Prologue

We’re in the middle of an archeological ruin somewhere on the
Panamanian coast. It’s me, two guys I work with, clusters of people
who are basically naked, and Mark Zuckerberg. Mark is not happy.
This is the 2015 Summit of the Americas, an international meeting of
world leaders. This particular event is a state dinner that—other than
Mark—is supposed to be exclusively heads of state of various
countries: Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Canada, the US, over thirty other
nations. I wrangled Mark an invitation because I’ve been trying to
convince him that he needs to have relationships with these people.
But somehow we are the only ones at this party.
Under dark skies and low clouds, a red carpet stretches into the
distance in the ruins, dimly lit by the open fires. It’s flanked by
guards in ancient costumes with frilly collars and colorful silk pants,
wielding swords and ax-type things. Plus the naked people, who—on
closer inspection—are seminaked, wearing abbreviated, ancient,
flesh-toned costumes. On one side, a group of people wearing only
tiny loincloths and holding crops. Farther down, people who appear
to be dressed as members of a kind of primeval Ku Klux Klan. All in
front of these ancient fortifications, the site of the oldest European
settlement on the Pacific coast of the Americas.
“Why are there naked people at a state dinner?” Mark whispers.
“Honestly,” I say, searching for a reasonable response, “I couldn’t
say. This is my first state dinner with naked people.”
We trudge down the endless red carpet past weird scenes of
ritual, trading, fighting, and who knows what else, the Facebook
men I’m with mostly averting their eyes because of the nakedness.
And because any time you look directly at one of the noncostumed
extras, they meet your eyes and stare back at you. It’s unnerving.
When we get to the empty dining area, I see who’s sitting where
and it’s dreadful. Because he isn’t a head of state, Mark is assigned a
table between two people who seem to be random relatives of the
president of Panama. I mean, they might also have been ministers,
and I’m trying to google them and simultaneously pretend that
everything about the evening is okay and normal, and of course I
have no internet signal because we’re in archeological ruins on the
coast of Panama.
Seeing few other options, I casually switch out Mark’s name card
with that of a minor president on a better table. I ferry the name
cards inconspicuously in my handbag so the staff who have emerged
and are milling around don’t notice, and then breathe a sigh of relief
and let the team know what I’ve done.
“He wants to sit next to Castro,” Javi says.
“Not happening,” I respond.
Javi’s my favorite of the coworkers here tonight—Javier Olivan, in
charge of “growth” at Facebook, which means he’s the person
responsible for getting the billions who still aren’t on the platform to
sign up. Javi’s a laid-back Spaniard and one of the few people in top
management with a sense of humor.
When the heads of state finally start arriving, my job is to
manage “pull-asides.” I used to work at an embassy, and “pull
asides” is diplomatic jargon for exactly what you’d think: pulling to
one side the person you want to talk to. Mark waits on the edge of
the crowd, not convinced about any of this. It’s my job at Facebook
to run international policy, and to make this matter I need to get
Mark engaged in the issues and politics Facebook encounters and
creates in the world. Some things that a company needs done on
the international stage, only the CEO can do. It’s just that this CEO
doesn’t want to. Mark is deeply skeptical of all this. And he plainly
does not enjoy it.
My first target is the prime minister of Canada, Stephen Harper. I
take a breath, steel myself, and approach.
“Hello, Prime Minister Harper,” I say. “I’m Sarah Wynn-Williams
from Facebook. You’ll remember me from all the data center and
privacy stuff.” Look, it’s not a great start but it’s all I’ve got, and yes,
“remember me” is definitely a stretch. We’ve never met personally,
and if he does remember our data center negotiations, he might feel
we screwed his government over. Facebook got them to agree to a
bunch of concessions and then we built the data center in Iowa.
He just stares blankly at me like I’m a wart on his foot. Out of
the periphery of my eye I see Javi looking relieved that I’m sourcing
heads of state for Mark.
“Anyway, I’m here with Mark Zuckerberg.” I pause. His
expression is inscrutable. “I was wondering whether you wanted to
meet him?”
“No,” Prime Minister Harper says firmly. “I wouldn’t.”
I hear the deflating sound of “Oooooh” beside me, and realize
that Javi has brought Mark over with him, and he is standing right
next to me for this exchange. Prime Minister Harper moves off to
mingle with other heads of state. Mark and I just stand there,
looking at each other. I turn to Javi, who declares, “I’m getting
mojitos for all of us,” and strides off to the bar, leaving me and Mark
in an uncomfortable silence. “Make sure they’re doubles,” I call after
him.
For the rest of the cocktail hour, the political leaders avoid us. No
one approaches Mark. He’s not used to this, to being ignored.
Usually, he’s hounded by people who think he’s the most interesting
person in the room. Now he stands awkwardly in the middle of this
fancy party, a fish out of water. The three of us down the mojitos
Javi has gotten, and I send him back for more.
I
go to double-check that Mark’s table seating is secure and
realize I’ve been rumbled and the seats switched back. I try
swapping the name cards again with an even lesser-known
president’s and stand by and watch as they get switched back within
minutes. The lights start to dim, signaling the end of the drinks and
the beginning of the dinner, and I quickly lay out the situation to
Mark.
“Do I have to stay?” he asks earnestly.
“No,” I answer, conscious that his night has been rather peculiar
already.
“Then let’s leave.”
And right at that moment the lights go out, except for one lone
spotlight, pointed at a tunnel near us. A stream of horses adorned
with colorful silks rushes out, ridden by performers in elaborate
costumes.
How do we get out of here?
We can’t go back down the endless red carpet. At the end of the
carpet there’s a large media contingent, and we can’t have the
international press capturing Mark Zuckerberg fleeing from a state
dinner. But there’s no other discernible exit. It’s ruins and
fortifications in all directions except for the red carpet and the tunnel
the horses are streaming out of.
The president of Panama stands up and urges people to take
their seats. I take one last look around and make a terrible choice,
urging Mark and the Facebook team, “Run! Follow me!”
I
sprint straight into where the horses are emerging from. I
figure wherever the horses are galloping in from, there has to be an
exit. But it’s only as I see the looks of terror from Javi and Mark as
they race past me sprinting in my heels that I realize my mistake.
Horses take evasive action around us, looking equally terrified, and
probably not expecting a young tech CEO to charge at them through
the tunnel of a ruined castle or church or fort or whatever it is we’re
running through. This is madness. There’s a whooshing of hooves
and tails and silks, warm mammals, fear, hot breath, and
expressions of surprise in Spanish. And then, abruptly, miraculously,
the tunnel ends. We pop out the other side into darkness.
I double over, partly to catch my breath, partly because I can’t
bear to look at Mark and partly because I have no idea what the
security arrangements are for that many world leaders and I’m
afraid that at any second we’re all going to be taken out by snipers.
When I force my head up, I can see that we’re standing in the
middle of a ginormous field next to some ancient wall, near some
straggling horses in silk that shimmers in the moonlight. Mark gives
me a wan smile. Not sure what else to do, we set off into the
darkness, across the fields, dressed in our formal state dinner
outfits, with no cell reception or any sense at all of where we are
other than Panama. We trudge through the black wilderness for
what feels like miles, hoping to come to a road. Eventually, I get one
bar on my phone and call for a car. When they ask me where to
send it, I tell them, “Honestly, I have no idea.” Mark hears this and
starts to laugh, and the others cautiously join in.
That’s pretty much what my early years at Facebook were like. It
was a lot of launching ourselves at various things that did not quite
work out like we expected. I was there for seven years, and if I had
to sum it up in a sentence, I’d say that it started as a hopeful
comedy and ended in darkness and regret. I was one of the people
advising the company’s top leaders, Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl
Sandberg, as they were inventing how the company would deal with
governments around the world. By the end, I watched hopelessly as
they sucked up to authoritarian regimes like China’s and casually
misled the public. I was on a private jet with Mark the day he finally
understood that Facebook probably did put Donald Trump in the
White House, and came to his own dark conclusions from that. But
most days, working on policy at Facebook was way less like enacting
a chapter from Machiavelli and way more like watching a bunch of
fourteen-year-olds who’ve been given superpowers and an ungodly
amount of money, as they jet around the world to figure out what
power has bought and brought them.
That’s the story I’m here to tell.
1
Simpleminded Hope
It was idealism that originally led me to Facebook. Looking back, I’m
a little ashamed to admit that. This was in 2009, back when it still
was possible to be optimistic about Facebook, in those innocent days
when it still was possible to be hopeful about the internet.
It’s hard to admit you wanted to “save the world” without putting
it in quotation marks, but that’s what I thought I’d been doing since
my midtwenties. During those years, I was a diplomat for New
Zealand at the United Nations.
I grew up in Christchurch, which is an agricultural services town,
the biggest city in the South Island and about the size of Lincoln,
Nebraska. To give you a sense of what it’s like, every November
there’s a holiday everyone calls Show Day, where the whole city
comes out to see sheep and vegetables and there’s a dog show and
horse racing and a lot of drinking. I loved Show Day.
I grew up in a family of four kids. The eldest. The responsible
one. My childhood was pretty normal, I guess, except for the time I
was attacked by a shark.
I was thirteen when this happened. We were on vacation at a
beach where my family camped every year. I’m standing in the water
with a friend. I don’t see it. I feel it. A force so powerful and
unexpected. A shark attack is like being hit by a knife attached to a
freight train. I’ve never been on the receiving end of such searing
pain as its teeth go deeper and deeper.
It locks its mouth around my torso, just above my waist on my
right side. It feels like it’s trying to get inside me, pushing deeper,
trying to rip my stomach, that chunk of me, away. I’m trapped. It
starts shaking me the way a dog shakes a toy, back and forth, trying
to force me under the water. I go under once and struggle to my
feet, then a second time and a third. This third time I start to take in
ocean water and the thought occurs to me, “Oh, it’s trying to drown
me. I could drown.” Like, I thought in a shark attack you die from
the attack, but now there’s a whole new way to die I hadn’t realized.
I’m in its mouth, clenched between its teeth, under the water. I need
air desperately.
My animal instincts kick in. I’m scratching, kicking, punching,
pulling, doing whatever I physically can to escape. It’s like hand-to
hand combat. I fight with everything I have to try to get my head
above the surface.
Whatever I did, it is enough to give the shark a fright. It lets go
and swims away.
I struggle toward the shore and send my friend for help. My
swimsuit is tattered. I look down and see two big puncture wounds
and a chunk of skin missing. Gone. There’s blood pouring out. I’m
worried that’s going to bring the shark back or maybe some other
sharks so I stumble through the water as fast as I can. But once I
get to shallow water, I collapse and lie there alone, feeling the blood
oozing out of me, the sting of the salt water, the hole in my body.
I don’t know how long I’ve been there when some fishermen
come along.
“Are you all right?”
I’m patently not all right. But the other issue is that I’m exposed;
the shark has ripped off enough of my swimsuit that I’m quite
naked. I’m also thirteen. So I try to tell them I’m fine, just hoping
they’ll go away. They’re like, “Um, you don’t look fine.” And I’m all,
“I’m okay. I’ll figure it out, you carry on.” Maybe it’s the blood, or the
shreds of swimsuit but they don’t buy it. “We’ll get you out of the
water.” And I’m still telling them I’m fine when at a certain point they
just stop negotiating, pick up my seminaked body and carry me up
to the shoreline. I am dying of shame. Absolutely dying of shame.
On the beach a small crowd starts to form, to my horror. My parents
arrive and lift me into the back of our family car. The beach is in a
remote part of New Zealand and there’s no hospital nearby. We set
off to the closest town, a twenty-minute drive away.
There’s no hospital in the town, so we have to call the local
doctor to open up his medical office, which is a small, single-story
building. Once we get there everyone seems relieved, like the crisis
has passed. It’s almost jovial as my dad and the doctor discuss the
cricket and plans for the weekend. My dad cheerfully explains that
yesterday we’d tried to refloat whales that had stranded on a beach
nearby, that I had been in charge of two small whales we’d
nicknamed Moby and Maybe, not knowing if the smaller one would
make it. No one is in a hurry. No one asks me what happened. The
doctor cleans the wound, pulls the skin around the jaw marks
together, and stitches it up so there’s no longer a chunk missing. He
gives me a tetanus shot and warns my parents that I might be a
little dramatic that night because I might be in shock but I’d be fine.
I obviously was a fighter. Everyone laughs.
We return to the campground. I’m allowed to stay in the camper
rather than head under the attached awning with my three siblings
because I’m in pain, which the doctor had told me and my parents
to expect, some mild pain from the stitches. Very quickly I realize
this pain is not mild. It’s searing. I start vomiting up blood and these
thick, dark, sticky clots that look like coffee grounds, which I assume
is stomach lining but I know nothing about the human body. I pull
out a large red plastic cup to collect it so I don’t get the camper
dirty.
Everyone else goes to bed but I can’t sleep. It keeps getting
worse and worse. I feel like I’m on fire. I wait, quiet as possible so I
don’t wake anyone. After a while, the red cup is full and I’m onto
another. The pain is excruciating.
Eventually I wake my parents.
“I’m on fire. I’m burning up inside.”
“Go back to sleep. You’ll be fine.”
This continues throughout the night: I wake my parents, they tell
me that the doctor said I’d be fine. We’ll all learn later what actually
is happening. The shark had bitten through my bowel in several
places, so it’s like I’ve been stabbed multiple times. The blood an