When a senior public policy executive at Meta titles her memoir Careless People, it should sound an alarm for every policymaker—and every philanthropist, not only about big tech's moral collapse, but how they can learn from it and prevent it from happening in their own sectors.

Sarah Wynn-Williams’s account of her time inside one of the world’s most powerful tech companies is more than a corporate exposé. It’s a wake-up call for an entire ecosystem that allowed a handful of private actors to shape our digital world. We, philanthropy included, underestimated how quickly ideals could be twisted into instruments of power.

The book’s title, borrowed from The Great Gatsby, points to the arrogance of the privileged—’They were careless people, Tom and Daisy…’—a fitting metaphor for Silicon Valley’s economy. But Careless People goes beyond moral outrage. It’s a chronicle of how idealistic people became part of a machine that normalised irresponsibility in the name of innovation. Wynn-Williams’s journey—from idealism to complicity to rupture—teaches us as much about institutional drift as about individual ethics.

And that’s the lesson for philanthropy. In its own way, our sector has often followed a similar logic: we fund advocacy for digital rights and transparency with admirable values, but often without enough political realism or structural ambition.

Lesson 1: Good Intentions Aren’t Enough. You Need Infrastructure to Prevent Moral Collapse.

Wynn-Williams shows how Meta built immense influence while creating minimal structures for accountability. Her public policy team was asked to manage reputational risks, not to construct ethical guardrails. The result was a company with global impact, but no internal architecture to shoulder moral or civic responsibility.

Philanthropy has its own version of this: a chronic underinvestment in institutional muscle. We pour millions into small civil-society organisations to ‘advocate’ for digital rights, but we rarely fund what makes advocacy stick: long-term coordination, deep legal expertise, and strong communications. We treat the digital public sphere as a series of projects rather than a living system to learn from big tech's moral collapse.

Read the full article about what philanthropy can learn from big tech by Gastón Wright at Alliance Magazine.