If you happened to find yourself perusing Dublin's bookshops over the weekend looking for a particular tome - Careless People: A Story of Where I Used to Work - you would have come away empty-handed.
Sarah Wynn-Williams’ whistleblower account of her time as a Facebook employee has taken the publishing world by storm in the two weeks since its publication.
Former New Zealand diplomat Wynn-Williams began working for Facebook in 2011, idealistically hoping to be part of a company that was changing and shaping the world.
In Careless People, she paints an extraordinary (but arguably unsurprising) picture of a toxic workplace culture during her eight-year tenure, illustrating how Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg’s thirst for power - and his pathetic neediness to rub shoulders with the world’s political elite - has led to Meta (as the company is now known) becoming the kind of platform that now allows gay and trans people to be defined as "mentally ill" without repercussions.
Wynn-Williams describes how she was berated for her lack of "responsiveness" while on maternity leave (during which she had almost died giving birth) and pulls no punches when it came to executives Joel Kaplan and Sheryl Sandberg either, deriding the latter’s famous 'Lean In’ policy as a "schtick" and alleging serious personal boundary issues of the former COO.
Meta’s repeated attempts to block the book’s publication ultimately proved unsuccessful; not only did it debut at #1 on the New York Times’ non-fiction bestseller list and racked up glowing reviews, it has been selling by the bucketload since its March 13th publication. Meta may have secured an injunction that means Wynn-Williams cannot promote the book - but who needs it when you’ve got a story this juicy?
Ever heard of the Streisand effect, Zuck?
Watch: Careless People on US morning TV programme The Today Show
The runaway success of Careless People is evidence, however, that there is a huge appetite for salacious tech tell-alls. Just look at the trial currently waging in Dublin’s Commercial Court between the three frenemies and co-founders of the Web Summit, Paddy Cosgrave, David Kelly and Daire Hickey.
Every day there has been a scurrilous headline or revelation - from secret recordings to Singapore brothels - and the public has been lapping it up. It’s only a matter of time, surely, until a Social Network-style movie is made about this epic fall-out.
That’s a notable point, actually: have you watched The Social Network lately? David Fincher’s 2010 film offers a very different viewing experience these days, knowing all that we know now about Facebook, Meta and Zuckerberg.
Upon its release, Fincher’s film was essentially about how a plucky nerd spotted a gap in the market and capitalised on it (via a variety of arguably underhanded avenues) to make it the billion-dollar company that it is today. Very few people could have predicted that less than a decade later, Zuckerberg would be allegedly helping Donald Trump win elections and allegedly cosying up to the CCP to allow Meta to operate in China? Or that someone like Elon Musk - then viewed as a cartoonish space-obsessed businessman - would be making regular appearances in the Oval Office and allegedly doling out Nazi salutes with impunity?
Speaking of Musk, there hasn’t been an exposé on him or Tesla - not yet, anyway - and even the most comprehensive autobiography of the South African billionaire, Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk from 2023, was an authorised and arguably sanitised one.
That said, Musk’s estranged daughter Vivian Wilson threw the cat among the pigeons last week when she gave her first in-depth interview to Teen Vogue about her father, calling him a "pathetic man-child" and denouncing him in an emphatic fashion.
Given Musk’s eyebrow-raising antics in recent years, surely there’s a sensational tell-all waiting to be penned by whoever’s brave enough.
The mega-rich ‘tech bro’ world is a peculiar one indeed, and as the saying goes, sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. In the case of Careless People, however, it seems that your imagination is only the terrifying tip of the iceberg.
Careless People: A Story of Where I Used to Work is published by Macmillan
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
