Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

by Kara Swisher

AI. He described the landscape to me starkly in a 2023 interview: The places that I think people are landing include what we call pre-tragic, which is when someone actually doesn’t want to look at the tragedy—whether it’s climate or some of the AI issues that are facing us or social media having downsides. We don’t want to metabolize the tragedy, so we stay in naïve optimism. A pre-tragic person believes, humanity always figures it out. Then there’s the person who stares at the tragedy and gets stuck. In tragedy, you either get depressed or you become nihilistic. Harris correctly sees another path: There’s a third place to go, which is what we call post-tragic, where you actually accept and grieve through some of the realities that we are facing. You have to go through the dark night of the soul and be with that so you can be with the actual dimensions of the problems that we’re dealing with and you’re honest about what it would take to do something about it.