GoKawiilI think I hate the internet
08 Sep, 2026
I’ve just finished reading Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams and was equally parts shocked and unsurprised by the events she witnessed at Facebook / Meta.
It’s a terrifying, breathless, and gripping read, and pretty much eviscerates Meta and everything it has professed to stand for since about 2012.
I’ve not had a Facebook account for years now, and it’s coming up to a year since I removed my Instagram and WhatsApp accounts too. My Facebook account was the first to go, and looking through my old emails I can see I requested deletion in 2018. I can’t put my finger on the exact reason I binned it, but I suspect it was because it had become increasingly filled with posts and content from people I’d grown distant from since school, college, and university. As well as those people, it was filling with news, groups, promoted adverts and posts, and other general crap. I guess overall it felt low value and just another of those vast online troves of personal data waiting to be monetised.
I kept Instagram and WhatsApp for a lot longer; these were only deleted by me last year. For instagram my reasons were much of the same as with Facebook, but with the added toxicity of Meta and their misdeeds to add fuel to the fire. Brexit, Trump, Myanmar, child suicides, alt-right, and just a whole lot of hate speech, propaganda, fake news, and of course AI slop. WhatsApp was the final Meta service to leave, but I figured that I only maintained contact with a pretty close circle of friends, most of whom I could always text (SMS) or iMessage.
Have I missed any of these platforms? Honestly, no. I definitely recall being concerned that I’d be out of touch with friends and acquaintances, or that I’d miss some hilarious meme or news that was popular, or that I’d not be able to keep others up to date with what I was doing in my personal life. Ultimately though, all that’s happened is I spend far less time consuming low value content, and more time doing other things that interest me. I also make a more conscious effort to meet regularly (in person) with my close friends; an admittedly smaller group of people, but a group that I think I have more rewarding friendships with.
Sorry for the lengthy preamble but I think this all underpins what has been going through my mind after reading Careless People. The internet is all about connectivity (duh), and most social networks have sought to justify their existence with lofty and worthy sounding goals like “connecting people across the world”, and “giving everyone the tools to build new relationships and friendships with people that matter”…blah blah blah.
Sarah Wynn-Williams certainly believed all this too. In her book she describes her idealism and enthusiasm for Facebook especially in her first few years working there. She truly believed that this company was going to “do good”. But even a cursory glance at Facebook’s backstory shows how it was never borne out of these ethical or morally guided desires, it was a way to rate how attractive the classmates at Harvard were. Facebook is an empire of shit built upon a foundation of misogyny and judgemental behaviour.
Mark was never a genius. He was a good coder who got into Harvard, acted like a dick, stumbled upon a half decent idea, and a whole bunch of dumb luck and privilege later ends up with one of the most valuable companies of all time.
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