Delights and dangers of the digital age —

Reviewing Kara Swisher, Burn Book: a Tech Love Story (Simon & Schuster, 2024)

I had learned of this book through an interview of Swisher by Bill Maher on his Real Time (HBO), where Swisher gave voice to one of my own biases, namely, that such successful High-Tech entrepreneurs as Bill Gates or Elon Musk, who had one or two brilliant ideas or highly consequential achievements, remain abysmally ignorant about almost everything else while lacking the appropriate humility.

Burn Book begins with an excellent history of the digital and Internet era; but then becomes essentially a personal memoir. The last third of the book is unfocused, sloppy, and short on substance — for instance, the infamous Section 230 that gave immunity to internet “platform providers” gets only a passing mention.

Good editing could have made this a much better book. It reads as though it had been dictated. Swisher even tries to describe the lack of an index as a deliberate good choice. Even a minimally competent copy-editor would not have allowed the profusion of such insider jargon as “legions of stans” (p. 267) or the many undefined acronyms: CTO, LVMH, HR, IP, IRL, PR, SVP, RT-ing, VC & VC parents.

A good editor would also have supervised a different style for the last couple of chapters, which self-describe and illustrate the author as all-knowing, all-understanding, all-ethical. I found those chapters embarrassingly difficult reading, possibly because I am a full generation older than Swisher and was educated to value traditional British reserve and stiff upper lips.

Has Simon & Schuster become a Vanity Press?

A blogger claims that has in fact happened: “Simon & Schuster has launched a self-publishing operation called Archway Publishing — contracting one of the most disreputable players in the business to run the show: Author Solutions” (https://davidgaughran.com/simon-schuster-author-solutions-penguin).

However, Burn Book has no mention of Archway or Author Solutions, and the front matter has a page proudly declaring “100 Years —  Simon & Schuster”.

 Swisher's memoir gives much detail about her personal life, including that at age 5 she had lost her much-loved father; and that her mother re-married to someone Swisher “came to think of as a villain” (p. 17).

The memoir describes in some detail Swisher’s two lesbian marriages, one divorce, and her several children, but the first mention of her sexual identity says only that she was “a closeted lesbian” (p. 18) at Georgetown University.

 My layman's Freud-influenced psychology brought to mind Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (Jonathan Cape, 1928), one of my first readings about lesbians, long ago. I had then speculated whether the fact that Hall's father had abandoned her when she was 2 years old might have been part of whatever influences resulted in her lesbian lifestyle; so I could not help wondering similarly about Swisher. But only late in the book is there any indication of self-awareness (“thanks, cruel stepfather!”, p. 261) of the degree to which childhood experiences might have influenced Swisher's whole later life-story, in particular her evident delight in describing at length the flaws of influential men. The book describes childhood Kara as “obnoxiously arrogant” (p. 17); the memoir suggests that has not changed, and that the book’s description of high-Tech gurus in that fashion might cause a Freudian to describe that as “projection”.

Nevertheless, there is enough insider story-telling to make the book worth reading; and I certainly enjoyed thoroughly the uninhibited gossip about such people as Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. They seem so sure of the delights of computers, robots, AI, and so dismissive of the dangers; but these man-toys enable “bad actors”, including bad-actor countries, to do great harm. Disinformation and mis-information seem likely to overwhelm the facts of reality and consequent mediocrity to overwhelm insightful rationality.

One indication: Kim Kardashian had 24.8 million followers on Twitter, 24 on Facebook, 20.5 on Instagram (p. 274).

It may not be ungrounded pessimism to worry that the human species is heading to self-destruction, thereby suggesting one of the possible answers to Fermi’s Paradox.