If Douglas Coupland’s 1995 novel about young tech workers, Microserfs, were a dystopian tragedy, it might read something like Careless People. The author narrates, in a fizzy historic present, her youthful idealism when she arrives at Facebook (now Meta) to work on global affairs in 2011, after a stint as an ambassador for New Zealand. Some years later she finds a female agency worker having a seizure on the office floor, surrounded by bosses who are ignoring her. The scales falling from her eyes become a blizzard. These people, she decides, just “didn’t give a fuck”.
Mark Zuckerberg’s first meeting with a head of state was with the Russian prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, in 2012. He was sweaty and nervous, but slowly he acquires a taste for the limelight. He asks (unsuccessfully) to be sat next to Fidel Castro at a dinner. In 2015 he asks Xi Jinping if he’ll “do him the honor of naming his unborn child”. (Xi refuses.) He’s friendly with Barack Obama, until the latter gives him a dressing-down about fake news.
In 2016, Facebook embeds staff in Donald Trump’s campaign “alongside Trump campaign programmers, ad copywriters, media buyers, network engineers, and data scientists”, helping him win. This inspires Zuckerberg to consider running for president himself, and he tours US swing states in 2017. Wynn-Williams describes his speeches as sounding “like what a kid thinks a president sounds like”. One goes: “The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, act anew.”
Meanwhile, in an effort to do business in China, his company has been offering the Chinese Communist party a “white-glove service”, and a genocide has occurred in Myanmar following a flood of false anti-Muslim stories posted on Facebook. In time Facebook abandons internet.org, its idea to give developing countries free access to the internet, or at least Facebook, pivots to the “metaverse”, a bad virtual-reality game populated by people who for a long time did not have legs, and finally pivots again to AI.
Zuckerberg, in short, turns out to be a giant man-baby suffering from a severe case of the Dunning-Kruger effect, whereby people overestimate their own cognitive abilities. His colleagues obsequiously let him win at board games. He calls politicians unfriendly to Facebook “adversaries” and instructs his team to apply pressure to “pull them over to our side”. He blames his assistants when he forgets his own passport.
Floating through the book like a toxic ice queen, meanwhile, is Facebook’s COO, Sheryl Sandberg. Wynn-Williams isn’t buying her “Lean In” talk. In one of two remarkable body-horror interludes in the book (the first is when she is almost eaten by a shark as a child), Wynn-Williams nearly dies in childbirth, but she is still harassed for work updates during her recovery. When she returns to the office her male boss gives her an unflattering performance review. “You weren’t responsive enough,” he says. “In my defense,” she replies, “I was in a coma for some of it.”
This sounds like a job for a famous champion of women in the workplace. “Friends who have fallen for Sheryl’s Lean In schtick,” Wynn-Williams writes, “earnestly recommend going to her with my concerns.” But she is not convinced. She has already been sent to a Zika hotspot while heavily pregnant, and to Japan while pregnant again, to help promote Sandberg’s book.
Wynn-Williams left Facebook in 2018 to work on “unofficial negotiations between the US and China on AI weapons”. Has the company’s office culture improved since then? A clue might be Zuckerberg’s recent appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast. He complains that corporate culture has become too “neutered” and needs a new injection of “masculine energy”. In February, he visited the White House to talk to Donald Trump about AI.
Editor’s note: since this review was written Meta has responded to Wynn-Williams’ book, calling it “a mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives”.