual harassment in silence to keep their job. You witness decisions that ensure an exclusionary culture, whilst the same organisation simultaneously trumpets DEI initiatives. You see people quietly managed out for becoming parents. You witness people get away with outrageous acts of corruption without consequence. You meet people who would undoubtedly sell their own grandmother if it meant furthering their own ambition.

Profit and power come before people, and when the consequences of careless actions come a knocking; nobody takes responsibility. It’s just business.

Scaling The Familiar

What Wynn-Williams does well in Careless People is showing us what happens when these problems scale, giving weight and visibility to dynamics that often get excused, ignored or downplayed.

The public and media reaction to the book has been particularly telling. The outrage sparked shows just how successful the industry has been at hiding in plain sight.

I suspect this is in part because of the power tech companies hold, but also a stunning lack of competent governance and digital literacy in society.

The Culture of “Carelessness”

For me, what is most sobering is how widespread the behaviours described within the pages of this book are. From startups in sheds, to companies the size of Facebook.

The idea of “Move fast and break things” has long been celebrated as innovation. But Careless People lays bare the collateral damage the ideal can cause; discrimination, burnout, shattered communities, and systemic neglect.

By framing “carelessness” not as an accident, but a recurring strategy, Wynn-Williams forces us to confront a hard truth: negligence in tech is often deliberate, efficient and profitable.

Consequences That Compound

The most lasting insight Careless People left me with is this: careless decisions in product, policy, and leadership do not just result in bugs. The consequences reverberate across the product, and its user base. In the case of companies, the size of Meta this scales the harm exponentially, shaping society.

This is true across the tech industry, where poor decisions have direct, measurable consequences. That people often refuse to see when busy selling picks and axes in the latest gold rush.

This book indirectly demands we stop treating these failures as isolated issues and start seeing them as systemic design flaws.

The Urgency Of Careless People

Careless People is important because It offers an example of what it means to speak up, to pull back the curtain, and to insist on a more ethical future. No doubt, at great personal risk.

For those of us who have watched dynamics like those described in the book play out many times over, aghast at what to do, Wynn-Williams has done something powerful: she’s escalated the problem for a mass audience.

The book concludes with thoughts on how these lessons apply to the future of technology. Specifically AI. At the time of writing, the most popular use of AI seems to be generating images of yourself as an action hero, Careless People would suggest better uses of our attention.

Final Thoughts

All this said, the mind boggles as to how anyone could really be surprised that Facebook has been used for election meddling, selling adverts to teenagers in emotional distress, and stoking violence (later labelled as genocide) in Myanmar.

The evidence has been there for years for those who are conscientious enough to pay attention. So perhaps what this book does particularly well, is finally making people care?

Wynn-Williams writes with a clarity, free of technical jargon and always balanced. Unlike this review, her tone is neither panicked nor preachy, making what she has to teach hit even harder.

I am unsure what the lasting impact of Careless People may be, but regardless; this is a book and an author worthy of celebration.