I have always been a bit unnerved by Sheryl Sandberg. There is something so American about her. Striving and smooth and helmet heady all at once. No 2 to Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook, now Meta. Youngest dollar billionaire, give or take a Kardashian. Author of Lean In — not a book but a movement.
Widow of a husband who died by losing his footing on a treadmill while on holiday — to be discovered in a pile on the floor with his phone bleeping insistently and all those Facebook notifications going unanswered. I always felt that this bit — the sad death by misadventure on a treadmill — has the makings of a tragic metaphor. There is something starkly unsettling with the world these titans of tech set up.
They — the tech titans that is — with Sheryl at their helm created and, in her case, monetised this world we all live in now. This world where our every move is meta. By which I mean we are little packets of information sold to the highest bidder — commercial, political or otherwise — and more bizarrely, we wilfully curate the packet of information for them.
Every waking moment, so that it can carry on selling us while we sleep. They don’t even have to do the hard work of market research — we just hand the stuff over wilfully and put a nice filter on it for good measure.
The troubling part of the Sheryl Sandberg mythology is that she is a woman. This somehow absolves her of any actual responsibility for the k*k her companies have perpetrated (she worked for Google before). Instead she becomes the poster girl for how to have it all. Her advice? Demand a parking bay and lean goddamn in. Work harder, do more and don’t sell yourself short.
As Michelle Obama said about Sandberg’s lean in shtick in an unguarded moment: “Sometimes that s**t doesn’t work.”
There is something profoundly shortsighted about her lean in movement. The onus is on the woman to do the leaning. That is all very well when you are the COO of Facebook and probably have a staff of hundreds at home to take care of the “s**t”.
But for everyone else it is double shifts and a relentless treadmill of constant work and answering your emails and calls and WhatsApps and notifications all the time. Because that is the connected world Sheryl sold us.
So it is interesting to me that she has chosen this moment to “lean out”. It is not clear what she plans to do next. She said she is focusing on her five children — three are from her new blended family post her impending nuptials — and taking time to step off the treadmill. Lest she falls off it. Good for her. But I hope she does not write a book reflecting on this next chapter of her life, advising us on the way to set a new slower pace on the information machine. Because that will be too damn meta for me.
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