Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

by Kara Swisher

Over that time, I watched founders transform from young, idealistic strivers in a scrappy upstart industry into leaders of some of America’s largest and most influential businesses. And while there were exceptions, the richer and more powerful people grew, the more

compromised they became—wrapping themselves in expensive cashmere batting until the genuine person fell deep inside a cocoon of comfort and privilege where no unpleasantness intruded. When people get really rich, they seem to attract legions of enablers who lick them up and down all day. Many of these billionaires had then started to think of this fawning as reality, where suddenly everything that comes out of their mouths is golden.

“Facebook, as well as Twitter and Google’s YouTube and the rest, have become the digital arms dealers of the modern age,” I wrote in one of my first columns after I joined the New York Times as a columnist in 2018. “They have mutated human communication, so that connecting people has

too often become about pitting them against one another and turbocharged that discord to an unprecedented and damaging volume. They have weaponized the First Amendment. They have weaponized civic discourse. And they have weaponized, most of all, politics.”

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.”

If you fell down yesterday, stand up today. —H. G. WELLS

If one-half of your friends just suddenly died, it would be shocking and devastating, and so I think it also gives you a sense of the capriciousness of life; that life can change on a dime, that bad things happen, and that you survive

them just fine. You just keep going.”

But what struck me was how easily people could be manipulated by fear and rage and how facts could be destroyed without repercussions. I think about that college version of me a lot.

Do I regret my subterfuge? Not for one fucking second. Then and there, I decided that was the best way to go through life—not caring about the consequences of saying or doing what I believed was right.

Reticence and subtlety were definitely not going to be my style, especially when accuracy and honesty were so effective.

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.

As prolific tech pioneer Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the computer mouse, early iterations of the graphical user interface, and more, once mused: “The digital revolution is far more significant than

the invention of writing or even of printing.” He was right, and even more so when he said: “The better we get at getting better, the faster we will get better.”

CEO Don Graham, the son of legendary publisher and surprisingly entertaining badass Katharine Graham. How much I loved these owners, I cannot underscore enough, for their bravery and steadfastness and decency and, really, their commitment to excellence in a less-than-excellent world.

Don Graham was also inexplicably humble and even sheepish about his power.

In mid-1993, there were only 130 web sites, with only 1.5 percent having commercial “.com”

designations.

Tech wunderkind Andreessen was utterly brilliant in mind but hopelessly juvenile in spirit. Dank humor was the Andreessen style of in-your-face

your-face joking that was a lot less funny than he imagined.

Today, part of Andreessen’s brand is to rail at the media, but there was a

time when he always picked up the phone for me, at all hours. It was the same with texts—all of which I saved in a “Marc” file, because I had a sense even then that these boy men would try hard to reinvent themselves and erase their former selves.

He was a jerk but an enjoyable jerk. Now he’s a tiresome and aggrieved jerk, who has joined

the grievance industrial complex as a permanent citizen.

He felt like he was born fully a

geek god, and the arrogance was part of the armor.

no one minded the transformation from human into donkey.

these Southern aphorisms. My favorite was: “Remember to keep the main thing the main thing.”

he exuded decency at every turn.

Thomas Edison did this constantly, of course, famous for turfing rivals like Nikola Tesla via nefarious tricks.

Too often, inventors are painted as heroic, with their faults glossed over in our accepted narrative.

Most are damaged in a significant way, usually from early in their lives. Tech is littered with men whose parents—typically fathers—were either cruel or absent. By the time they grew to be adults, many were unhappy and often ...

were proved triumphantly right. Most of all, the damaged ones shared one sad attribute: They ...

I have never seen a more powerful and rich group of people who saw themselves as the victim so intensely.

found this PR theater tiresome and obvious.

I maintained that part of my job was to make that stink and write about where it could all go wrong. I got particularly fixated on an online grocery delivery company called Webvan, which had thirty-five hundred employees at its peak.

The rules of the bubble are different, until it pops.

In fact, he sometimes launched into a downward-facing dog yoga move when you were talking to him. Still, the two founders shared a quirkiness in habit and speech, and both embraced a classic entrepreneurial narrative, having moved their startup to the nearby garage of a house that was owned by a junior marketing executive at Intel.

their famed search engine. I thought of it as a database of human intentions, a description that came to me when I

was waiting in the lobby of one of their buildings, as I watched a lighted scroll of terms being searched at the moment (they took out the porn-related ones).

Schmidt exuded competence and assurance, painting himself as the one who could tend the delicate flower geniuses and bring order to the chaos.

At that moment he was sorting through how to go public with some modicum of integrity, as he seemed to loathe investment bankers and all the Kabuki theater that went with an IPO.

‘I don’t understand why I can’t make money from your IPO the way the stockbrokers will.’ ”

Did no problematic actions made by tech fall somewhere between benign and heinous?

“I’m not worried about the good people in charge now,” I replied, my history education still acute. “I’m worried about the bad people later.”

Tech leaders loved to dole out these origin tidbits for color, and the often-hungry media ate them up with gusto. I checked and it appears that I never reported on the door anecdote, largely because desks were already pretty cheap and it seemed painfully performative even for a painfully performative crowd.

But while Gates was outwardly difficult, Bezos kept his bare-knuckled characteristics in public check.

I thought better of him because of her.

Having been a retail reporter, I could see that what he was selling had less to do with tech chops and more to do with how automated and data-driven Amazon could become.

Since Bezos was not as deeply insecure as many tech types, even if he was just as narcissistic, he had no problem cutting ties with anyone he did not need once the momentum got going.