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.
