Rebooting the Narrative: Kara Swisher's Awakening in 'Burn Book'
Until a month ago, I had never heard of Kara Swisher. Then, one day, I got a PM on Mastodon (a decentralized social media platform, and my social media home after I escaped the other famous troll and AI-generated junk site), suggesting a great book by the tech journalist Kara Swisher. Swisher has been writing for about 30 years about Silicon Valley and the men (they are almost all men) who fund it. A woman covering Silicon Valley. That’s interesting, I thought. According to the publisher’s description , Burn Book is
“Part memoir, part history, …. a necessary chronicle of tech’s most powerful players. From “the queen of all media” (Walt Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal), this is the inside story we’ve all been waiting for about modern Silicon Valley and the biggest boom in wealth creation in the history of the world.”
Hyperbolic book descriptions always amuse me, but I get it, it's part of the marketing game. The issue here was the term “the queen of all media.” For years, I thought Oprah was that the queen of all media. Apparently, I was wrong. So, who is Kara Swisher? I had to know.
I resisted the urge to buy (see: order online) the book right away. Instead, I opted to borrow it from the local library and I had to wait more than a month to get it. Clearly, a popular book. This only served to fuel my already huge curiosity and I spent a considerable amount of time during this month reading a lot of her work and watching snippets of her interviews with the semigods of technology.
After all of this reading, I should have been prepared for the book itself, but no. I was hoping to read a thorough analysis of the companies and a sharp critique of the men who are shaping our lives and influencing us enormously by appealing to our basic human instincts. But no.
It’s very clear that Kara Swisher is smart and knowledgeable. She realised the potential of technology to transform the world early on. She has been a savvy-news hound. She has been able to build relationships that granted her access to companies and, often, to their confidential documents. She has given the space to the men /founders of these companies to talk about their visions and ambitions. Did she challenge them on the extent of these ambitions, the actions required to achieve their goals, the things that had to do to succeed, or the ethics of those actions? Certainly not. Did she discuss with them the consequences of their actions for society at large? Not at all. On the contrary, often—at least this has been my impression—in her interviews and articles, she seemed to be promoting the products of these companies.
The turning point for Kara Swisher seems to have been the Trump Tech Summit, which took place on December 14, 2016, at the Trump Tower in Manhattan. The leaders of the most powerful tech companies—including Amazon, Tesla, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Alphabet, Google’s parent company—were “summoned to tromp into Manhattan’s Trump Tower and meet the man who had unexpectedly just been elected president and was the antithesis of all they supposedly represented.” Present, of course, was Peter Thiel, PayPal founder, Silicon Valley investor and, at the time, part of Trump’s transition team. Curiously, Twitter executives were blocked from attending the meeting.
Two days later, Swisher published a frustrating article on her website Recode (now part of Vox) asking, “So what is the first move of the people in charge of inventing the future? Full of ugly choices and likely bad outcomes, they have opted to punt, with most of them saying nothing publicly about even attending the summit nor making it clear beforehand that there are some key issues that are just not negotiable.” (Yes, I read the article, too.)
We now know more about this meeting/photo-op. Did these brilliant and super-rich disruptors voice any concerns to the man who had just been elected president and was the antithesis of all that they claimed to represent about immigration (with some being immigrants themselves), human dignity, or gender equality? Certainly not. Did they take a moment to consider their role in public discourse? Did they defend science and climate policies that will help us address the climate crisis? Certainly not. They were there to protect their profits and, more importantly, to be shielded from regulation and push against restrictions on the transfer of personal information across borders, which would limit their ability to access citizens' data.
This was nothing new. The bursting of the internet bubble in March 2000, marked a cultural shift in Silicon Valley. The denizens of Silicon Valley began to focus on the potential of global tech platforms and a more people-focused web, known as Web 2.0. This shift led to the creation of social networks and platforms that eventually, amassed vast amounts of user data without any obligation to protect their privacy. (Read Roger McNamee’s book “Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe” for more.)
These new entrepreneurs, often seen as disruptors, had left behind the hippie libertarianism of Steve Jobs, and whom Kara Swisher truly admired, and turned into an aggressive version of what was more in line with Ayn Rand's ideas. I'm pretty sure that many of them read Atlas Shrugged (a bad novel, by the way) in their teens and fantasised about becoming John Galt one day. Peter Thiel, for example, wrote an article in 2014 in the Wall Street Journal titled “Competition Is For Losers” with the subtitle /advice to his fellow entrepreneurs, “If you want to create and capture lasting value, look to build a monopoly.”
I could go on and on, but I better stop. After all, this is meant to be a book review, isn't it? My point is that any person who wants to know what's going on in the world and hasn't been living in their bubble can have a very good idea of what has been happening in Silicon Valley. Kara Swisher has been an important figure in tech journalism; she should be able to hold a very good idea about Silicon Valley.
She could perhaps find some time between interviewing the leaders of these corporations and attending parties to investigate the wider socio-economic landscape of Silicon Valley, the widespread poverty, racial discrimination, and systemic inequalities. Instead of promoting specific viewpoints and disseminating carefully crafted messages aligned with the industry’s agenda, she could be talking about the lack of transparency, the deteriorating working conditions, and the glorifying but punishing, physically and mentally, long working hours.
After reading all of this material and the book, it's still not clear to me why Kara Swisher wrote this book. Does she regret for not criticising the tech industry and its creators more during her time in San Fransisco, and wants to apologise? Is this an attempt to rewrite the narrative and convince us and perhaps herself, that she was on the right side of history? Furthermore, who is the intended audience for Kara Swisher’s book? The general public, fellow journalists, or the CEOs of these corporations? Too many questions! I even find myself wondering why I have spent so much time reading and writing about Kara Swisher and her book.
Being a journalist means trying to hold power into account, or in Swisher’s case to hold the tech industry into account. But then, in the book she writes that even though she started out as a reporter, she “had shifted into an analyst and sometimes into an advocate.” An analyst can wear many hats -assessing a sector’s trends, predicting shifts or providing insights and guidance to entrepreneurs, investors or media companies. I still have no idea what Swisher’s role has been or why she continues to hold a really important place in the sector.
In the book, she talks about how generative Artificial Intelligence moves the world to another Cambrian explosion. The Cambrian explosion occurred approximately 529 million years ago and it was then that complex life took place. It was the time when multicellular life truly turned on itself for food. The pressure to survive in that world spawned ever more specialised tools for hunting and for avoiding capture. It was a period where animals developed their hard parts that are thought to be adaptation to the new, predatory world.
I'II leave you with that.