REVIEW: Burn Book by Kara Swisher

Nonfiction. 320 pgs. Simon & Shuster. February 2024. 9781982163891.

No Burn Baby, Burn Book, but an informative, entertaining Burn Book. A Tech Love Story. (!)

The parenthetical screamer above is mine; maybe too much of a love story, actually, is what I’m commenting on there. Burn Book’s author, tech journalist Kara Swisher, names names, but with a big wink. Even an affectionate wink. She doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t know about the self-congratulatory yet often self-loathing nerds of Silicon Valley and points east, but some of the shenanigans are exposed and ugly. Ugliest of all are our so-called lawmakers, who sit thumbs-in-butt while the tech billionerds clearcut the info forests for their own gain. Could it be the fat envelopes are making their way to these inactive folks’ accounts in digitized form? I’m just asking. If ever lobbyists existed, they would be an art form viz-a-viz SV nerd protection.

The book; not great, not bad, much better than “meh” with a mid section of family photos and those taken at All Things Digital events, and many including the Silicon Valley…humans. I say humans because their failings are, well, totally, disappointingly human.

They may not be the skull-sucking fangbats and soulless feral pirates that Swisher now and then hints at, love affair notwithstanding, but more like failures of the most banal kind, they succumb to absolute power and mountainous big bucks abso-frigging-lutely, (and quickly) the jury still out on some; like Gates who has shown an interest in improving worlds that sorely need it. Jobs, we know, was cool genius with quirks.

Elon gave the book this blurb, “Kara has become so shrill at this point that only dogs can hear her,” perhaps before proffering this one: “You’re an asshole.” Both adorn her book. My sense is that Musk is simply undergoing a pronounced, all too public mid-life crisis and will pull out of it in plenty of time to helm his impressive empire with fewer self-defeating tweets and/or odd mega-purchases. I am reminded here of when the Hunt Brothers (yes, those Hunts, the oil rich Texas non-techie Hunts) got bored and tried to corner the world market on silver; it didn’t work. But the Hunts are still in the game. As is Elon Musk.

Unlike some other SV mega-nerds, Musk’s kingdom is not a symphony with but one or two violins; rockets, cars, space exploration, Starlink, tunnels, implants, solar energy, batteries, chips, interconnections and subsets of each—it’s the way his mind works. A restless genius. We count him out every week or so due to his vitriolic X blurts. How we love to trivialize accomplishment. Burn Book, on the other hand, bows in respect to billions, trillions. Dollars, it would seem, are still the mile markers to great achievement. Fine. But responsibility lags. The “data-rapacious” (another great Swisher term) are also libidinous about compiling the dollars. “Anything that can be digitized would be,” is a recurring Swisher mantra; unconscionably digitized with no regard for ownership, authorship, or what used to be referred to as privacy.

This is where the book fell somewhat short for me and my thirst in this area was far from slaked; I wanted a seething, countercultural kickass outrage with Klieg lights on the slimier corners of SV and our own bicameral bodies, the house and senate, presently occupied by preening, smug, oddly coiffed (have you seen that guy from Kentucky? What is that perched on his head? Put it on a leash and give it a bowl of milk) people who all look vaguely unhealthy and pasty, yet oddly pleased with themselves as they march from one hall to another in a group to seek impeachment. Impeachment of whom? It doesn’t seem to matter any more to the impeachment impaired. This time it was an official in Homeland Security, unimpeachable by law.  I digress. So do they. Heigh-ho, heigh ho, it’s off the charts we go (in chipmunk helium-sing).

I wanted more than just that mushy old softball “Truth to Power,” which is meaningless in today’s mouth-breathing polarized atmosphere. Trump/Biden (that’s a choice? I mean, no shit, really? Is that the best we can do? If so, well, quit reading right now, and start soaking up Revelations and Nostradamus and buy yourself an empty nuclear missile site and a 26kw Generac. I mean, let’s get some phonies that, at least, fool us some of the time.)

Do these people not know that a rather large percentage of voters are sick to puking with these smirking house and senate dickheads? That the vitriol level is bubbling over? That it’s patent that “public service” now simply means offshore accounts? (Digitized, now—so much easier.) I’m just reporting, here. Write to your “representative” and you get treacly non-answers from AI and interns that thank you for your interest and your valued input.

So, Swisher’s heart and head seem in a better place; I do take minor issue with her grokking locutionisms but not with their etymology (Stranger in a Strange Land—it has gotten at least that weird out in SV and the Beltway and Murdochville.

Here’s a headline I saw recently while scrolling through my godawful email: TikTok Mishandled The Data Of Hundreds Of Top American Advertisers. No surprise here. None. But Jesus, lawmakers, make some laws and enforce them. Or resign, if the task of PUBLIC SERVICE is just too daunting, woke or unwoke. The law heading toward the books now signifies nothing other than a deep distrust of the New China Syndrome, or “Horrors—a big country is pulling our kind of crapola now.”

More than once in Burn Book, Swisher alludes to the fact she could have used empirical knowledge of billionerd behavior and certain “tells” to make a few bucks of her own, but didn’t. No slouch in the earnings department, she and cohort reportrepreneur* and mentor Walt Mossberg did well with their All Things Digital conferences, seminars and talks, under WSJ’s banner, then under NBC/Windsor Media as Shut Up And Listen, LLC.  The behind-the-scenes machinations moving from one entity to the other were far from simple, and attest to the Swisher/Mossberg match being right people, right time.

The book is, for any of its minor faults, a trove and a must-have for any and all SV and technophiles, and anyone with the slightest twinge of alarm in their sensing mechanism about the tipping point (hint: we passed it at high speed like it was sitting up on blocks, years ago—and here comes another wave called AI).  On that note, remember the Swisherism, “Anything that can be digitized will be.” With impunity.

(End)

*(another Swisherism—you’ll find many peppered throughout, and you may, like me, find them delightful. She has a way with words.)