Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams review – Zuckerberg and me

An eye-opening insider account of Facebook alleges a bizarre office culture and worrying political overreach

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 astint 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 ablizzard. 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 andnervous, but slowly he acquires ataste 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.