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The recent exposé Careless People, by former Facebook (now Meta) executive Sarah Wynn-Williams, has received significant attention for its jaw-dropping revelations about the social media company and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. According to the author, company decisions enabled the Chinese Communist Party to suppress dissent, undermined the mental health of teenage girls, and led to genocide in Myanmar and election interference in the U.S. While there has been much attention to details showing the moral bankruptcy of Zuckerberg and former COO Sheryl Sandberg, there has been less discussion of how financial pressures shaped executives decisions. Are Metas leaders just bad apples, or are the many troubling revelations in Careless People representative of pervasive problems across corporate America? While Careless People focuses on Facebook, it also prompts a broader reflection on the tech industry as a whole. Companies like Amazon, X, Google, YouTube, TikTok, and many others similarly operate extractive growth models that prioritize engagement, surveillance, and monetization over social responsibility. What Wynn-Williams has laid bare is a shared playbook of scale over ethics. Facebooks meteoric riseand the ethical corners cut by its leaders to meet its goalsreveals fatal flaws at the heart of growth-obsessed capitalism. The company had a vast infrastructure overseen by a chief growth officer operating . . . fast and loose, and always looking for opportunities in the gray area created by the lack of regulation. When Facebook reached 1 billion users, COO Javier Olivan (who succeeded Sandberg) expressed fear and uncertainty, not pride and accomplishment, because it meant the company had to figure out things like how to reach children, how to get into places like China that are hostile to any social media site. The company engineered algorithms to maximize time spent on the platformregardless of whether that meant radicalizing users, fostering election misinformation, or taking advantage of peoples vulnerability. Even when Facebook became a trillion-dollar company, internal discussions continued to emphasize seizing vulnerable markets (like teenagers experiencing mental health crises) because these were deemed high-value audiences. In internal documents, Facebook acknowledged that its platforms made eating disorders worse and increased suicidal ideation among teen girls. Against this backdrop of relentless innovation to maximize engagement and ad spending, Zuckerbergs frequent claims that monitoring hate speech or misinformation at scale was too difficult or technically impossible ring hollow. How could it be impossible to monitor hate speech while simultaneously keeping tabs on when teen girls are feeling insecure? The truth is, when it came to growing revenue and profits, Facebook demonstrated immense ingenuity and problem-solving power; when it came to safeguarding democracy or human dignity, the company suddenly discovered its limits. The damage inflicted by Facebook is so sweeping, so deeply intertwined with human rights abuses and national security threats, it should force us to reconsideror at least raise significant questions aboutwhether growth itself is a valid goal. Mark Zuckerberg didnt just build a tech giant; he built a cautionary tale. The title of Wynn-Williamss book is from The Great Gatsby and F. Scott Fitzgeralds indictment of characters Tom and Daisy, who smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness. The parallel with Zuckerberg and Sandberg is clear. But Careless People should also spark deeper consideration of how our growth-obsessed capitalist system leads to perverse incentives, catastrophic externalities, and systems that cannibalize the very societies they rely upon. Similarly, The Great Gatsby isnt just a discussion of the poor morals and behaviors of the upper classes in the Roaring Twentiesits also a critical perspective on the social and economic transformation in America at that time. Skepticism of the growth-at-all-costs logic that underpins todays capitalism is often dismissed as fringe thinking. As ecological economist Tim Jackson observes, Questioning growth is deemed the act of lunatics, idealists, and revolutionaries. Yet what alternative is left when companies like Meta repeatedly erode public trust, mental health, and democratic institutions in pursuit of investor returns? Degrowth, a growing movement in response to runaway capitalism, has been gaining attention as an urgently needed alternativeone that rejects expansion as an end in itself and instead redefines progress around well-being rather than accumulation: shorter working hours, universal basic services, caps on resource extraction, and new models of enterprise that are accountable to people and the planet. Companies like Patagonia and Fairphone are already showing what some of these principles look like in practice. Patagonias transfer of ownership to an environmental trust ensures all profits support climate action, while Fairphones modular, repairable phones challenge the logic of planned obsolescence and resource waste. Critics often dismiss degrowth as unrealistic or anti-innovation. But whats truly delusional is believing that the endless growth obsession that fuels companies like Meta can coexist with human dignity and democratic stability. The real question isnt whether we can afford to abandon growth. Its whether we can afford not to. Metas history confirms the urgency of making this shift. Without systemic limits, the pursuit of scale inevitably erodes the conditions necessary for a free and flourishing society. Had Meta been judged by measures like user safety, informational integrity, or ethical designinstead of engagement and ad revenuethe world would be a safer and saner place today. Its time for policymakers to recognize this and start asking harder questions: Growth for whom? At what cost? To what end?
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E-Commerce
Air traffic controllers have been in the news a lot lately. A spate of airplane crashes and near misses have highlighted the ongoing shortage of air traffic workers, leading more Americans to question the safety of air travel. The shortage, as well as aging computer systems, have also led to massive flight disruptions at airports across the country, particularly at Newark Liberty International Airport. The staffing shortage is also likely at the center of an investigation of a deadly crash between a commercial plane and an Army helicopter over Washington, D.C., in January 2025. One reason for the air traffic controller shortage relates to the demands of the job: The training to become a controller is extremely intense, and the Federal Aviation Administration wants only highly qualified personnel to fill those seats, which has made it difficult for what has been the sole training center in the U.S., located in Oklahoma City, to churn out enough qualified graduates each year. As scholars who study and teach tomorrows aviation professionals, we are working to be part of the solution. Our program at Ohio State University is applying to join over two dozen other schools in an effort to train air traffic controllers and help alleviate the shortage. Air traffic controller school Air traffic control training todayoverseen by the FAAremains as intense as its ever been. In fact, about 30% of students fail to make it from their first day of training at the FAA Academy in Oklahoma City to the status of a certified professional air traffic controller. The academy currently trains the majority of the air traffic controllers in the U.S. Before someone is accepted into the training program, they must meet several qualifications. That includes being a U.S. citizen under the age of 31 and speaking English clearly enough to be understood over the radio. The low recruitment age is because controllers currently have a mandatory retirement age of 56 (with some exceptions) and the FAA wants them to work for at least 25 years in the job. They must also pass a medical exam and security investigation. And they must pass the air traffic controller specialists skills assessment battery, which measures an applicants spatial awareness and decision-making abilities. Candidates, additionally, must have three years of general work experience, or a combination of postsecondary education and work experience totaling at least three years. This alone is no easy feat. Fewer than 10% of applicants meet those initial requirements and are accepted into training. Intense training Once applicants meet the initial qualifications, they begin a strenuous training process. This begins with several weeks of classroom instruction and several months of simulator training. There are several types of simulators, and a student is assigned to a simulator based on the type of facility for which they will be hired, which depends on a trainees preference and where controllers are needed. There are two main types of air traffic facilities: control towers and radar. Anyone who has flown on a plane has likely seen a control tower near the runways, with 360 degrees of tall glass windows to monitor the skies nearby. Controllers there mainly look outside to direct aircraft but also use radar to monitor the airspace and assist aircraft in taking off and landing safely. Radar facilities, on the other hand, monitor aircraft solely through the use of information depicted on a screen. This includes aircraft flying just outside the vicinity of a major airport or when theyre at higher altitudes and crisscrossing the skies above the U.S. The controllers ensure they dont fly too close to one another as they follow their flight paths between airports. If the candidates make it through the first stage, which takes about six months and extensive testing to meet standards, they will be sent to their respective facilities. Once there, they again go to the classroom, learning the details of the airspace they will be working in. There are more assessments and chances to wash out and have to leave the program. Finally, the candidates are paired with an experienced controller who conducts on-the-job training to control real aircraft. This process may take an additional year or more. It depends on the complexity of the airspace and the amount of aircraft traffic at the site. Increasing the employment pipeline But no matter how good the training is, if there arent enough graduates, thats a problem for managing the increasingly crowded skies. The FAA is currently facing a deficit of about 3,000 controllers, and unveiled a plan in May 2025 to increase hiring and boost retention. In addition, Congress is mulling spending billions of dollars to update the FAAs aging systems and hire more air traffic controllers. Other plans include paying retention bonuses and allowing more controllers to work beyond the age of 56. That retirement age was put in place in the 1970s on the assumption that cognition for most people begins to decline around then, although reserch shows that age alone is not necessarily a predictor of cognitive abilities. But we believe that aviation programs and universities can play an important role fixing the shortage by providing FAA Academy-level training. Currently, 32 universities including the Florida Institute of Technology and Arizona State University partner with the FAA in its collegiate training initiative to provide basic air traffic control training, which gives graduates automatic entry into the FAA Academy and allows them to skip five weeks of coursework. The institution where we work, Ohio State University, is currently working on becoming the 33rd this summer and plans to offer an undergraduate major in aviation with specialization in air traffic control. This helps, but an enhanced version of this program, announced in October 2024, allows graduates of a select few of those universities to skip the FAA Academy altogether and go straight to a control tower or radar facility once theyve passed all the extensive tests. These schools must match or exceed the level of rigor in their training with the FAA Academy itself. At the end of the program, students are required to pass an evaluation by an FAA-approved evaluator to ensure that the student graduating from the program meets the same standards as all FAA Academy graduates and is prepared to go to their assigned facility for further training. So far, five schools, including the University of North Dakota, have joined this program and are currently training air traffic controllers. We intend to join this group in the near future. Allowing colleges and universities to start the training process while students are still in school should accelerate the pace at which new controllers enter the workforce, alleviate the shortage, and make the skies over the U.S. as safe as they can be. Melanie Dickman is a lecturer in aviation studies at the Ohio State University. Brian Strzempkowski is an assistant director at the Center for Aviation Studies at the Ohio State University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Category:
E-Commerce
Streetwear used to be about rebellion, community, and self-expression but now it’s walking down luxury runways with $2,000 price tags. Fast Company hit the streets of New York at the iconic Jeff Staple store launch to ask real streetwear fans: Is streetwear still streetwear? Is the culture still alive? Or has luxury killed the vibe?
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E-Commerce
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