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Tech journalist Kara Swisher has long been the queen of burn. As anyone who has followed her writing over the years knows, she dishes it out with relish. Her personal style is honed for the Twitter jab, the hectoring podcast interview and the gleefully in-your-face scoop, often delivered with a “told you so” flourish.
So it is disappointing to report that Burn Book, which is billed as part memoir, part score-settling after more than a quarter of a century of tech reporting, is short of scorching new material. True, Swisher doesn’t stint in her evisceration of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk.
The Facebook co-founder, she writes, was “extraordinarily naive about the forces he had unleashed” and “was one of the most carelessly dangerous men in the history of technology who didn’t even know it”. Musk’s ranting on Twitter, which he renamed X, was “one long cry for help from a clearly troubled man” and made him “heinous”.
But these days taking a lash to the twin bad boys of Silicon Valley hardly counts as radical. That said, this brief, breezy canter through a reporting life and impressions of the tech moguls Swisher has crossed swords with over the years is a lively read. It also serves as an interesting report from the front lines of digital journalism by someone who helped shape how the medium has mutated.
Feeling constrained as a tech columnist at the Wall Street Journal, Swisher was one of the first to heed the call of blogging, developing a style that pushed against the limits of traditional news reporting, with its fiction of the omniscient and objective author. A Swisher scoop — and there were many — usually included a lot of the first person and was not afraid to level with the reader about the aspects of the story she felt less sure about.
She honed her style in live onstage interviews, podcasts and social media. And, as a media entrepreneur — alongside former WSJ tech columnist Walt Mossberg — she carved out new publishing and conferences businesses, something that brought her closer to the start-up founders she was reporting on.
A news journalist to the core, however, Swisher is far too canny to singe her sources or reveal exactly how she has operated over the years (a superficial chapter that purports to reveal some of the secrets of her scoop-getting does nothing of the sort).
She is also terse about her personal life, but if anything that reserve gives more power to her account. A lesbian in the age of “don’t ask, don’t tell”, she turned her back on her dream of a career in the CIA to opt for journalism. Her early attraction to the disruptive rise of Silicon Valley seems to owe a lot to the affinity she felt with the challenge it threw down to the entrenched media elite of the time.
When it comes to the tech overlords who are its main subject, the book serves up hastily drawn portraits that will already be very familiar to most readers. There is a juicy new anecdote or two, such as the baby shower for Google co-founder Sergey Brin and his then wife Anne Wojcicki where guests were told to dress in diapers or onesies. But there are few surprises, even if the stories are enlivened at times by Swisher’s personal run-ins with Silicon Valley’s billionaire class.
The focus on personality is relentless. The reader is left with the impression that, had it not been for Zuckerberg’s supposed character flaws or Musk’s tendency to have his head turned by success, all might have turned out perfectly well with the tech revolution. Swisher doesn’t dwell on the broader forces that have shaped Silicon Valley.
The fact that Burn Book ends up reading like a book-length version of a tweet storm will do nothing to put off fans of Swisher’s iconoclastic voice. For a deeper investigation of the personalities that shaped the digital revolution or an explanation of how Silicon Valley has failed to deliver on its idealistic promises as its power and wealth have grown, they will have to look elsewhere.
Burn Book: A Tech Love Story by Kara Swisher Little, Brown £25/Simon & Schuster $30, 320 pages
Richard Waters is the FT’s tech writer at large
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