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Podcast – Cory Doctorow's craphound.com
Zuckerberg’s increasingly bizarre war on whistleblowers
This week on my podcast, I read Zuckerberg’s increasingly bizarre war on whistleblowers, about Mark Zuckerberg’s campaign of terror against the whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams. 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... more
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Welcome back to the Cory Doctorow Podcast London Edition. You can hear from the room tone that I am in the big hard surface room that is my home office in London and until about 10 minutes ago, my guest room in London. My parents who've been visiting us have just left and they are now at King's Cross station on their way to Edinburgh for a bit of a Scottish holiday. They stopped in to see us on their way back from visiting my brothers in laws in Poland, so they've been having quite a European jaunt in the Heat dome and all. I am back in London, as you can tell, and next Saturday the 11th of July, I will be at the Idler Festival. I will be in Edinburgh myself on the 16th and 17th of August for a solo presentation and a presentation with Jimmy Wales. I'm going to Australia after that. I'll be at the Festival of Dangerous ideas in Sydney August 23rd and 24th and at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne on August 25th. And while it's not on my schedule yet, I can reveal that I will be in Warsaw from September 4th through 7th for the launch of the Polish edition of Inshidification. And then I rush back to the UK to do an event on September 8 in Brighton with Carol Cadwallader and in London with riley quinn on september 9th that is hosted by Foyles Piccadilly. Again, not on my schedule yet, but I will be at Brain bar in Budapest September 16th through 18th, in Berkeley for the 25th anniversary of the Samuelson Clinic at UC Berkeley on September 24th, in Edmonton at the Public Library on September 28th, in Notre Dame on October 6th in South Bend and in Hudson, Ohio at a local library on October 7th in the middle of October. Shortly after that I'll be in Vancouver, Victoria, Winnipeg and Ottawa for dates still to be confirmed at various writers festivals and other events. And I will be in Vienna for an as yet unrevealed event on October 29 and in Kilkenny for kilconomics on November 5. I'll be on Vancouver island on November 11 and in Vancouver itself on November 12, in Folkestone, England on November 16, in Madrid on November 18 and I'll be in Oxford on November 22 for an event with Kim Stanley Robinson. I'm also going to be likely in Manchester in the middle of September, so that's the travel I've got coming up between now and late November. There are a few more events that haven't been fully solidified, but that's a good crack at what's going on for the rest of the year for me. So I've had a busy couple of weeks since I last spoke to you. I got some very good news very early on in my book tour in the US for the Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life after AI, which is that I am now cancer free. I had my CT PET scan and there is no cancer. And so the judgment of the oncologist and the hematologist is that I am cancer free, having been treated with immunotherapy and radiotherapy and some excisions. So that is very good news. I do have to get follow up scans and that will be in my future. But for now it's very good news. And I did have a bit of a scare. So I had the scan and I asked the radiation tech if I could see the scan and the radiation tech said, sure, but you understand that I can't consult with you on it. I'm not a radiologist. And so if you see anything you have questions about, I can't tell you anything about it. Now, I'd seen a few of my scans before, kind of had a sense of what I was looking for, little white dots that would indicate tumors. And there were no little white dots. Instead there were pie plate sized white discs over my heart and my bladder. And I asked the radiation tech, is that what I think that is? And he said, I can't discuss this with you, you will have to wait for the radiologist who will take no more than four business days to get back to you. And so I walked out of there thinking that I had massive tumors in my bladder and in the middle of my chest. It turns out that they were just ghosts on the scan. The way that those PET scans work is you get infused with radioactive glucose while you're in a fasting state and they let you sit for a bit and your hungry cells take up that glucose. And of course the highest metabolism cells are the cancer cells and so they fluoresce when they put you through the PET scanner that detects the radiation. And in this case I think I just needed a pee. And maybe my heart was beating a little fast because I was nervous and so those were phantoms and I am cancer free. But it was a tough couple of hours. So from there I went straight into the book tour for Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life after AI, a series of sold out events across America. They were all fantastic, all my interlocutors were wonderful. And it ended with some pretty amazing news, which is that the book debuted on the new York Times bestseller list at number 13. It was number one on several Canadian bestseller lists including the National Commercial list and the National Independent list. It is number three on the American Independent list. It is a bona fitti international bestseller which was great news to finish that tour with. And then the icing on the cake. I found out that the Oxford English Dictionary had inducted Inshidification into the canonical dictionary of the English language. Very cool news. So that's what's happened with me. That's what's going on. I won't be back next weekend. I am taking the weekend off for my 55th birthday. It's great to be going, going into my 55th birthday with all of this great news. We have rented a cabin that is off grid with a composting toilet and one little solar powered lamp and a little gas range to make coffee on in the middle of the Hundred Acre Wood. Yes, that Hundred Acre Wood. So we're going to be spending next weekend up there and having a lovely time. I'm going to do this week's podcast for you. It's a short essay from Pluralistic and it turned out to be just the right thing I needed to do in order to write the speech that I gave immediately before coming back to London. In Connecticut, where I was the keynote speaker at the national association of Attorneys General Annual President's Conference, where I was the guest of General Wang, the Attorney General of Connecticut, who was this year's host, I spoke to the 50 state AGs and their staff about insidification and the call to action is the call to action I developed while writing this essay, which is called Zuckerberg's Increasingly Bizarre War On Whistleblowers from the 27 June edition of Pluralistic.net. 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 Lukashenko, a man who is often called the last Soviet dictator. Lukashenko's secret police, still called the kgb, routinely terrorize and kidnap pro democracy activists and and all forms of protest are banned. It was against this backdrop of unrelenting oppression that the activists launched a series of whimsical flash mobs that challenged the Lukashenko 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 protesters thought that by daring Lukashenko to arrest people for eating ice cream. They could create a win win situation. Either Lukashenko 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. Lukashenko 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 Lukashenko 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. 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, Sara Wynne Williams, author of the internationally best selling memoir Careless People, which details the criminality she witnessed 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 Win Williams workplace evaluation for being, quote, unresponsive over a period when she was in a near death coma. Worst of all though, is Zuckerberg, whose sins range from cheating as settlers of Catan to endangering the Colombian peace protest 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. Wynne Williams's conditions of employment required her to sign a contract that bound her to silence, non disclosure forbade her from speaking ill of the company, and denied her access to the legal system in all her dealings with Meta. Binding arbitration Together, these three clauses routinely used by Meta to silence would be whistleblowers meant that after Wyn Williams book was published, Meta got its arbitrator, a lawyer who was paid by Meta to adjudicate contractual disputes instead of an actual judge, 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 $111 million. 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 exceed 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 experience at Facebook. Meta when she and I appeared on stage in London for the launch of my book Inshitification last year, she fell silent and assumed a blank expression anytime 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 COVID of her book was blurred out on the overhead screen. She gave an acceptance speech on behalf of her co winner, the late Virginia Jeffrey, who was abused by Jeffrey Epstein and who accused Prince Andrew of sexual assault. Nevertheless, when she was booked to speak about a subject other than her book at the Hay Festival on a stage with Tim Wu and Carol Cadwallader, Meta sent a legal threat to the festival and Wynn Williams, claiming that 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 Cadwallader carried on a discussion. Careless People was withdrawn from the festival bookshop on the day 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 Wynne 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 length she's gone to and 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 New York Times number one 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 too. 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 when 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 of those thousands of bitter ex employees into silence about the even graver sins the company has committed. That's my theory anyway. Lukashenko knew that by arresting children for eating ice cream it 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 guillotine billionaire. But both Lukashenko and Zuckerberg are willing to be thought a thin skinned bully, so long as that means that the people that they oppress the most are too terrified to ever challenge their authority. All right, well that is this week's podcast and once again we will see you next weekend at the Idler Festival if you can come. And the weekend following I will be off for my birthday in the 100 Acre Wood and then you'll get a podcast on the 26th of July. That's when I will be back at my desk again and again. You'll get a podcast on the 2nd of August. We're going to have some podcasts for you in the weeks to come. I hope you're having a great summer and it was lovely to talk to you again and I'll talk to you in a few weeks. Bye now. That was the Cory Doctorow podcast Licensed Creative Commons Attribution Non commercial share alike 4.0 or as woody Guthrie put it in another context, this song is copyrighted in the US under seal of copyright 154085 for a period of 28 years and anyone caught singing it without our permission will be a mighty good friend of ourn cuz we don't give a dern, publish it, write it, sing it, swing to it, yodel it. We wrote it and that's all we wanted to do. Many thanks to John Taylor Williams of Ryneck Studio. That's W R Y N E C K for engineering and mastering. John Taylor Williams is a broadcast technology specialist, an audio engineer and a musician. In his spare time, he likes to carve useful objects out of wood, antler and steel.