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- #1
“This is about love gone wrong,” says Kara Swisher, looking back on a life spent studying the giants of Big Tech. “I saw the possibilities of tech being the saviour of humanity – or at the very least, really helping people, in terms of community and knowledge and education. And instead, you know …”
She pauses, and wearily exhales. “It’s like that old expression: ‘They promised us jetpacks, and this is what we got?’ Like, are you kidding me?” But, she adds: “The problem isn’t tech. It’s people.”
Swisher is essentially a business journalist, but her speciality is human beings and what they do with wealth and power. She has been scrutinising Silicon Valley for around three decades – writing ferociously and insightfully for the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, founding the tech news website Recode, and blazing a trail into podcasting. Her writing has always struck a delicate balance between insider knowledge and biting irreverence. Now, though, her iconoclastic side has won out, given free rein in an extremely readable memoir, Burn Book.
The title, she tells me, comes from the 2004 movie Mean Girls, in which the leading characters keep a shared diary full of slights and gossip about their classmates. As well as telling her own story, the book centres on pen-portraits of people – men, mostly – she has closely observed as their wealth and influence has ballooned: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the founders of Google.
A few of them emerge as rounded, deep-thinking people who at least understand the huge questions of power that swirl around them. Others, by contrast, are more cuttingly portrayed – as “fresh-faced wunderkinds I had mostly rooted for” who eventually made the author “feel like a parent whose progeny had turned into, well, assholes”.
She pauses, and wearily exhales. “It’s like that old expression: ‘They promised us jetpacks, and this is what we got?’ Like, are you kidding me?” But, she adds: “The problem isn’t tech. It’s people.”
Swisher is essentially a business journalist, but her speciality is human beings and what they do with wealth and power. She has been scrutinising Silicon Valley for around three decades – writing ferociously and insightfully for the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, founding the tech news website Recode, and blazing a trail into podcasting. Her writing has always struck a delicate balance between insider knowledge and biting irreverence. Now, though, her iconoclastic side has won out, given free rein in an extremely readable memoir, Burn Book.
The title, she tells me, comes from the 2004 movie Mean Girls, in which the leading characters keep a shared diary full of slights and gossip about their classmates. As well as telling her own story, the book centres on pen-portraits of people – men, mostly – she has closely observed as their wealth and influence has ballooned: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the founders of Google.
A few of them emerge as rounded, deep-thinking people who at least understand the huge questions of power that swirl around them. Others, by contrast, are more cuttingly portrayed – as “fresh-faced wunderkinds I had mostly rooted for” who eventually made the author “feel like a parent whose progeny had turned into, well, assholes”.
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