Meta’s former policy chief Nick Clegg appears to be walking a tightrope as he promotes his upcoming book, “How to Save the Internet.” Unlike certain other Meta employee memoirs, his book does not sound like a tell-all or a scathing critique.
In an interview, Clegg, who previously led the U.K.’s Liberal Democrats, seems to distance himself from Silicon Valley without quite disavowing his former employer. He stated that he truly believes social media, despite its imperfections, has allowed billions of people to communicate with each other in a way that has never happened before. He added that he would not have worked for Meta if he felt Mark Zuckerberg or Sheryl Sandberg were the monsters other people say they are.
However, he did deliver memorable sound bites about the Valley. He described its culture as “cloyingly conformist,” a place where everyone wears the same clothes, drives the same cars, listens to the same podcasts, and follows the same fads.
Clegg also expressed mystification at the tech industry’s growing obsession with masculinity. He remarked that he could not, and still cannot, understand what he calls this deeply unattractive combination of machismo and self-pity.