Burn Book

Could I have chosen a more different book from Middlemarch than Kara Swisher’s Burn Book? Possibly. But Kara Swisher is a very big departure from George Eliot, and 21st century Silicon Valley is a long way from 19th century England. It’s a very different reading experience. I’m a little whipsawed right now. A little confused. 

If you spend any time reading online book discussions, then you’ll know that Burn Book is mildly controversial. I haven’t gotten to this part yet, but apparently Kara Swisher is pretty hard on Elon Musk and the social media book commenters complain that she was once as taken in by Elon as she is now critical. 

I’m not wading into that discussion; first of all because no good ever comes out of an online argument about books or anything else, and because I haven’t been following Kara Swisher for years as many of these Threads commenters appear to have been, so I can’t comment on her early coverage of Elon Musk. 

*****

I’ve read some of Kara Swisher’s work here and there over the years, but not much because until recently, I didn’t have much interest in her journalistic beat, which is the internet and social media and all of the technology that powers pretty much everything. I’ve also seen her on TV, mostly in short commentary sound bites. She is not just a writer and thinker, she’s also a mover and shaker and a bit of a personality - brash, confident, even pugnacious. And so predictably, lots of people, especially lots of men, don’t like her for the usual reasons that people don’t like opinionated women who say what they want to say without worrying if men will think that they’re shrill or aggressive or unfeminine or God forbid angry. Kara Swisher doesn't care. 

And really, it’s not just opinionated and outspoken women - lots of people don’t like women at all, full stop. And that’s something that I’ve been thinking about lately, I have some things to say about it but maybe another time. 

Or maybe now. Misogyny in tech is pretty much a byword - even people who “don’t believe in glass ceilings” (lol Nikki Haley) acknowledge that the technology sector is notoriously hostile toward anyone who is missing a Y chromosome. And Kara Swisher is not afraid to call them on their misogynist bullshit. She could stay quiet about it, and remain as the only girl in the room, the only girl who plays on the boys’ team while all the other girls are relegated to the sidelines, jumping up and down and waving pom poms. She could be the cool girl. But she calls out the misogyny because she doesn't care if the boys like her or not. 

*****

Kara Swisher started reporting on the Internet and everything arising from it, from e-commerce to chat rooms and email and social media, in the 90s, when lots of people - even smart people - thought that it was all just a fad that was going to go away. She saw things that other people didn’t see, although I’m sure that there’s some truth in some of the online criticisms of the book. In some places, she comes across as a boastful know-it-all. I think that most of the time, she really did and does know it all when it comes to tech, but I get just a slight sense of 20/20 hindsight in a few stories. She claims that she knew certain things or predicted certain outcomes before they materialized. For example, she tells us that she once told a then-unknown Jeff Bezos that the early Amazon was not so much a tech company as a retailer with a very good logistics operation. If she really said that at that time, then that was a brilliant observation. Ultimately, as Kara Swisher explains it, Jeff Bezos used technology as a tool to transform the essentially non-technical business of selling merchandise and Steve Jobs, whom Swisher admires very much, transformed technology itself. The question I have is, is there really a moral difference between those two accomplishments? I’m not so sure. 

*****

I like the very casual, immediate style of the writing in Burn Book. Swisher is very much at ease with internet slang (she probably invented most of it). In one of the few passages that is truly a memoir-like observation about herself, she writes that she has always been brash and confident and impervious to others’ criticism - “it’s hard to neg me,” as she puts it. This is, by the way, a trait that I would love to claim for myself, but I cannot because I am exactly the opposite. She also uses the word “grok” quite frequently - once would have been enough, but I guess it’s just one of her everyday words. I had never seen or heard either “neg” or “grok” in writing or conversation, but it was easy enough to infer from context. There's also lots of tech-savvy bravado - "Who emails?" she writes. Everyone, Kara. Everyone still emails. 

*****

Yesterday, I spent a good part of the afternoon working on a presentation about AI in medical education. I know pretty much nothing about AI but that's not going to stop me from making a slide deck about it. I’ll make a slide deck about absolutely anything. I’ll write about absolutely anything. Give me a topic. One time when I was writing a speech, my smart-aleck son asked me why I didn’t just use ChatGPT. I don't need ChatGPT, I told him. I am ChatGPT. 

Or maybe ChatGPT is me. Maybe I didn’t write this at all. Maybe all I wrote is an AI prompt: “Crank out a half-baked, scattershot review of Kara Swisher’s Burn Book, and throw in some random non-sequiturs.” 

I might try that, actually. Let’s see what happens. Let’s see how this shakes out. 

*****

In all seriousness, I learned a tiny bit about AI as I worked on this slide deck, and I’m going to learn more. This is one of Kara Swisher’s key messages. AI is here to stay, and we should, collectively, figure out a way to control it before it controls us. We can’t make the same mistakes that we made with the World Wide Web and social media. When the young geniuses who are inventing new technologies by the minute promise us that we don’t need to bother our pretty little heads with annoyances like regulation and oversight because everything is under control and they have our best interests at heart, we have to not believe them because nothing is under control and they absolutely do not have our best interests at heart. Mark Zuckerberg and Tim Cook and Satya Nadella do not have our best interests at heart. Elon Musk REALLY doesn’t have our best interests at heart.