A Tech Love Story: Burn Book by Kara Swisher

Dive into the mesmerizing world of technology and love with Kara Swisher’s “Burn Book: A Tech Love Story.” This gripping tale takes you on a rollercoaster ride through the ups and downs of the tech industry, leaving you craving more with every turn of the page.

Immerse yourself in this captivating story and discover the secrets, scandals, and triumphs that define the tech world. Read on to uncover the truth behind the glitz and glamour.

Genres

Non-fiction, Technology, Business, Romance, Drama, Memoir, Exposé, Social Commentary, Industry Insights, Personal Journey

 

“Burn Book: A Tech Love Story” by Kara Swisher is a riveting account of the author’s experiences and observations in the fast-paced world of technology. Swisher, a renowned journalist and expert in the field, takes readers on a journey through the industry’s most significant events, trends, and personalities.

The book delves into the complex relationships between tech giants, entrepreneurs, and the media, revealing the often-hidden dynamics that shape the sector. Swisher’s personal anecdotes and sharp wit add depth and humor to the narrative, making it an engaging read for both tech enthusiasts and casual readers alike.

The book also explores the darker side of the industry, including the challenges faced by women and minorities, the ethical dilemmas posed by emerging technologies, and the impact of tech on society as a whole. Throughout the book, Swisher’s love for technology shines through, even as she critically examines its flaws and shortcomings.

Review

Kara Swisher’s “Burn Book: A Tech Love Story” is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding the inner workings of the tech industry. Swisher’s unique perspective, born from years of experience as a journalist and insider, provides readers with an unparalleled view of the sector’s triumphs and tribulations.

The book is well-researched and expertly crafted, balancing personal anecdotes with in-depth analysis of the industry’s most significant developments. Swisher’s writing style is engaging and accessible, making even the most complex topics easy to understand.

The book’s exploration of the industry’s darker aspects, such as the lack of diversity and the ethical challenges posed by new technologies, is particularly poignant and timely. However, some readers may find the book’s focus on personal relationships and gossip a bit distracting from the larger themes at play. Overall, “Burn Book: A Tech Love Story” is a compelling and informative read that offers valuable insights into the world of technology and its impact on our lives.

Recommendation

Technology companies and their leaders promise to help change the world. However, some of the most powerful names in tech tend to act like “adult toddlers,” writes renowned tech journalist Kara Swisher, while others simply lack empathy for their users. Part memoir, part exposé, Swisher’s eye-opening, decades-spanning account offers a nuanced picture of Silicon Valley’s history and how its innovations have reshaped society — for better and for worse. Boldly holding a mirror up to power, Swisher deftly balances insider anecdotes with a serious call for tech leaders to focus on the public good.

Take-Aways

• Silicon Valley leaders have transformed the world — but not always in the ways they promised.
• Google became a threat to global information flows when it gained monopolistic powers.
• A quest for profit more than idealism drove Amazon’s rise.
• Digitalization weakened the media industries that Steve Jobs saw as vital to a healthy democracy.
• CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg have too much power and cannot afford to be careless — but they are.
• Travis Kalanick normalized a culture of dehumanization and egregious sexism at Uber.
• Heated online discourse can translate into offscreen violence.
• Swisher developed her own scale for measuring tech founders’ characters in relation to their accomplishments.
• The tech industry can help build a better future if those in power choose to act in humanity’s best interests.

Summary

Silicon Valley leaders have transformed the world — but not always in the ways they promised.

Silicon Valley leaders often win over consumers with world-changing promises. In 2000, Google adopted the motto “Don’t be evil,” while Tesla’s Elon Musk vowed to reduce mass-market dependence on fossil fuels through electric vehicles. But while many leading tech companies have changed the world, it’s often for the worse. Many people today are addicted to digital devices and more isolated from other humans; fake news and disinformation abound; and social media platforms have eroded civic discourse.

In a 2018 New York Times column, the author characterized Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter as the “digital arms dealers of the modern age.” She explained that these companies have weaponized free speech and political discourse, exacerbating polarization and fueling conflict to trigger engagement. Silicon Valley dismisses the adverse effects of the technologies they’ve profited from as “unintended consequences.” But just because Big Tech didn’t aim to do harm doesn’t mean they should not be held accountable.

“For tech to fulfill its promise, founders and executives who ran their creations needed to put more safety tools in place. They needed to anticipate consequences more. Or at all. They needed to acknowledge that online rage might extend into the real world in increasingly scary ways.”

Many tech leaders choose to be blind and deaf to the social ills their companies enable. When some of the most influential names in Silicon Valley, including Jeff Bezos and Tim Cooke, met with Donald Trump in December 2016 at Trump Tower, it signaled a new normal. As investor Chris Sacca pointed out, Trump hadn’t promised to help these leaders work toward goals aligned with their purported values, such as embracing science or protecting the rights of Silicon Valley’s diverse tech workers. Rather, the CEOs who chose to attend the confab likely had less magnanimous priorities, such as snagging military contracts and evading regulation.

Google became a threat to global information flows when it gained monopolistic powers.

With the public launch of the World Wide Web in 1993 by the European Organization for Nuclear Research, longstanding constraints on how and when people could access information fell by the wayside: Once something got uploaded to the internet, an infinite number of users could access that knowledge from anywhere, at any time. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, innovators, and investors were like prospectors during the American Gold Rush, digitizing everything they possibly could in the hopes of cashing in on the unprecedented opportunities that this shift presented.

The author herself followed the tide and, in 1997, moved west to California to cover developments in the fast-evolving tech ecosystem for The Wall Street Journal. At the time, Netscape and Yahoo were the hot companies in Silicon Valley, though the beginning of the end of their dominance was already in sight. While Google initially saw itself as the “scrappy Han Solo to Bill Gates’s Darth Vader,” the author marked them as a power player early on.

“In truth, Google was becoming a Borg that would suck in all the world’s information and then spit it out for profit. And, eventually, resistance would be futile in every media.”

Yahoo lost its status as the “gateway to the internet” after signing a deal for Google to act as the default search provider on its portal. When users visited Yahoo, the site showcased Google’s logo. Google.com’s growth soon outpaced Yahoo’s. Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, believed, with an almost religious fervor, in the company’s mission to connect people all around the world through information sharing. Swisher shared her fears that Google was growing too powerful in her All Things Digital site. She warned that a Google monopoly would harm advertisers and consumers, and hinder innovation. Swisher wasn’t worried about “good people” like Page and Brin taking Google down the wrong track; she was concerned about the “evil ones” who’d come after them if Google became a monopoly.

A quest for profit more than idealism drove Amazon’s rise.

“Feral”: That was the first word that came to mind when the author met Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in the mid-1990s. By the decade’s end, Bezos had emerged as the leader who most epitomized the new internet-driven economy. Time’s 1999 Person of the Year​​​​​​ ran Amazon more like a “souped-up logistics company” than a tech company. He didn’t bother with platitudes about saving the world, but Bezos was not at all lacking in vision — or ambition. Though others, including AOL, had attempted to popularize online shopping, none did so successfully until Amazon.

“I had no doubt that Jeff Bezos would eat my face off if that is what he needed to do to get ahead.”

Bezos beat his competition by first offering consumers books, then other physical goods, at a fraction of the cost of brick-and-mortar stores. Amazon grew by leveraging dynamic pricing and data insights to anticipate what people wanted before they even knew they wanted it. Though the 2000–2002 dot-com crisis would rock Amazon along with the rest of Silicon Valley, Bezos’s carefully structured systems allowed his company to weather the storm.

Digitalization weakened the media industries that Steve Jobs saw as vital to healthy democracy.

In 2000, AOL bought media giant Time Warner. Time Warner had launched its own web portal, Pathfinder, in 1994, but it had never found its footing. The company tried to bill the choice to shutter Pathfinder in 1999 as “an evolution,” but, like the merger with AOL itself, the move only underscored Time Warner’s lack of creativity in the face of disruption. When the dot-com bubble burst, traditional media thought that a return to the predigital normal might ensue. But, as the author predicted, the crash was merely “the end of the beginning” of the tech industry’s takeover of the news and information infrastructure. Over the next decade, that shift in power between traditional media and tech became only more pronounced as digitalization spread from one sector to the next — print publishing, radio, film, and beyond.

“From the music, newspaper, book, and radio industries to the movie and television studios of Burbank, no medium escaped the inevitable march of digitalization. Each got disrupted and sometimes destroyed.”

Swisher identifies the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs as one of the few famed individuals in tech who honestly considered the full range of ways his company’s innovations might reshape society. Jobs believed that healthy journalism was necessary within a democratic society, and he spoke of his fears about descending “into a nation of bloggers.” Yet tech became the new “gatekeepers of media” thanks, in no small part, to the debut of the Apple iPod, which disrupted the music industry with digitization in 2001, and, later, the birth of the iPhone, which gave rise to companies like Instagram and Uber and prompted a dramatic change in the trajectories of social media platforms like Facebook.

CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg have too much power and cannot afford to be careless — but they are.

In many ways, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s profanity-laced text ridiculing his early user base for trusting him with their data exemplified the growth-at-any-cost mindset that many in Silicon Valley openly embraced in the late-2000s. At Facebook, disregard for user safety and data privacy was practically a company motto, dovetailing neatly with the advice Napster’s Sean Parker had given Zuckerberg to make his platform as addictive as possible.

“No, Zuckerberg wasn’t an asshole. He was worse. He was one of the most carelessly dangerous men in the history of technology who didn’t even know it.”

Zuckerberg differed from many of his save-the-world predecessors in that he was transparent about his ambitions for power. He openly admitted, for example, that his hero was Augustus Caesar. Like that emperor, Zuckerberg exercises absolute control at Facebook, including over the company’s voting shares, ensuring that nobody on his board can ever remove him from power.

His position has insulated Zuckerberg from much-needed criticism on more than one occasion, and for many years, it has closed his eyes to the dangerous consequences of Facebook’s neutral approach to disinformation. For example, Zuckerberg allowed antisemitic hate speech groups to persist on Facebook for about two years. While he did finally ban antisemitic users in 2020 — the data on rising antisemitic hate crimes finally triggered an evolution in his thinking — the platform’s three billion users cannot always afford to wait for him to slowly, and sometimes carelessly, make decisions that affect their health and safety.

Travis Kalanick normalized a culture of dehumanization and egregious sexism at Uber.

Under CEO Travis Kalanick, Uber demonstrated sexism and a flagrant disregard for user privacy. For example, in India, the media outlet Recode revealed that an Uber executive had obtained a female rider’s medical files — without her consent — after she was raped while riding in an Uber. The company didn’t obtain the files to help the survivor but to discredit her. Kalanick, whose company hit a valuation of $70 billion in 2017, ran Uber like a frat club. One memo sent out before a 2013 company party advised Uber employees to avoid throwing beer kegs off the roof of the Miami Shore Club.

“When the truth stands between a man and his next $100 million, the truth is always going to be escorted off the premises.”

In that same memo, Kalanick expressed frustration that he couldn’t have sex with anyone who worked for him: “Travis will be celibate on this trip. #CEOLife#FML.” As whistleblower Susan Fowler noted in her headline-grabbing 2017 blog post, such remarks — together with a general tolerance of sexual harassment — were par for the course at Uber. Kalanick was similarly blasé about how the development of autonomous vehicles would affect Uber drivers. In fact, he openly celebrated how not needing to pay gig workers would enable him to get even richer. Fortunately, Uber’s “take no responsibility” ethos wasn’t sustainable: Investors stopped indulging Kalanick’s behavior, and he gave in to pressure to resign from the company in 2017, albeit as a billionaire.

Heated online discourse can translate into offscreen violence.

Former US president Donald Trump became one of the world’s most notorious social media voices during his presidency. He regularly fired off boorish tweets, espoused racist views, and spread blatant lies. In a New York Times column, Swisher wrote of her fears that if Trump lost his second bid for the presidency, he might declare the 2020 election a fraud and inspire an armed rebellion. As she watched Trump supporters storm the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, Swisher tagged former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and other Twitter executives in a message, urging them to suspend Trump’s account, at least temporarily, or bear responsibility for any ensuing violence.

“If Mark Zuckerberg is the most damaging man in tech to me, Musk was the most disappointing.”

Twitter banned Trump from its platform on January 8. When announcing the decision, Dorsey acknowledged that offline harm can occur when online speech incites violence. Facebook followed suit, citing Trump’s “policy violations.” The move to silence a man who was still technically the president met with mixed reactions. Twitter’s current CEO, Elon Musk — who is himself prone to posting incendiary ideas — described the act as “morally wrong.” Swisher admits that, while she advocated for the ban, allowing a handful of tech billionaires to decide who gets to participate in public discourse is problematic.

Swisher developed her own scale for measuring tech founders’ characters in relation to their accomplishments.

Swisher created a playful metric, the “Prick to Productivity Ratio” (P2P), for assessing the tech CEOs and founders she’s known, including the following big names:

• Bill Gates — Gates has a P2P ratio of 7/10. He has made admirable contributions to philanthropy through The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. However, his character rating — one of the metric’s components — is low, as he often met with rapist and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
• Steve Jobs — Job’s P2P ratio is 8/10. He sometimes parked in handicapped spots, but his innovations had an indelible impact on the world.
• Elon Musk — Musk gets a P2P ratio of “∞/WTF.” The once highly productive founder has utterly transformed in recent years into little more than a childish, sexist, conspiracy-peddling troll who expends most of his energy engaging in toxic Twitter fights.

The tech industry can help build a better future if those in power choose to act in humanity’s best interests.

The directions in which tech will evolve in coming years hinge on the decision makers: If “out-of-touch” tech CEOs maintain their current choke hold on power, there’s reason for worry. However, if more diverse voices gain greater clout, tech companies will be more likely to serve a wider range of interests.

“The journey started out as a love story and, despite my many disappointments, remains one. I still love and breathe tech.”

Despite all the problematic cultural norms and leadership shortcomings in the tech industry, there’s still reason to hope in tech. From increased human longevity and getting cars off the roads to replacing repetitive, unsatisfying forms of labor with more creative pursuits via automation, technological innovations have the potential to deliver a better future. But people must be brave enough to speak out when they see those in power behaving dangerously.

About the Author

Kara Swisher is an American journalist, host of the New York Magazine podcast On with Kara Swisher, and a cohost of its Pivot podcast. She cofounded Vox Media’s Recode, was a contributing opinion writer and podcast host for The New York Times, and has worked for The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post.