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They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made. —F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, THE GREAT GATSBY
After decades of covering the nascent Internet industry from its birth, I could believe it. While my actual son filled me with pride, an increasing number of these once fresh-faced wunderkinds I had mostly rooted for now made me feel like a parent whose progeny had turned into, well, assholes.
While Musk would morph later into a troll-king-at-scale on Twitter, which he would rename X, he was among the few tech titans who did not fall back on practiced talking points, even if perhaps he was the one who most should have.
He told me he would attend, adding that he had already joined a business council for the newly elected president, too. When I brought up Trump’s constant divisive fearmongering and campaign promises to unravel progress on issues ranging from immigration to gay rights, Musk dismissed the threats. I can convince him, he assured me. I can influence him, he told me.
Trump’s invitation to Musk and other tech leaders a month after he won the 2016 election.
The guest list had been compiled by contrarian investor and persistent irritant Peter Thiel,
I didn’t even attempt to contact Thiel. The entrepreneur had long since stopped communicating with me, especially after a lengthy video interview in 2007 where we agreed on exactly nothing. After the camera stopped rolling, I pressed Thiel on the need to ensure gays had the same rights to be married and have children as straight people. Both Thiel and I are famously gay, but he argued that gays should not get “special rights,” even as I asserted that we had no rights at all.
most had privately derided Trump to me as a buffoon. This kind of casual hypocrisy became increasingly common over the decades that I covered Silicon Valley’s elite. 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
I advised the people who called me back to make a strong public joint statement going into the meeting on key values and issues important to tech and its employees. “Isn’t that the point of a democracy?” I urged one CEO. “Let the public know that you’re not going to Trump Tower to bend the knee to a king, but to stand up to a bully.
though I started out as a reporter, I had shifted into an analyst and sometimes an advocate.
My advice, of course, was completely ignored. These famed “disrupters” accepted Trump’s invitation with no conditions.
Hewlett Packard’s Meg Whitman, whom I had tangled with over her opposition to gay marriage when she ran for governor (a stance she later recanted), was the rare exception and was therefore not at the meeting. Despite being a staunch Republican, she had accurately pegged Trump as “a dishonest demagogue” and shifted her support to Clinton in August before the election.
Investor Chris Sacca, who also was not invited to the meeting, likewise seemed to grasp what was happening, boiling it down beautifully. “It’s funny, in every tech deal I’ve ever done, the photo op comes after you’ve signed the papers,” he told me. “If Trump publicly commits to embrace science, stops threatening censorship of the Internet, rejects fake news, and denounces hate against our diverse employees, only then it would make sense for tech leaders to visit Trump Tower. Short of that, they are being used to legitimize a fascist.” Did Sacca change minds where I had failed? Nope. And on
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it’s easy to see a direct line from FDR mastering radio to JFK mastering TV to DJT mastering social technology.
Trump didn’t do it alone. Purveyors of propaganda, both foreign and domestic, saw an opportunity to spread lies and misinformation. Today, malevolent actors continue to game the platforms, and there’s still no real solution in sight, because these powerful platforms are doing exactly what they were designed to do.
Trump. His team went public with a list of thirteen topics of discussion with no mention of immigration, even though I’d called around and learned that Microsoft’s Nadella had asked specifically about H-1B visas, often called the “genius visa.” Reportedly, Trump responded with, “Let’s fix that. What can I do to make it better?” Instead, his administration made it worse, eventually issuing a proclamation to suspend the entry of H-1B visa holders. Only successful litigation stopped the action. It was a massive embarrassment for an industry that had promised to be better than anything that had
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The Trump tech summit was a major turning point for me and how I viewed the industry I’d been covering since the early 1990s. The lack of humanity was overwhelming. My minor in college was in Holocaust studies. I studied propaganda, and I could see Trump was an expert at it. I knew exactly where this was headed.
for tech to fulfill its promise, founders and executives who ran their creations needed to put more safety tools in place. They needed to anticipate consequences more. Or at all. They needed to acknowledge that online rage might extend into the real world in increasingly scary ways.
“IRL” = “in real life”.
the push to build a communications network emerged from the fecund brain of J.C.R. Licklider. He was a famed computer scientist who sketched out the idea in a 1963 memo that described an “Intergalactic Computer Network.”
But what struck me was how easily people could be manipulated by fear and rage and how facts could be destroyed without repercussions.
Media was central to this warping of reality. I was particularly attracted to Vito Russo’s 1981 book The Celluloid Closet, which surgically traced the way gays and lesbians were portrayed by Hollywood as compared to how they were treated in real life. Movies were filled with tragic suicidal dykes, conniving gay men, silly fops, and butch aggressors. Those depictions were not a fair reflection of me or anyone I knew.
With my first-choice career path blocked due to discrimination, I fell back on becoming a journalist. I applied to the top school at the time, the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and got in.
Wanted to go in the intelligence services, but being gay effectively prevented that option.
Once, I interviewed for an internship at the Washington Post, and the editor said I was “too confident.” I’ve since come to understand that this is something men say to women to shut them up and undercut them. I was not going to let that happen. And so, I replied: “I’m not too confident. I’m fantastic. Or I will be.” I have always, always been like this. It’s hard to neg me. Those who do only encourage me to try to win even more.
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.
Al Gore did invent the Internet. Kind of. As most probably know, the former vice president was widely pilloried for claiming this distinction in a 1999 interview on CNN. His exact words were: “During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet.”
As a senator from Tennessee, Gore crafted and pushed through the “High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991,” aka the “Gore Bill.” This legislation funded initiatives like the game-changing Mosaic browser and was critical to the commercialization of the now indispensable medium.
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.
glacial. I related my worries about the turtle pace of digital change many times to the Washington Post Company’s affable 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.
W3 or www launched in 1990, introducing itself on the first web site at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) as a “wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents.” This was a convoluted geek way of saying: All of human knowledge is linked to each other in an endless and ever-evolving chain of everything. This critical concept and the terms that were coined by techie Ted Nelson were, as the very simple CERN page noted, “not constrained to be linear.” Translation: It would be everything, everywhere, all at
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In 1993, I tried out the Mosaic browser, created by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina while they were grad students at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I got to know Andreessen later, for better and worse (much worse as time went on and he became odder). His original browser was fast and able to display images and quickly made him a legend. He decamped to Silicon Valley, co-creating Netscape with a high-profile serial entrepreneur and frequent tech loudmouth named Jim Clark. The company went public in August of 1995, and the
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In mid-1993, there were only 130 web sites, with only 1.5 percent having commercial “.com” designations. A year later, there were close to 3,000. And, by the time I met Steve Case at AOL in 1994, there were ten times that—and then a hundred times again soon enough.
Case managed to stick an earworm in my brain that day. He and all the AOL executives I met did so by repeating a version of the same word: “Connect.” “Connect” is all over my early notes and seemed like such a simple and basic idea.
Only one person fully supported my move. Walt Mossberg was already the most famous of tech reporters for his popular Wall Street Journal column, “Personal Technology,” which debuted in 1991 and opened with the single greatest lede about tech: “Personal computers are just too hard to use, and it isn’t your fault.” I had introduced myself to the goateed guru while writing my AOL book, and he graciously agreed to an interview. Walt and I instantly became close, bound by professional kismet and a tech mind meld.
Move to California from D.C.
Walt was also the most highly paid editorial staffer at the Journal, and deservedly so. He had the highest standards of journalistic integrity, never becoming a slobbering fanboy like so many.
Walter Mossberg.
Walt had just one more piece of advice for me before I left. “Parachute in with your cleats on,” he said. “They’ll never know what hit them. Be fair but cover them hard since they’re going to run the world.”
Move to the Bay Area so she could cover tech. locally.
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 had some disgruntled tale of being misunderstood before they were proved triumphantly right. Most of all, the damaged ones shared one sad attribute: They all seemed achingly lonely.
renamed Yahoo, an acronym for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.”
Yahoo took what AOL had pioneered and put it directly on the Internet. It became the most important web site that was a directory of other web sites, all listed by hand by a group of human Web crawlers. Yes, one at a time, by a group that I dubbed “the Internet bouncers.”
The only sites Yahoo did not add to its critical directory were those that promoted illegal activities such as bomb making and child pornography. But sites for many controversial topics were listed, often in the “Society and Culture” area. Sites that promoted the Ku Klux Klan and other hate groups made it past the gatekeepers with Gems insisting to me that he was not a “censor.” Sound familiar?
I even wrote a story about the “lies” of Silicon Valley, which holds up rather well a quarter century later. “No wonder, then, that self-congratulation and self-deception are now a part of the Valley’s ethos, right up there with fearless risk-taking, maniacal effort and programming genius,” I wrote, listing lines like: “It’s not about the money.” (It was!) “It’s not about the fame.” (It also was!) “There’s no dress code/no special parking spaces/no fancy offices here, because we’re not hung up on status symbols.” (They were, just different ones.) “No one is really in charge here.” (Ahahahaha.)
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I turned down a series of job offers from basically all of these companies. “You’ll make $100 million quick,” said one startup CEO to me, dangling a job as editorial director for a site that had exactly no editorial at all. Over the years, I got job offers from every major Internet company and a whole lot of minor ones. I always turned them down, because—well—just because I liked reporting. Many journalists did jump during the boom, but I never did. Such a move seemed soul crushing. Maybe I also knew that I was far too much of an irritant to survive until my shares vested.
Google’s key idea of PageRank, which measured the importance of web pages, seemed especially geeky. Relevance was the key determinant, and Google had noted in a statement that their offerings were “computed by solving an equation of 500 million variables and two billion terms.”
it was a big deal when Yahoo selected Google to be its default search provider in mid-2000, to add to its directory and navigational guide.
Google delivered exactly what you were searching for, all via the magical PageRank algorithm. The service was fast, correct, and totally useful.
Page was both disappointed and confused that the publishers had not jumped on Google’s proposal to help get their content digitized. I tried to explain why IP was so important to media companies and that you could not just take it without consequences. And once Google did this, no one else could afford to digitize the material, so content makers and their work would eventually be held hostage by the technology and access to it. Google would dominate all content without having generated anything but the delivery system. To Page, this seemed illogical. He and many at the company were relentless
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By the end of 2007, Google clocked 63 percent of worldwide queries, with Yahoo limping along at just under 20 percent.
“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.” You know, the evil ones. Since, unlike the people I covered, I had studied history and I had zero doubt they would show up soon enough.
Google’s chiefs didn’t like Swisher editorial objecting to Google buying Yahoo. That’s because that would have given Google a monopoly in ad search revenue.
settled on books, not because he particularly loved them, but because they were a global product. Books were cheap and titles were plentiful and could be traced easily. He was pretty bloodless, even then, despite the affable image. To Bezos, everything was dedicated to the higher purpose of pushing Amazon forward. This would manifest in a tougher work culture than the coddled tech playpens of Silicon Valley.
Since I was also more coldly business minded than the average reporter, it was a relief to talk to Bezos.
I appreciated that he never spewed the “I’m changing the world” craplets that had become de rigueur among the tech set. He had truckloads of enthusiasm about his business, but Bezos never was breathless about any of it.
