Former Meta exec Nick Clegg offers careful criticism of ‘cloyingly conformist’ Silicon Valley

Meta’s former policy chief Nick Clegg appears to be strolling a tightrope as he promotes his upcoming e book, “How to Save the Internet.”

Not like sure different Meta employee memoirs, “Find out how to Save the Web” doesn’t sound like a tell-all or a scathing critique. And in an interview with the Guardian, Clegg (who beforehand led the U.Okay.’s Liberal Democrats) appears to distance himself from Silicon Valley with out fairly disavowing his former employer.

“I actually do imagine that, regardless of its imperfections, social media has allowed billions of individuals … to speak with one another in a approach that has by no means occurred earlier than,” he mentioned, including that he wouldn’t have labored for Meta “if I felt Mark Zuckerberg or Sheryl Sandberg have been the monsters different folks say they’re.”

Nonetheless, he delivered memorable sound bites in regards to the Valley, describing it as a “cloyingly conformist” tradition the place “everybody wears the identical garments, drives the identical automobiles, listens to the identical podcasts, follows the identical fads.”

Clegg additionally sounded be mystified by the trade’s growing obsession with masculinity, saying, “I couldn’t, and nonetheless can’t, perceive this deeply unattractive mixture of machismo and self-pity.”