I read these two books practically back to back (well, with Jakob Kerr’s Dead Money sandwiched in between, for a fictional version of the profit-at-all-costs mentality), and combined with the current political climate, I’m ready to wheel out the guillotine.
PRK’s Empire of Pain is, predictably, a well-researched and thorough discussion of three generations of the Sackler family, who manage to become more feckless the more distant they are from Purdue Pharma’s founding three brothers Arthur, Mortimer, and Raymond. However, the “entrepreneurial spirit” that seizes these brothers, particularly Arthur, is always at odds with the Hippocratic oath of “first do no harm”; early in his career, Arthur uses the patients at the psychiatric hospital he works at as essentially guinea pigs for his drug trials. While Arthur’s branch of the Sackler family is not involved in Purdue Pharma for the development and relentless marketing of OxyContin, PRK illustrates how the rot of rapacious capitalism pervades the entire family. Empire of Pain indicts everyone involved: the family itself, the various consiglieres who do their bidding, the institutions that tacitly endorse the opioid crisis by accepting the Sacklers’ philanthropic “gifts” (as PRK explains, blood money), and the government agencies that allow Purdue Pharma to evade responsibility and blame the victims for their reckless pursuit of billions of dollars.
Careless People takes a different tack; this is one woman’s (SWW) account of her experiences working for Facebook as a low-level executive. She narrates her loss of idealism as capitalism and the quest for ever-increasing market share subsume the company’s initial idealistic goal of connecting everyone. It’s easy to roll one’s eyes at SWW’s idealism with 2025 hindsight: after all, it’s now common knowledge that Mark Zuckerberg stole much of the idea for Facebook from existing “IP,” which was a “hot or not” catalogueing of Harvard’s female student body. But so many people were swept up in Facebook’s rise that she was certainly not alone. The two-park Frontline documentary The Facebook Dilemma is excellent. A lot has been said about SWW and just how much she puts up with before finally being fired by Facebook; she is sexually harassed by at least two prominent executives, the importance of her health is minimized, and her bodily safety is taken for granted. And her characterizations of three main characters, Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and Joel Kaplan, are depressingly familiar. But with as Empire of Pain, Careless People shows just how quickly people in these systems can lose perspective. The Sacklers crush any dissenters within their ranks; the Facebook higher-ups make their reality the only one. (SWW is also a foreign national who would have to leave the US if she leaves FB, so there is that.)
Capitalism is a disease that infects everything good (medicine, health care, the internet). There are no ethical billionaires.