Burn Book Quotes

“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.”
― Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

“Silicon Valley had perfected the image of itself as a meritocracy and touted that as one of its greatest strengths—that anyone could become a billionaire. In fact, tech has always been a mirrortocracy, full of people who liked their own reflection so much that they only saw value in those that looked the same. They keep copying themselves, choosing slight variations on the same avatar template. Financial success was proof of their talents, which was like the old cliché of starting on third base and thinking you hit a home run.”
― Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

“We had, in essence, privatized our public discourse and were now allowing billionaires to implement the rules of the road.”
― Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

“The trash-talkers are the most annoying to me, aiming all kinds of barbs at journalists, the government, the “woke” culture, the state of California, and particularly San Francisco, where most of them made their fortunes. They position themselves as populist truth-tellers to their legions of stans. I don’t know about you, but it’s funny to see the world’s richest men urging people to stick it to the man, when they are the man. They are, as often as not, inaccurate and couldn’t care less.”
― Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

“A garden is never Finished, and nor are you: Become, I think, a garden again, And never, like a garden, cease.”
― Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”
― Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

“I have always maintained that the people who ultimately succeed are the creative ones.”
― Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

“summed up Zuckerberg’s attitude perfectly, noting, “Between speech and truth, he chose speech. Between speed and perfection, he chose speed. Between scale and safety, he chose scale.” That idea of “mistakes were made” in service to the bigger idea would carry throughout Zuckerberg’s career and bleed into Facebook’s culture. This approach was distilled in the “Move fast and break things” posters that adorned the company headquarters early on. While this motto was a geek coding reference to software, it was a telling choice. The aim was to “break things” instead of “change things” or “fix things” or “improve things.”
― Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”
― Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

“More people across the globe get their news and cues from social media, it has a scary ability to generate anxiety and rage, and it is addictive. Expert after expert I talked to over the years has made the same point—in the new paradigm, engagement equals enragement. This is made worse by the people who run these companies, for whom anticipation of consequences is lacking and whose first instinct is to let it all through the gate, regardless of potential damage of danger. What’s the opposite of the Mommy state? Parent-free chaos.”
― Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

“In the poem, “A Gathered Distance,” Mark Tredinnick articulates this well. He writes: A garden is never Finished, and nor are you: Become, I think, a garden again, And never, like a garden, cease.”
― Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

“He was right, and even more so when he said: “The better we get at getting better, the faster we will get better.”
― Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

“Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”: “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then, I contradict myself. / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”)”
― Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

“Life is a series of next things, and you’d do well to be ready for that. And”
― Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

“I did call you Madame Secretary, but that was a joke, and it is funny.”
― Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

“a precursor to reductive cable news that oversimplified complex policy for entertainment.”
― Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

“While the basics of journalism remained important, the medium was about to become the message—”
― Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

“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.”
― Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

“so far the record is pretty clear that tech leaders have largely abrogated their responsibilities around the deleterious impact of their products, either in pursuit of more growth and profits or to duck any incoming flack. That was especially clear in the 2024 election, as companies such as Meta and X drastically cut back on their safety and moderation teams. A stark contrast from the 2016 election, when social media companies felt pressured to evaluate how their lack of moderation may have affected the results.”
― Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

“I continue to be disturbed by the implications of a small number of homogeneous men—and they remain mostly men—controlling the next stage of computing. I’ll repeat: People who never feel unsafe a day in their lives tend never to consider the safety of others.”
― Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

“But no laws regulate almost all of it, despite the Biden administration giving it a shrugging try—efforts that are sure to be wiped out under Trump as the rich get richer and the most powerful get more so. A bummer, right? But not unexpected if you have been paying even the slightest amount of attention for a while.”
― Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

“What is more troubling to me is that Musk’s behavior is emblematic of that of tech’s most heinous figures, who now feel emboldened to enter the analog world with the same lack of care and arrogance with which they built their sloppy platforms”
― Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

“I actually believe he’s staying out of the election, which is nice,” Trump told the podcast Bussin’ with the Boys. He added that he liked Zuckerberg “much better now.” Of course, Trump had earlier threatened Zuckerberg with prison.”
― Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

“Which is why it is always good to have a backup plan. Musk and especially Peter Thiel, who once had mutual antipathy, had also brought in Senator J. D. Vance, who had largely bumbled through his short tech and legislative careers, to be Trump’s vice presidential candidate. Once a Trump detractor, calling his new boss “America’s Hitler,” Vance had done a complete turnaround in much the same way Musk had. I cannot count the many times Musk had mocked and dismissed Trump to me and the pair had traded public barbs, until they kissed and made up. The same for Vance.”
― Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

“And Trump, ever the coin-operated politician, was happy to comply, until inevitably it would be in his interests not to.”
― Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

“As inane as he looked, it was the best investment of time and money of Musk’s life, his net worth rising $200 billion by the end of 2024, with tens of billions after that and more to come in the future as a loud part of the administration as “efficiency czar,” who would remake the government in his image. That appointment was announced soon after Trump won, in yet another stunt-like manner, as the head of DOGE—the Department of Government Efficiency—with fellow look-at-me billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy. I quickly dubbed the effort the Department of Grandstanding Edgelords, which, given its undefined power, staff, and efficacy, sounded more like something out of an episode of The Apprentice.”
― Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

“False or misleading claims by billionaire Elon Musk about the U.S. election have amassed two billion views on social media platform X this year, according to a report by non-profit group Center for Countering Digital Hate” (CCDH). That”
― Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

“can tell you how we got that way, because of what I know about a critical element: the wholesale capture of our current information systems by tech companies, and their willful carelessness and sometimes filthy-thumb-on-scale malevolence (we’ll get to Elon in a minute) in managing it. When combined with enormous financial self-interest—a point I make at the start of this book, when describing how Silicon Valley potentates marched up to Trump Tower in late 2016 like sheeple to pay homage to the president-elect—it is basically a familiar trope: Greed (of the few) over need (of the many). And that has resulted in damage and the warping and siloing of us, courtesy of many of the people—though not all—you have just read about in this book. These characters don’t want to reign over only tech like kings, but also over everything everywhere and all at once throughout our society. To update the old Facebook maxim of “move fast and break things”: “Move fast and crush everyone in the way of what our small, elite, and extraordinarily wealthy group thinks the world should be like.”
― Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

“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.”
― Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

“Which brings us to the question, “Will AI kill us?” I can only answer at this moment now that I’m not as afraid of AI as I am fearful of bad people who will use AI better than good people.”
― Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story