The autobiographical tale of this New Zealand lawyer/UNdiplomat/Facebook executive, is filled with easily anticipated disillusionment and entirely unpredictable personal crises including a nearly fatal childhood shark attack and a equally serious amniotic fluid embolism with her second delivery.
She was idealistic to the point of naivety, and left her job at the UN in 2011 to join Mark Zuckerberg and Cheryl Sandberg as a senior policy advisor at Facebook, hoping to assist in making the world more connected. Attending many conferences of world leaders and billionaires, she arranged many meetings with presidents and prime ministers, on behalf of Zuckerberg.
The unstated goal was always global growth without regard to human rights or morals, working deviously with the Chinese and with fatal consequences for thousands of Malaysians to collect data on their citizens. They planned and launched a program specifically to prey on teenagers susceptibility to emotional insecurity. The annual Davos World Economic Forum farce is seemingly almost entirely a show of power and wealth with no consideration of morals.
Both Mark Zuckerberg and Cheryl Sandberg are portrayed as ruthless amoral workaholics whose demands on underlings bear no relationship to the people described in Cheryl’ s book, Lean In. The author’s complaints about sexual impropriety of a co-worker was ignored and lead to her firing in 2017.
Not a pretty picture of corporate America, and global tech companies, nor anything to instill confidence in any government’s ability to rein in the excesses of the AI-driven tech, this book is timely but quite pessimistic.
I joined Facebook to publicize books for sale and later to publicize my blog of book reviews, (ThePassionateReader. Blog) but delete the vast majority of postings, ads, friend suggestions, videos, etc., which some AI thinks I should look at, without a second thought. Perhaps even this limited engagement is not justified.
4.0/5
Thanks, The Economist.
The Passionate Reader 
Interesting. Indeed, Facebook and other Meta companies all seem awful to me
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