BURN BOOK: A Tech Love Story, by Kara SwisherPublic opinion has soured so thoroughly on Silicon Valley that it can be hard to comprehend the excitement that surrounded the industry in its early years.
How did people miss the threat of concentrated wealth and power, the super-exploitation of gig workers, the commodification of daily life, the pollution of discourse by micro-targeted propaganda and whiny billionaires?
A common story holds that we were dazzled by fast-talking entrepreneurs and entranced by the slick platforms and gadgets they served up, deluded into believing digital technology would solve all of our problems.
But perhaps the emphasis on user irrationality is overstated.
One of the insights to be gleaned from “Burn Book: A Tech Love Story,” a memoir by the veteran technology journalist Kara Swisher, is that those who embraced the internet early on may have been driven by a totally reasonable dissatisfaction with the status quo, as much as a naïve infatuation with the promise of digital utopia.
Persons:
Kara Swisher, ”