I am the Robert M. Beren Professor of Economics at Harvard University. I use this blog to keep in touch with my current and former students. Teachers and students at other schools, as well as others interested in economic issues, are welcome to use this resource.
In The Agency, human lives and personalities are tools to be abused by the state. The Showtime series stars Michael Fassbender, Jeffrey Wright, and Richard Gere as London-based CIA agents running complex undercover operations.
Fassbender's character, Brandon Cunningham, has just returned from a six-year stint in Africa under an assumed identity, where he made personal connections and fell in love. Ordered to return to London and his old identity, he is expected to simply discard those feelings—to compartmentalize in ways that further the spy agency's projects.
Meanwhile, the agency is training a new operative, a young woman named Daniela Morata (Saura Lightfoot-Leon), who they hope can infiltrate Iran through a scientific research program. Much of her training involves figuring out how to connect with people in ways that feel natural and genuine, and then exploit them.
Cunningham's dilemma demonstrates the psychological consequences of long-term undercover work, while Morata's shows the strange coldness required to be good at that work. The espionage game is a cruel and dehumanizing process that makes the individual subservient to a vast and unknowable state. The show seems to suggest that being a spy in service of international geopolitics means throwing away a part of yourself.
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It was Meta itself that first told me about the new book attacking Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and the allegedly bankrupt morals of their company. On March 7, a Meta PR person contacted me to ask if I’d heard about Careless People, a presumed takedown of the company that was due for release in a few days. I hadn’t. No one at Meta had read the book yet, but the comms department was already proactively debunking it, issuing a statement that the author was a former employee who had been “terminated” in 2017.
My first thought was Wow, I’ve got to read this book! And in fact I did, devouring it in a night as soon as it was published. With the benefit of attention from Meta’s complaints, I suspect Careless People might become a must-read. Meta—the company that promotes itself as an avatar of free speech—has successfully convinced an arbitrator to silence author Sarah Wynn-Williams, who was a director in charge of connecting Meta’s executives with global leaders. The ruling, relying on an NDA signed after Wynn-Williams was fired, demands she stop promoting the book, do everything in her power to stop its publication, and retract all comments “disparaging, critical or otherwise detrimental” about Meta. That’s pretty much the whole book. Wynn-Williams, who has registered as a whistleblower with the SEC, did not attend the hearing and doesn’t seem inclined to respect it. As I write this, Careless People is now the third-best-selling book on Amazon.
The arbitrator’s Meta-friendly “emergency” ruling was the climax of an intense campaign against the book that erupted once the company got a look at it. Even as I turned the pages of Careless People, my inbox was fattening with dispatches from Meta. “Her book is a mix of old claims and false accusations about our executives,” a company spokesperson says. They characterize her firing as the result of “poor performance and toxic behavior.” They call her “a disgruntled activist trying to sell books.” Meanwhile on social media, current and former employees posted comments defending the maligned executives.
If the news is so old, one might ask why is Meta going nuclear on Wynn-Williams? For one thing, its author was a senior executive who was in the room, and on the corporate jet, when stuff happened—and she claims that things were worse than we imagined. Yes, Meta’s reckless disregard in Myanmar, where people died in riots triggered by misinformation posted on Facebook, was previously reported, and the company has since apologized. But Wynn-Williams’ storytelling paints a picture where Meta’s leaders simply didn’t care much about the dangers there. While the media has written about Zuckerberg’s obsession with getting Facebook into China, Wynn-Williams shares official documents that show Meta instructing the Chinese government on face recognition and AI, and says that the company’s behavior was so outrageous that the team crafted headlines to show what the company would have to deal with if their plans leaked. One example: “Zuckerberg Will Stop at Nothing to Get Into China.” While making blanket statements that the book can’t be trusted, Meta hasn’t denied all these allegations specifically. (In general, when a company tries to dismiss charges as “old news,” that translates to a confirmation.)
Still, in the context of what we know about Meta already, nothing Wynn-Williams says about the company’s actions and inactions is shockingly new. Careless People is not an investigative work, but a memoir, with the narrative thread being the observed callousness of the company’s leaders. Given this personal focus, it’s no wonder that Careless People’s most memorable moments come not from Meta’s substandard corporate morals, but gossipy anecdotes of misbehavior on the corporate plane or at luxury hotels. Despite the lofty F. Scott Fitzgerald title reference, much of the book reads like a Big Tech–themed episode of White Lotus. Wynn-Williams says that Sheryl Sandberg pressured her to share a bed mid-air, that Meta’s chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan called her “sultry” and grinded against her while dad-dancing at a corporate retreat. (This led her to file a sexual harassment claim that Meta now says was “misleading and unfounded.”) Also, Mark Zuckerberg thinks Andrew Jackson was the greatest president because he “got stuff done.”
Can she be trusted? Meta calls Wynn-Williams an unreliable narrator, and she is certainly self-interested. I tend to think that she isn’t making things up but spinning events in the least favorable light for her subjects and the most favorable light for herself. And though she may not admit it, she’s one of the careless people too. By her own account, she was the Susan Collins of Facebook’s policy team, wringing her hands over morally questionable practices, and sometimes offering objections—but ultimately going with the flow. She says that for years she plotted an escape but couldn’t afford to leave the job and the medical coverage due to her serious health issues. Since she was a corporate director who made many millions of dollars in compensation, and California includes preexisting conditions for private health insurance, that doesn’t ring true. She stuck around until she got canned. By then, according to her own account, she was slow-walking her efforts because she disagreed with the policies of her bosses.
Meta will be happy that I point all this out. But none of this exonerates the people who lead the company. Meta’s sweeping condemnation of the book, which includes very little in the way of documentable evidence, fails to tarnish Careless People as an act of fiction.
My question to Meta is, why bother to roll out the cannons to blast this tome? The effort to neutralize the book seems quaint and futile. For one thing, NDAs do not cancel out the first amendment. In a statement, the publisher, Macmillian, says, “We are appalled by Meta’s tactics to silence our author through the use of a non-disparagement clause in a severance agreement.” The book is still on sale and the author will continue the disparagement, only now as the victim of a trillion-dollar company’s attempt to silence her.
The whole effort is totally unnecessary. This is a company that has had every nasty charge thrown against it for almost a decade and just keeps getting bigger and more profitable. Its CEO now trolls critics by wearing triumphalist clothing and going on Joe Rogan to celebrate masculinity. The campaign against Careless People seems defensive and out of step. One of Meta’s big complaints is that Wynn-Williams did not undergo a prepublication rundown of the text with the company. Please pause for a moment to savor the irony. Meta, the company that recently announced an end to fact-checking in posts seen by potentially millions of people, is griping that an author didn’t fact-check with them?
There might have been a time in history—like a decade ago—when matters of veracity were determined by an empirically driven point/counterpoint process, and the best facts won. That time is over—in large part due to Facebook itself, which has been a major force in promoting false narratives that seem to stick, even after they are thoroughly debunked. When I wrote my own book about Facebook, I spent thousands of dollars on a fact-checking team, and I submitted a long document to the company asking for verification on all I had found. But those who live in the world where facts matter are a diminishing minority.
Now that I think of it, Meta’s actions against Wynn-Williams might be less about defending its reputation than a need to punish a defector who violated her promise to keep its secrets. The campaign seems at one with the desire of the White House’s current occupant to pursue vindication at all costs. As opposed as they may seem, Mark Zuckerberg and Sarah Wynn-Williams both understand something fundamental about our time: Careless people rule the world.
We’re an audiobook family at House Hutchinson, and at any given moment my wife or I are probably listening to one while puttering around. We've collected a bit over 300 of the things—mostly titles from web sources (including Amazon's Audible) and from older physical "books on tape" (most of which are actually on CDs). I don't mind doing the extra legwork of getting everything into files and then dragging-n-dropping those files into the Books app on my Mac, but my wife prefers to simply use Audible's app to play things directly—it's (sometimes) quick, it's (generally) easy, and it (occasionally) works.
But a while back, the Audible app stopped working for her. Tapping the app's "Library" button would just show a spinning loading icon, forever. All the usual troubleshooting (logging in and out in various ways, removing and reinstalling the app, other familiar rituals) yielded no results; some searching around on Google and DuckDuckGo led me to nothing except a lot of other people having the same problem and a whole lot of silence from Audible and Amazon.
So, having put in the effort to do things the "right" way and having that way fail, I changed tacks and fixed the problem, permanently, with Audiobookshelf.
Audiobookshelf is a self-hosted audiobook and podcast server, and after two weeks of use, so far it works vastly better than trying to stream within Audible's app. My wife can now actually listen to audiobooks instead of staring at a spinning loading icon forever.
To get Audiobookshelf running, you need something to run it on—a spare desktop or other computer you're not using should fit the bill, as Audiobookshelf's requirements are relatively meager. You can either install it via a Docker image, or on bare metal on Windows or several different Linux distros. (The Linux distro installations include a repository for handling updates via your system's update method, so you won't have to be manually installing releases willy-nilly.)
Since I already have a Proxmox instance up and running on my LAN, I chose to install Audiobookshelf inside an Ubuntu 24.04 LXC container using the "bare metal" method. It's not particularly resource-intensive, using about 150MB of RAM at idle; as noted above, if you don't have a server handy, running Audiobookshelf via Docker on your desktop or laptop shouldn't be much of a burden on your memory or CPU. (It does suck up a fair amount of processing power when it's bulk-importing or matching books in your library, but these aren't things you'll be doing terribly often.)
Once you've got Audiobookshelf installed via your preferred method, your next stop is creating and then populating your library. You can do this directly in the application's web interface, if desired:
I chose to do it the old-fashioned way and copy files into the library location myself, which also works.
There are a number of ways to make sure Audiobookshelf properly ingests and categorizes your books; first, it is aware of and respects metadata tags if your books have them. If your files lack tags, the Audiobookshelf docs provide several other methods of organization using file and directory structure. Between tags and being able to just name things per the guide, I had no problem uploading all 300-ish of my books into Audiobookshelf, with no misses or mismatches.
Of course, this all presupposes that you've got some DRM-free audiobooks. There are plenty of sources where you can get books free of charge—like Librivox, for example. If you're using pay sites like Audible, you'll want to actually log in to your library via a web browser and download each audiobook locally; this will give you a pile of files in .AAX format or something similar—which leads to a significant caveat.
While books that come on audio CDs don't have DRM embedded in them, files downloaded from Audible or other for-pay sources often do. Audiobookshelf won't play books with DRM, which means you need a method of stripping that DRM out.
Unfortunately, here's where we run into a problem: removing DRM from your audiobooks is not universally legal. "In the US, the law against 'circumventing' effective DRM has no personal-use exemption. In Europe, it varies by country," explained the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Competition and IP Litigation Director Mitch Stoltz when Ars reached out for advice. "That's as silly as it sounds—stripping DRM from one’s own copy of an audiobook in order to listen to it privately through different software doesn’t threaten the author or publisher, except that it makes it harder for them to charge you twice for the same audiobook. It’s another example of how anti-circumvention laws interfere with consumers’ rights of ownership over the things they buy."
And that means you're kind of on your own for this step. Should you live in a jurisdiction where DRM removal from audiobooks for personal use is legal—which includes some but not all European countries—then sites like this one can assist in the process; for the rest of us, the only advice I can give is to simply proceed in a legal manner and use DRM-free audiobooks to start with.
Once you've got Audiobookshelf set up and your DRM-free books stuffed into it, the last piece of the puzzle is an app to actually listen to books with. There is an official Audiobookshelf app, and if you're an Android user you can grab it right here. The iOS app is perpetually stuck in beta and requires Test Flight, but there are third-party alternatives.
Personally, I've been using Plappa, and I've found it to be not just perfectly acceptable, but also more responsive and less prone to crashing than Apple's own Books app (not to mention there's no annoying in-app audiobook store page always trying to get in my face!).
Audiobookshelf itself has plenty of tunable options for the home system administrator who just can't leave well enough alone; I've found most of the defaults are exactly what I want, but there's tons of stuff to tweak if you want to do the tweaking.
Notably, Audiobookshelf supports multiple libraries if you want more organizational options. It has accounts you can set up for different listeners, logging options, notification options, RSS support, and a whole mess of other things I honestly haven't even looked at yet. The good news for me is that you don't have to look at any of that stuff if you don't want to—Audiobookshelf is set up to be workable right out of the box.
Sharper readers might already have spotted a major problem with self-hosting audiobooks on one's LAN: How do you listen when you're not on the LAN?
This is probably worth another article, but the way I'm tackling this particular problem is with a local instance of Wireguard and a VPN profile on my mobile devices. When I'm out and about or in the car or whatever, I can tap the "VPN" shortcut on my iOS home screen, and boom—Plappa is now able to see Audiobookshelf, and streaming works just as well as it does at home.
One potential concern for doing this is cellular data usage, but this fear seems minor. The biggest audiobook I've got is a cool multicast recording of Frank Herbert's Dune, which weighs in at about 2.4GB—so, the most data I'm going to transfer even for my biggest audiobook is 2.4GB max, and that'd only be if I listened to all hillion-jillion hours of Dune at the same time. And depending on the app you're using for playback, you'll likely also have the option to download the books to your device and listen to them locally, without streaming. (This is true for Plappa, at least.)
I glossed over a lot of the setup steps to keep this a relatively short piece, but even so, getting Audiobookshelf going is a relatively simple self-hosting task, as self-hosting tasks go.
We also haven't talked about Audiobookshelf's other major feature: podcast hosting. I'm not a big podcast kind of guy (I tend to prefer audiobooks if I have time to listen to something), but Audiobookshelf is also (purportedly) great for hosting a giant pile of podcasts. If those are your jam, then that's another point for Audiobookshelf.
I can't vouch for the podcasting bits, but I can say that it's gratifying to have solved a problem—especially one that was driving my wife crazy, and any day I can solve a problem for her via nerdery and server-wrangling is a good day. At least as of right now, the Audible app on her phone remains nonfunctional for reasons that are beyond me, but with luck—and a bit of ongoing care and maintenance for the server in the closet where this stuff all lives now—neither of us will ever have to deal with that app again.
A few days ago in Manhattan I came across a Cybertruck parked in front of a fire hydrant. I took a photo:
Is it possible that the driver was in a rush and just needed to pop into a nearby store for a moment? Maybe. But I checked awhile later and the Cybertruck was still parked there. No one was inside the vehicle.
It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the driver knowingly parked in front of the hydrant, showing a callous disregard for residents of that block. This was just days after two New Yorkers died in a fire because someone’s car was blocking a hydrant.
Our actions reveal who we are. This holds both for individuals and for entire societies. Here we see how a Cybertruck owner might choose to endanger one’s neighbors for a little extra convenience. What’s more depressing is the general conclusion that maybe this is who we are now, at least in part. This ostentatious, lethally designed vehicle threatening the common good is a metaphor for where the country is headed.
America – thanks to our kakistocratic leadership – is daily acting like a doltish playground bully, idiotically strutting around while threatening to fight those who, until a moment ago, were friends. Shutting down vital research, indiscriminately laying off dedicated public servants, hunting down our neighbors with vindictive cruelty. I’m appalled by all of it.
But it’s not just political leaders. Our economic leaders, by which I mean the Big Tech oligarchs, kissed the ring at the inauguration and since then have demonstrated nothing but obedience and compliance with the new administration. (This is as expected, as I discussed on the Jan 27, 2025 Techtonic, “Welcome to the oligarchy.”)
Our economic and political leaders are advancing a certain set of values, the very same that are embodied by the Cybertruck at the hydrant. Self-centeredness, short-sightedness, and – considering the outcomes we will all suffer – sheer, outright stupidity.
Values are supremely important to any society. I recently read all of Plato and this was one of the major themes. Dialogue after dialogue has Socrates challenging people: What are the values we should aspire toward? What values will help us build a healthy society? And what should we do if others subvert or oppose those values?
In The Republic, Plato lists the most important values as wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice. In contrast, we can name the principles embodied by Silicon Valley: arrogance, (misplaced) faith in the machine, and above all and driving all, growth at any cost.
A society built on “growth at any cost” is terribly impoverished. UVA professor Mark Edmundson wrote a book a few years ago, Self and Soul, arguing that without ideals, life lacks significant meaning. The book draws on Plato, Aristotle, Homer, and other texts arguing for a life, and a society, based on values.
Our economy allocates its treasure not for the common good but for whatever grows the machine. For example, Facebook/Meta has reportedly spent $100 billion trying to build “the metaverse,” the janky VR platform that shows no sign of becoming popular – ever.
Here’s a screenshot of a promotional video from Meta from 2025, looking more like something from the 1990s:
This is what we get when we allow Mark Zuckerberg to deploy $100 billion as he sees fit. As one Bluesky user put it:
$100 billion is genuinely the kind of money you could “do the impossible” with. Crack nuclear fusion. HIV vaccine. Universal flu vaccine
And they spent it on this
I could say the same for the massive AI buildout going on right now. Google has spent at least $50 billion on its AI initiatives, resulting – so far – in a Gemini chatbot that, according to this Tow Center study, on some tasks is generating an error rate of around 99%.
Some will no doubt respond that this is the free market at work, failed investments will lead to better innovation elsewhere, and so on. I get that, and I’m in favor of technology actually succeeding – just not when it’s built on exploitation of others. Right now what we have is tech that either doesn’t work (like the metaverse) or works mainly to exploit others (like predictive AI, as I wrote about here).
We need a different approach – one built on ethics, ideals, and values rather than cancerous growth. Socrates, in his life and death, showed one excellent way to pursue the better path. And he’s not alone.
Take, for example, the Old Testament prophets, those “voices crying out in the wilderness.” Their message was consistent, and it resonates as clearly today as it did 2,700 years ago: don’t exploit the vulnerable. Back then the people needing protection were “widows and orphans.” Today we have, among others, the “precariat” – the class of people under intrusive Big Tech surveillance at home and at work. These are the very people serving as sources of profit for the world’s most powerful companies, through exploitation.
I started my career as a technologist, believing in the power of digital tools and platforms to make things better (hence the name of my company, Creative Good). But over time my perspective has changed. Yes, tech can be helpful, and it should be helpful, but that’s not what we’ve built so far. We’ve spent hundreds of billions of dollars on tech that exploits vulnerable populations and ecosystems. The only value is “growth at any cost.”
We’re seeing the limits of the technological society. Sure, it can produce a Cybertruck, but if that ends up blocking our access to resources we all need, what good is it?
The work ahead of us is to ask that question, again and again: what good is it? If we can return to values and ideals – like the wisdom of Socrates, like the compassion of the prophets – we’ll finally be ready to envision technology worth building.
If this column resonates with you, I hope you’ll help support my work by joining Creative Good.
Until next time,
-mark
Mark Hurst, founder, Creative Good
Email: mark@creativegood.com
Podcast/radio show: techtonic.fm
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P.S. If you find these newsletters valuable, I’d like to ask for your support. You’re on an unpaid subscription. Please join us at Creative Good. (You’ll also get access to our members-only Forum.)
At 9am today, five Wall Street Journal journalists published a claim that Binance founder Changpeng Zhao (CZ) is seeking a presidential pardon from Donald Trump. Their reporting acknowledges CZ’s completion of a four-month prison sentence and claims that unnamed sources familiar with the matter believe CZ has pushed forward with his request despite already serving a sentence.
Although the reporters do not speculate on other misdeeds, a US president has the sole authority to preemptively pardon for crimes for which an individual does not yet have a conviction. Per Article II, Section 2, Clause 1 of the US Constitution and Supreme Court precedent in Ex parte Garland (1867), the president wields “unlimited” pardoning power applicable to “every offence known to the law,” even “before legal proceedings are taken.”
In addition, Wall Street Journal reporters claim that Binance wants the Trump family or one of its entities, like World Liberty Financial, to invest in Binance. As part of their negotiations, Binance has expressed willingness to move substantial operations into the US.
Read more: Binance founder CZ made over $25 million per day while in prison, report
Within the first hour of the article’s publication, neither CZ nor Binance leaders Yi He or Richard Teng have responded publicly to the rumor of the pardon request.
Trump has been a vocal advocate for foreign companies relocating offices, plants, and personnel into the US. He has implemented many tariffs on foreign-operated companies and has made onshoring a cornerstone of his administration’s trade policies.
Interestingly, the US government already holds approximately $33 million worth of Binance Chain (BNB) coins. Per a recent Executive Order signed by Trump, those coins may now be part of a newly-formed US Digital Asset Stockpile.
Yesterday, Binance announced crypto’s $2 billion equity investment from Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund MGX. Founder CZ boasted that it was the largest crypto-denominated equity investment in history.
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The post Binance wants a Trump partnership and a pardon for CZ, report appeared first on Protos.
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