Tech capitalism has inspired a flood of publications which shows no signs of abating. I can’t call myself an expert on the matter, which I mainly follow as a much-concerned lay person through the news and social media, but I have recently read two books (a memoir, an essay) that form a sort of accidental trilogy with a novel I read years ago. I want to recommend this trilogy here (not necessarily review it).
I refer to Dave Eggers’s novel The Circle (2013), Sarah Wynn-Williams’s memoir Careless People: A Story of Where I Used to Work (2025) and Cory Doctorow’s essay Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (2025). The three together could be the foundation for a thrilling seminar on pre-AI tech capitalism, even a semestral subject, though I can’t quite think how they would fit the BA and MA I work for. I did get away with teaching a subject on the criticism against globalisation years ago under the umbrella of our Cultural Studies elective, so, there is always room for that. We read books such as Naomi Klein’s No Logo, Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickle and Dimed, or Eric Schlosser’s Fast-Food Nation and it was a great break from strictly teaching Literature, while still staying within English Studies.
I have always found it a tad suspicious that Eggers’s The Circle is not a modern classic given its spot-on scary Orwellian nature. It was successful enough to inspire a film adaptation directed by James Ponsoldt, released in 2017, with Emma Watson and Tom Hanks, but this was universally panned (quite unfairly, if you ask me). The general consensus was that the film did not tackle the issues that the novel raises with sufficient seriousness, though the novel had also been found wanting as the work of an outsider insufficiently informed about the inner workings of tech companies. Eggers’s novel narrates the descent of young Mae Holland into the dark inner echelons of the tech company she joins as an enthusiastic newcomer. This company is simply called The Circle, and could be any of the big US tech corporations: Facebook/Meta (which includes Instagram and Whatsapp), Google, Amazon, Apple, Twitter/X.
Perhaps the problem with Eggers’s novel is that it cannot be easily classified: it’s dystopian sf set in the present, with touches of the thriller, but it’s, above all, a raw presentation of how a person’s morality can be swallowed up by the rotten approach to privacy of the tech CEOs and their companies. In the sequel The Every (2021), Mae herself is the new CEO of an even bigger giant (that of the title), which seems to integrate Google and Amazon. I acknowledge this is a less accomplished work, but still one of the few novel to pay attention to the forces shaping up our daily reality.
In The Circle, Mae’s best friend and college roommate Annie helps her to get a first-rung job in Customer Experience (CE). Annie is part of the inner circle of 40 persons who run the company, founded by the ‘Three Wise Men’: Eamon Bailey (the kind public face but a fascist at heart), Ty Gospodinov (the wizard engineer) and Tom Stenton (the ruthless capitalist). The Circle’s star product is SeeChange, a light, portable camera mounted on a pin that provides real-time video feed to the wearer’s followers.
The SeeChange cameras are associated to transparency, and they gradually invade people’s privacy, including Mae’s own life. She uses SeeChange all the time, forces her parents to accept the camera in their home in exchange for much needed healthcare, and ultimately causes the death of an important person in her life. Mae eventually embraces the Circle’s credo by which “secrets are lies, sharing is caring, privacy is theft.” A second product, PastPerfect, brings to light problematic aspects in Annie’s family which cause her to end up in a coma, a tragedy which prompts Mae to dream of a time when people’s brains might be accessed. Instead of getting her come-uppance, though, almost villainous Mae ends up betraying her lover’s efforts to destroy The Circle.
Former Facebook employee Kate Losse accused Eggers of plagiarizing her memoir The Boy Kings: A Journey into the Heart of the Social Network (2013), which he denied having read. This book appears to be the first in a sub-genre of anti-Facebook memoirs by former employees which includes Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley (2016) by Antonio García Martínez, An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination (2021) by Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang, and Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Toxic Secrets (2023) by Jeff Horwitz. The volume by former Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (2013) is the opposite: a piece of blatant pro-Facebook propaganda. Those who’ve read (not my case) claim that it sharply contrasts with Wynn-William’s Careless People. This, by the way, is titled after one of the most famous passages in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925): “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
Wynn-Williams is currently fighting an arbitration order Facebook has used to gag her, so that she cannot in any way promote her book. She made news last June when her totally silent presence in a roundtable at Hay Festival caused sales of her memoir to soar (a classic Streisand effect). That Zuckerberg is worried about Wynn-Williams to that extent seems to be endorsement enough to believe what she narrates. I must clarify first, though, that her own position is, to say the least, controversial.
Wynn-Williams, a New Zealand-born lawyer and diplomat, managed to convince Sandberg that Facebook needed a political advisor at a time in the early 2010s when the company (launched in 2004) was far from understanding its own power. As Facebook’s Director of Public Policy (2011-17) Wynn-Williams was instrumental in transforming Zuckerberg into an indispensable public figure of immense political importance, doing for him PR he was totally incapable of. Wynn-William grew increasingly horrified by the consequences that the combination of the misuse of Facebook by rogue users and the company’s cavalier attitude to incendiary posting had for nations such as Myanmar and others, including the USA. Yet she did not raise this issue publicly nor did she quit. She was actually fired when her allegations of sexual harassment became too bothersome for Facebook.
Wynn-Williams paints a very bleak portrait of the corporate culture in Facebook. The company’s core is presented as a clique of mostly male ex-Harvard graduates who run Facebook, and a great deal of the world, from a totally unempathetic, psychopathic, deeply misogynistic point of view. Wynn-Williams goes into territory Eggers never considers in The Circle, such as the nightmare of combining motherhood with a career in a high-performance tech company, the sexual harassment by powerful bosses (both male and female), and the employees’ lack of mutual support for each other. Yet, the more personal part of the memoir is never as frightening as the revelation that Facebook has been run on a more random, chaotic basis than one might believe of such a huge corporation.
Essentially, Wynn-Williams claims, Zuckerberg launched a most powerful tool for human intercommunication without the least inkling of how it could be misused (though there have always been rumours that the CIA, one of Facebook’s alleged backers, did know). Once Wynn-Williams taught Zuckerberg how world politics work, he made the most of the moral corruption Facebook was already generating to empower himself. There is an episode in which Wynn-Williams secures for her boss a major role in an international meeting of presidents, but she herself misses how obscene that is. Wynn-Williams is mostly scandalized by how Facebook sought alliances with China. Yet, it seems obvious that what bothers Zuckerberg is Wynn-Willaims’ account of how Facebook imposed on its users, with no consideration of their rights, tactics of total surveillance and manipulation all over the world to benefit its shareholders.
This is, precisely, the process described by Canadian author and anti-tech activist Cory Doctorow in his best-selling essay Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It. Doctorow did not originate the concept, which had been circulating since 2013, but he boosted its popularity through his blog from 2022 onward. Enshittification, or ‘platform decay’, is a process of service degradation by which online vendors entice users. They initially offer quality products at a low cost only to start degrading these products to please the announcers and, ultimately, the shareholders. For instance, Doctorow explains how Google decided to undermine the quality of their searches to that users would need to do more of them to reach the target result. Along those unproductive searches, users are bombarded with more tailor-made adds than if the search had worked at the first try.
In another telling example, Doctorow explains that Amazon prioritizes in its customer searches low-quality products whose makers have paid for these to be highlighted, relegating to the bottom of the page the better-quality choices. Facebook or X, which used to offer tools to build connections and community are now platforms dominated by the interests of their shareholders; these seek to monetize users’ engagement through adds and through controversy that generates manipulation for their own ends. So, yes, all digital platforms have been degraded by this process of enshittification and since our whole economy and social life depends on them, life itself has been enshittified.
21st century internet is a terrible place in comparison to the promise that late 20th century internet offered as a digital domain to build community and personal relations apart from greedy capitalist economy. It has been swallowed up by a handful of US-centred platforms that have degraded our lives and are damaging the mental health of the younger generations. I’m not demonizing the internet, which has changed our lives for the best in so many ways, but the patriarchal, masculinist tech oligarchy that has enshittified it for their own benefit and to please uncaring shareholders. In comparison, the times of the monopolistic entrepreneurs of the turn of the 19th century and the 20th seem a lost golden era.
Knowing that it’s useless to try to persuade users to abandon platforms and services they are addicted to, Doctorow asks governments to put an end to the huge monopolies that dominate the digital world to prevent billionaire CEOs from possibly destroying our world. With the rise of AI, the whole matter of tech capitalism has taken on a dangerous edge unseen since the worst days of the Cold War and its many nuclear war scares. We may be literally about to sacrifice human life to a form of enshittification so intense than it can’t be harnessed by those who have unleashed it upon us.
You’ve been warned. Now read, read and read and stay alert. And fight back.