Sarah Wynn-Williams began her career in diplomacy and international relations. At the UN, she found herself working with other bureaucrats who got into their line of work because they care – about peace, about climate and our environment, about improving quality of life for people around the world. She also found that the organization she was a part of was devoting a large share of its energy to petty arguments over matters of little consequence. When she saw Facebook beginning to become a powerful political force, she left to work for the company as an envoy to governments and world leaders.

When she got there, she found that Facebook’s leadership had very little understanding of what roles their company was playing socially and politically, and she took it upon herself to try and educate the people she was now working with about how they could better relate to the human beings and societies they served. She worked under the assumption that her colleagues and bosses may have been naïve about human concerns due to their technology and business backgrounds, but that given Facebook’s high-minded, even utopian, rhetoric and stated goals, her co-workers cared about the consequences of their work and about making the world a better place.

Boy, was she wrong.

When she brought up instances of lawbreaking that the company was engaged in, her leadership responded by trying to hide or obfuscate their illegal activities (when the laws in question belonged to the US or other powerful nations) or just flat out ignored them (when the country in question was poor, small, or provincial enough for them to deem beneath their concern). Faced with the ugly real-world consequences of their ad-targeting tools being used to take advantage of people in vulnerable emotional states, the primary response was to incorporate the effectiveness of this manipulation into their sales pitches to potential advertisers. After Facebook’s products were used to amplify the power and reach of authoritarians and influence the outcomes of elections for the worse, Zuckerberg toyed with the idea of using his platform to run for president.

The carelessness of these and (numerous) other terrible things the company has been responsible for is more than just a lack, I think. It’s the expression of a philosophy. The belief that the pursuit of wealth and power is what matters in the world, and that anything standing in the way of their individual pursuits is not just unjust but irrelevant. That rules don’t matter if you have the power to ignore them. That having our needs met as human beings is not a right, but a prize to be won. It’s “getting yours” as a be-all and end-all.

It’s a nihilism of convenience, masquerading as rationalism and objectivity. Adopting the position of cool aloofness that money is morally neutral, that business is apolitical, provides an easy way around the difficult questions of what one must do as a moral actor when all that power falls into your lap. And once you’ve dispensed with any notion that the rule of law is good or right, you might prefer dealing with authoritarians, dropping the pretense that you respect any rules you find inconvenient and exercising your power transactionally.

If they are careless (they are) it’s because caring is something they don’t believe anybody should have to do.