Torch Song
The pioneering journalist Kara Swisher recounts a life in, and of, Silicon Valley.
PUBLIC OPINION HAS SOURED so thoroughly on Silicon Valley that it can be hard to comprehend the excitement that surrounded the industry in its early years. How did people miss the threat of
concentrated wealth and power, the super-exploitation of gig workers, the commodification of daily life, the pollution of discourse by micro-targeted propaganda and whiny billionaires?
A common story holds that we were dazzled by fast-talking entrepreneurs and entranced by the slick platforms and gadgets they served up, deluded into believing digital technology would solve all of our problems. But perhaps the emphasis on user irrationality is overstated. One of the insights to be gleaned from “Burn Book: A Tech Love Story,” a memoir by the veteran technology journalist Kara Swisher, is that those who embraced the internet early on may have been driven by a totally reasonable dissatisfaction with the status quo, as much as a naïve infatuation with the promise of digital utopia.
Although the prologue frames “Burn Book” as a righteous roast of an industry that has gone “off the rails,” the best part of Swisher’s ultimately underwhelming tale takes place when Mark Zuckerberg was in grade school. Before she rose to fame covering the early internet, before she founded a series of conferences and publications that made her wealthy, before she started a couple of hit podcasts and became a New York Times opinion writer, Swisher was an ambitious, outspoken, hyper-confident young woman struggling to make her way in a world practically designed to hold her back.
We meet her as a closeted lesbian at Georgetown in the early 1980s, dismayed by the administration’s efforts to ban gay groups from campus. She gives up her dream of working for the C.I.A. because of the 1990s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. She gets a job working for the conservative television host John McLaughlin, who, she says, sexually harasses a colleague and ritualistically demoralizes his staff. As a cub reporter at The Washington Post, she chafes against the petty bureaucracy of the newsroom.
When she is angry, Swisher does not hold back, and you can really feel her younger self’s frustration and rage at the ossified power structure and the straight white men who still dominated: “I hated their entitlement and certainty that the future belonged to them.”
So, it makes perfect sense that Swisher is thunderstruck when she first encounters the internet, using the World Wide Web to download a “Calvin and Hobbes” collection: “A book could be all the books,” she writes. “Everything that can be digitized will be digitized.” She foresees a tidal wave of change strong enough to wash away the old gatekeepers and clear the way for a new and better future. A future that offers her a path to journalistic glory that bypasses the “backslapping mess of compromise” inherent to D.C. political reporting. “I knew I had struck gold,” she writes.
In 1997, she moves to San Francisco to be the West Coast technology correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. But just as the dot-com bubble is cresting, the book starts to fall apart.
The problem is that Swisher tells two conflicting stories that are never convincingly woven together. One details her disillusionment with the industry. Once in power, the scrappy entrepreneurs reveal themselves to be little better than the analog elite they replaced: irresponsible, megalomaniacal, dishonest or some toxic combination thereof.
By 2016, when Tech’s leading figures go to Trump Tower for a photo op with a man who seems to her the opposite of everything they once stood for, Swisher is disappointed but unsurprised by their “casual hypocrisy.” By 2020, she writes, she has become “less of a chronicler of the internet age and more of its cranky Cassandra,” warning of Tech’s increasingly unaccountable power.
The book’s other thread involves Swisher self-actualizing — by becoming more like the Silicon Valley elite she covers. She and a colleague start a conference that grows into a must-read Tech blog. Eventually they launch a website, which leads to podcasting. These endeavors allow Swisher to transcend the limits of newspaper journalism and become a “one-person media entity.” I imagine her status as a founder also earned her respect from the Tech titans, which may help explain her deep access. That she was married, for a time, to a Google executive surely helped too.
There is a compelling tension here: Even as Swisher is rising into “Silicon Valley royalty,” as a 2014 New York maga
zine profile put it, Silicon Valley is, in her telling, descending into the gutter. This tension is scarcely acknowledged in those chapters that detail her relationship with various leading Tech figures. These seem instead designed to bolster her reputation as a fearless but fair-minded, straighttalking reporter.
We see her calling out Mark Zuckerberg for not stopping the rampant spread of dangerous misinformation on Facebook, rolling her eyes at the excesses of the Google co-founder Sergey Brin’s baby shower, sparring with Elon Musk over email. Her mantra is: You can’t be wrong. But to the extent that she succeeds in demonstrating her journalistic chops, it only makes her slowness to recognize the depth of Silicon Valley’s problems more jarring.
Swisher eventually did start sounding the alarm, but by that time, people had been warning for years about Tech’s voracious gyre of capital and power. If Swisher is such a great journalist with so much freedom, how did she miss the larger story for so long even as it unfolded under her nose?
In the last chapter, Swisher finally addresses the issue. Kind of. She admits that she became “too much a creature” of Silicon Valley, and only a 2020 return to D.C. allowed her to fully grasp its dangers. In other words, she had been compromised.
Her forthrightness goes some way in helping us believe that “Burn Book” doesn’t merely represent a convenient pivot, as they say, from Tech royalty to Tech heretic at a time when strident industry criticism is trending hard. But “Burn Book”’s fatal flaw, the reason it can never fully dispel the whiff of opportunism that dooms any memoir, is that Swisher never shows in any convincing detail how her entanglement with Silicon Valley clouded her judgment. The story of her change of heart is thus undercut by the self-aggrandizing portrait that rests stubbornly at its core. “At least now we know the problems,” Swisher writes of Silicon Valley at the end of “Burn Book.” Do we?