Careless People: Power, Greed, Madness. A story of where I used to work. By Sarah Wynn-Williams (2025, 4th Estate)
Remember the Metaverse? Funny that you don’t hear much about it these days. This was going to be the Next Big Thing, the fully immersive virtual reality (VR) heaven where we all spent every waking moment, in our aspirational avatar forms, shopping, meeting people, swanning around in flying cars, and never going outside to see the real sky, or indeed talk to a real person. Unappealing as all this might sound to jaded old cynics and doubters, Mark Zuckerberg was so excited by his own visionary virtual universe that he changed his company name from Facebook to Meta, hired thousands of engineers and invested $36bn in development. As might be expected, tech firms chucked in plenty of money too, just in case it ever took off, and even manufacturers and high-street businesses like HSBC, Skechers, Bosch, Next and Heineken. Seoul City Council even went so far as to build a VR community space where people could ‘take advantage of public services 24/7 all year round and even visit the virtual mayor’s office and library’, as well as availing themselves of ‘various administrative services such as economy, education, and tax affairs’.
It’s hard to imagine a duller advertisement for the Metaverse than, ‘Hey, you can use it to pay your taxes!’ For once, the doubters were on the money. It turned out people didn’t want to spend their lives indoors wearing silly Oculus headsets. Sales flopped, followed by investments, until Zuckerberg quietly dropped the whole project.
One indication of how preposterous the whole thing was, and also why apparently nobody told Zuck this at the time, is the fact that in her tell-all exposé of her five years as a top Facebook executive, Sarah Wynn-Williams doesn’t bother to mention the Metaverse once. But she does have plenty to say about Facebook’s dirty off-book activities. One of these, which Facebook publicly denied to the consternation of their own marketing teams who were using it as a selling point, was to target vulnerable teenagers who had just deleted a selfie by thrusting beauty ads at them, on the assumption that they must hate the way they look. Though often funny, the darkest part of the book is where Zuck finally realises how the Trump campaign has used Facebook’s comprehensive data tools in an ingenious and targeted misinformation offensive in order to win the 2016 election. What’s dark about this is that Zuck and the other FB execs are not horrified, they are impressed. Zuck allegedly even begins to form his own plans to use the same techniques to run for president himself. After all, he’s so rich he wouldn’t even need to fund-raise.
The take-home gist is that, whereas FB starts off as a maladroit mix of idealists and nerdy technicians with no concept of the political reverberations they are about to unleash on the world, the more wealth and power they acquire, the less they give a damn about anyone or anything, a point rammed home by their casual indifference to the FB-driven massacres in Myanmar. Nobody comes out of this book looking good, including in some ways the author. The corruption, hypocrisy, sexual harassment and megalomania are laid bare for all to see. Some of these people would probably have been jailed, except that capitalism doesn’t jail people this stupendously rich. Zuckerberg, increasingly isolated in a protective shell of fawning sycophants, comes across as having had any trace of humanity surgically removed. He is never told that any of his ideas (like the Metaverse?) are just dumb and won’t work, because FB ‘ices out’ and then fires anyone who dares. He’s actually tried to have this book banned in the USA, a truly stupid move because of the ‘Streisand effect’, where attempts to suppress tend to backfire in spectacular fashion. To no one’s surprise, the free-speech champion’s attempt at censorship has sent the book to the top of the bestseller list.
But in truth, apart from showing how dysfunctional the business is, there are no real revelations that weren’t already out there. Yes, Zuck lied to Congress. Yes, FB are manipulative bastards out to make money out of your data. No, they have no scruples whatsoever. We knew or could guess all that. It’s a fun read, but socialists won’t be surprised by any of it. It’s just the reality of capitalist business with the veneer removed.
Paddy Shannon
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