Burn Book: A Tech Love Story
Ratings25
Average rating3.6
15
Ratings25
Average rating3.6
From award-winning journalist Kara Swisher comes a witty, scathing, but fair accounting of the tech industry and its founders who wanted to change the world but broke it instead. While tech titans bragged they would “move fast and break things,” Kara Swisher was moving faster and breaking news. Covering the explosion of the digital sector in the early 1990s, she developed a long track record of digging up and reporting the truth of this new world order. Her consistent scoops drove one CEO to accuse her of “listening in the heating ducts” and for Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg to once say: “It is a constant joke in the Valley when people write memos for them to say, ‘I hope Kara never sees this.’” Burn Book is part memoir, part history and, most of all, a necessary recounting of tech’s most powerful players. This is the inside story we’ve all been waiting for of modern Silicon Valley and the biggest boom in wealth creation in the history of the world. While still in college, Swisher got her start at The Washington Post, where she became one of the few people in journalism interested in the emerging field of tech. She was among the first to recognize the potential of the internet, accurately predicting that “everything that could be digitized, would be digitized.” She went on to work for The Wall Story Journal, joining with Walt Mossberg to start the groundbreaking AllThingsD conference, as well as pioneering online tech sites. It’s only a slight exaggeration to say Swisher has interviewed everyone. Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Bob Iger, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Meg Whitman, Peter Thiel, and Mark Zuckerberg are just a few who Swisher made sweat—figuratively and, in one famous case, literally. Despite the damage she chronicles, Swisher remains optimistic about tech’s potential to help solve problems and not just create them. She calls upon the industry to make better, more thoughtful choices, even as a new set of powerful AI tools are poised to change the world yet again. At its heart, this book is a love story to, for, and about tech from someone who knows it better than anyone. Burn Book includes soaring tales of innovation and brilliant entrepreneurs, as well as Silicon Valley’s much more complex history of striving, success, and failure. The book details how the commercial internet came into being and how, for all it has given the world, it now sits at the center of global power, creating a clear and present danger to humanity.
Reviews with the most likes.
Fun book. Mostly stories you'd know if you listen to any of her podcasts.
Kara Swisher seems to attract a lot of ire from my circles of social media, claiming she has spent a lot of time being a stenographer to power for Silicon Valley oligarchs, or at least a useful tool in their PR machine. But if that's the case, Swisher seems to be trying to morph her career into something else and the result is a memoir that's pretty interesting to me regarding the threat wealthy titans of tech pose to us in the 21st century.
I do wish she would rely less on the Arrested Development "Narrator: Contradiction of the above statement" meme.
Kara is a thoughtful and reflective story-teller. The memoir provides a unique and up close look through the lens of a someone who covered the tech beat for decades. Some of my favorite quotes -
French philosopher Paul Virilio has a quote I think about a lot: “When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane, you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution…. Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress.”
“No wonder, then, that self-congratulation and self-deception are now a part of the Valley’s ethos, right up there with fearless risk-taking, maniacal effort and programming genius,”
“The best ideas have to win,” Jobs insisted over and over to me. He utterly rejected the idea of speed (move fast) and destruction (break things).
