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Kara Swisher Takes on the Tech Titans – Again
In an excerpt from ‘Burn Book: A Tech Love Story,’ the American journalist writes about covering the early days of the internet / BY Anne O'Hagan / March 8th, 2024
What do Netflix boss Ted Sarandos, billionaire investor and Shark Tank TV personality Mark Cuban and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman have in common, besides money and power? The answer is they’ve all been grilled by American “reportrepreneur” Kara Swisher, and yet all have agreed to talk to her live onstage to promote her new memoir Burn Book: A Tech Love Story.
The former technology reporter for The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal turned conference impresario and celebrity podcaster has chronicled the ups and downs of Silicon Valley for 30 years, and now tech’s most trenchant and acerbic commentator spills with glee. Even better for fans of the provocateur, Swisher has taken a pass on the routine author book tour and, with characteristic bravado, invited each of these moguls (and more) to interview her in cities across the United States.
Famously self-assured (although her targets have dismissed her as “vitriolic” and “arrogant”), Swisher credits her success to her willingness to step out of line to break news – if not spirits. She is also eminently practical, and plans to repurpose each of her high-profile book tour interviews as episodes for her wildly popular podcasts, On with Kara Swisher and Pivot with Scott Galloway. Indeed, Swisher is so comfortable in her own skin that, on the back cover of Burn Book, she’s quoted several of the very titans she’s eviscerated on the page. “Kara has become so shrill at this point that only dogs can hear her,” reads one blurb attributed to Elon Musk, whom she refers to, diminishingly, as “Tesla Guy.”
Musk, who also runs SpaceX and X (formerly Twitter), and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg are just a few of the tech luminaries Swisher denounces for their greed, dishonesty and lack of moral compass. It’s a good thing she is both funny and fearless in the process, otherwise her overall take on big tech’s overlords, whom she calls the most powerful people on earth since they’re in charge of all of our information, might be too grim and depressing to stomach.
In the following excerpt from Chapter 1 of Burn Book, Swisher writes about the early days of the internet and the “Aha” moment when she realized she’d be covering technology for years to come.
With access to federal support, the first Internet companies started forming in the early 1990s. The Washington Post gave me the space to report on a broad range of digital topics, largely because no one else would, and having just turned thirty, I was the “young” person in the newsroom. In fact, I was also already hooked. During a short fellowship at Duke University, I’d had a revelation. I was sitting in front of a computer and logged into the nascent World Wide Web and experienced firsthand its awesome power to deliver content. So, what was the first thing I did?
I downloaded a Calvin & Hobbes cartoon collection. Did I care even slightly that I managed to jam up the computer network doing it? I did not. But the system administrator—a young man already sporting a proto-techie-slash-seventh-grader look—was pissed.
“You clogged up everything,” he said, chastising me.
“But I downloaded a whole book, pretty much by just pushing a button,” I said to him. “A whole book, for fuck’s sake!”
“Big deal,” he said, flashing me that girls-can’t-code scowl I would come to know so well. I definitely could not code, but I knew something that this geek did not seem to grok: A book could be all the books, and a song could be all the songs, and a movie could be all the movies. It was right then and there that I came up with the concept that would carry me for decades hence and still does to this day:
Everything that can be digitized will be digitized.
If “God said, let there be light: and there was light” is the most important tech concept ever—and let’s be clear, no golden geek, however much they think so, has topped that one as yet— this idea of being able to turn the analog into the digital is at the heart of the promise and the challenges we still face today.
That day in the cramped computer lab in Durham, I realized that we were at yet another critical turn in history, when technology ushers in a new age. I was witnessing the dawn of the printing press, electricity, the light bulb, the telegraph, the radio, the telephone, or the television. It was obvious to me that this innovation was the next great content and communications delivery system. Most of all, I knew I had struck gold. I was fully on board for the Internet age, and however it evolved, I wanted to cover it.
And why wouldn’t I be riveted? I happened to be in the same state where the first powered flight had taken place ninety years earlier, at Kill Devil Hills near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina on December 17, 1903, piloted by Orville Wright. The Wright Flyer was aloft for just 12 seconds, during which it traveled 120 feet at 6.8 miles per hour.
Was I going to be the person standing on the beach who looked on, underwhelmed and unimpressed, complaining that the flight should have been longer and higher and faster? Would I have been the one to catcall the Wright Brothers, taunting them that their plane was lame and needed better wings? Can you imagine me there on my big-wheeled bicycle, screaming into the wind at the handlebar-mustached tech bros (some things never change), “Can’t you get it up?” Someone might have done that, but I would not, because of one important fact: A man flew.
Once I had downloaded Calvin and Hobbes, I was eager to see how much more this new technology would revolutionize media. Early content was far from world-shaking. A university in England set up a coffeemaker and those who were interested could dial into the web site and watch an electronic photo of the percolator updated every second. It was also the first time that coffee could put you to sleep. Another web page offered instructions on how to explode a grape. In this new world, the “cybercast” of Pope John Paul II’s Mass at Camden Yards in Baltimore—which I chronicled as if it were the moon landing— passed for exciting.
Just as the gold prospectors had needed pans and pickaxes, web site builders also needed tools to get to the good stuff. Internet service providers (ISPs) popped up in the D.C. area, which was the site of one of the four big Internet hubs called MAE-East. (Another big hub, hahaha, MAE-West, was in Silicon Valley). That included PSINet and UUNet, which were run by prescient entrepreneurs. These services were different from the old-school database technology that had served the federal government for decades and was run by the so-called “Beltway bandits” who charged a lot and innovated nothing. The new guys were a much different breed.
Excerpted from Burn Book: A Tech Love Story by Kara Swisher. Copyright © 2024 by Kara Swisher. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All Rights Reserved.