Tech Won't Save Us - Kara Swisher Shows Tech Journalism’s Flaws w/ Edward Ongweso Jr.

Episode Date: April 11, 2024

Paris Marx is joined by Edward Ongweso Jr. to discuss Kara Swisher’s attempt to rebrand herself as the most feared journalist in Silicon Valley, how she spent her career forwarding the industry’s narratives, and the larger problems with access journalism. Edward Ongweso Jr. is finance editor at Logics Magazine and co-host of This Machine Kills.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Eric Wickham. Transcripts are by Brigitte Pawliw-Fry.Also mentioned in this episode:Ed wrote a critical review of Burn Book in The Baffler.In Disconnect, Paris also wrote a critical review of Swisher’s book and explained his journey to becoming a tech critic.In 2021, Kara told CNBC that just because NFTs are digital “doesn’t mean it’s not of value.” The following year she also defended promoting investments in crypto for retirement.Support the show

That's how she kind of views all of this, right? It's a game. And I think she assumes other people think it's a game and doesn't stop to think, huh, why are all these executives talking to me? Is it because of how smart I am? Is it because of how brilliant I am? Is it because of how much I get to the bottom of it and they appreciate these things? Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, made in partnership with The Nation magazine. I'm your host, Paris Marks. we get to this week's episode, just a reminder that we are running the fourth birthday member drive this month, where we're asking listeners like you to celebrate, you know, our four years

of making the show making over 200 episodes by helping us get 200 new supporters or, you know, existing supporters can upgrade their memberships as well over on patreon.com slash tech won't save us so that we can make a series digging into the ai hype of the past year as well as the material side of that by looking at the data centers that go into powering all of these tools the resources that are need to power those data centers all the water all the energy all of the minerals that are needed to create the computer parts that power all the servers that fill what are essentially computing warehouses. And then the growing opposition to this as the number of data centers, massive hyperscale data centers that get built, continue to grow around the world. And that is

making communities turn against them because there's a serious problem there. So we want to dig into all of that. And that's why we need your support to make this series. So if you enjoy the show, if you want to help us hit our goal so we can make this series, and you know, to help celebrate the fourth birthday of the podcast, you can go to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and become a supporter. And with that said, this week's guest is Ed Ongwezo Jr., returning friend of the show, who is the finance editor at Logix Magazine and the co-host of the This Machine Kills podcast. In this week's episode, we're digging into the tech media and into the legacy of Kara Swisher in particular. Kara Swisher has been covering this industry for decades and has recently sought to rebrand herself and rewrite

her narrative as being one where she has been critical of this industry and its key players for the past number of decades that she's been covering it. But that is not an accurate retelling of her story and the role that she has played in this industry. We know that since 2016, there started to be more of a critical perspective put on this industry as its leaders began engaging with Donald Trump, and then particularly in 2018 when the Cambridge Analytica scandal involving Facebook broke. And since then, some people have sought to act like they were critical of this industry and of some of the key players in it this whole time. But that is not the truth. And that is the case with Kara Swisher. We're not just talking about this out of nowhere, of course. Kara has a new memoir out called Burn Book, a tech love story, where she tells her story. And that is why we wanted to discuss this

now. Ed and I have both written critical reviews of the book because Cara is not honest about the role that she played in tech media and in covering this industry that, sure, once was not as powerful as it is, but now is incredibly powerful, causes immense harm for so many people, and was able to reach that level through boosterism and a lack of scrutiny applied to it for a very long time by people like Swisher. And if we want to be able to hold this industry to account, to stop the harms that it causes, we not just need to understand how it works today, but we need to understand how it got here. And that means not lying about the history of what happened, either with what happened in the companies themselves, but also how they were treated and how they were covered and how the public was informed about what

they were actually doing. And that's why I think it's so important to talk about Kara Swisher now, because even as she is weaving this tale of her being this critical figure holding these powerful CEOs in Silicon Valley to account, it's clear that that is not the case. Even in her book tour, she has been doing events with the very people that she says she's holding to account, CEOs of major tech companies like Sam Altman, who she did an event with in San Francisco to promote the book. And of course, she was one of the main conduits for Sam Altman's version of the story when he was ousted from OpenAI last year. And that is the version of the story that she retells in her memoir as well, even though additional information has come out

showing that that is not really an accurate portrayal of what happened and why Sam was ousted as the CEO of OpenAI. So it's important to hold this industry to account, but it's also important to know who is actually doing that important work and who is pretending to and actually letting the CEOs off the hook by allowing themselves to pretend that they've been asked the hard questions

and that they've always been treated with scrutiny and a critical eye when that is not the case. So I hope you enjoy this conversation. It's not the type of one that we often do, you know, talking about the tech media and the coverage of it. But especially with Kara Swisher's memoir being out, I thought it was an important one for us to explore. We talk not just about Swisher, but about the tech media more broadly as well. So with that said, if you enjoy this episode, if you enjoyed this podcast and the critical conversations that we have on it, we would ask you to become a supporter this month as we celebrate our fourth birthday,

so that we can make this series digging into, you know, the very role that people like Sam Altman have played in the AI hype of the past year and the type of future that they're pushing on us and how harmful that future would be. So if you want to help us hit our goal, and you can also get some stickers and shout out on the show, you can join supporters like Christoph from Berlin, Kieran from Ireland, Biarte from Oslo, Brian from Seattle, Luke, Brendan from New Zealand, Philippa in the US, Andres in Los Angeles, Matt from Austin, and Luca from Seattle by going to patreon.com slash techwon'tsaveus where you can become a supporter. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation.

Ed, welcome back to the show. Thanks for having me on again. Absolutely. It's always a joy to talk to you. We've recently got to dig into Dune together. We're digging into a book today. It's probably going to be like our top pick, number one of 2024 tech book, I would imagine. Kara Swisher's Burn Book. Is that how you're feeling about it, Ed? Yeah, this is, you know, I'm so happy that the most feared journalist in America's book has finally come out and we've gotten an inside look at the way that tech has digitized our lives and really shaped our society. I just love how she tore the mask off of all of these tech billionaires and really kind

of burned these relationships that she's had for so long. Yeah. I mean, that's what a burn book does. You have a lot of slanderous, messy things in there that make the people want to hurt themselves and that ruin their lives and isolate them and cause scandals, right? That's what a burn book is. And she delivered. Yeah, we both wrote very enthusiastic reviews of this book. Five out of five. Listeners can't tell we're being very sarcastic. But you know, I figured this book came out, we have kind of been talking about Kara Swisher and the role that she plays in tech journalism for a long time. So now that her version of events is out there, I figured there's no better time to actually talk about the real role that Kara

Swisher has played in the tech industry for the past several decades, you know, since her start at, I think it was the Washington Post, and then through to the Wall Street Journal, and then of course, doing her own things. But I think just generally, you know, sarcasm aside, what did you make of the book, Ed, and the way that she kind of approached her story, I guess? You know, Kara Swisher is someone who I've been fascinated by over her career, largely because, you know, when I first came across her work, I think it must have been 2016. And I'd come across her work near the end of that year.

It was during like that year when I had been noticing a lot of journalists kind of suddenly been adopting a much more like critical viewpoint of technology because of the seeming willingness of these tech firms to collaborate or were worried that the Trump administration would crush America's crown jewel. And Swisher was probably near the front, I think, offering a pretty apocalyptic viewpoint. And so I've been interested in her work since then, because I think as I have done more research, become more familiar with Silicon Valley, it has been harder to understand why the moment of Trump has prompted all this soul searching when these companies have been at the forefront of pretty horrible things for a while. And that their financiers and funders have been having an noxious influence on society for a while.

But, you know, things are different because in the previous administration, you know, the Obama administration, I think technology firms were worshipped and praised just as they were in the Bush administration, just as they were in the Bush administration, just as they were in the Clinton administration. That which was digital was spiritual and holy and somehow. And this was a new profit center, a new prestige center in society akin to the ascendance of Wall Street, right? So Kara Swisher's work has been interesting because I've always felt that there's been a mismatch that's most sharply

highlighted in her, where someone who insists that they've had such a long storied career and access to a lot of people in front row seats is confused by how things got here. And so the book, I kind of expected, and I should also add, and over the years, I've grown to kind of dislike her reporting and analysis because I've felt that it's concern there feels more that Silicon Valley has lost its way because they're associating with right-wingers. And there's not really much mind paid to, well, why is that the political form that Silicon Valley is attaching to, as well as with liberalism? Why is it that Silicon Valley lends itself to some noxious and odious ends? You know, why is it that technology is being advanced in certain arenas of our lives? And she doesn't offer that sort of analysis to answer those questions because everything is inevitable.

And so the book, I was expecting, you know, maybe at the very least, because I hadn't had the masochistic impulse to read all her work yet, you know, would at least be a good guide through it. And so in anticipation of the book, I did get the impulse and I did start reading a lot of her work, which I think primed me for the book itself, which I felt was a lot more shallow, a lot more revisionist, a lot more hindsight 2020, recalibrating my priors, but not to like, not any reflective way, just in like an I was always right way. And a lot more of a nothing burger. The book is very thin in a way that I didn't expect, or that I should have, because we've read so many of these books that are kind of like a staple in the industry. There's a class of book that is a deeply reported piece on a founder. There's a not that because that's not what the point of this book is. The point of this book is to insist that Kara Swisher is the most feared tech journalist and has always had her finger on the polls. But when you read the book, you come

away with the conclusion that this is a woman who became the very thing that she hated. Didn't go into politics journalism because she hated the ass kissing and the access and the arrogance of the subject. Became the premier tech journalist where she does a lot of ass kissing, spins it as critical, does a lot of access journalism, spins it as firebrand, does a lot of coverage of arrogant men and spins it as necessary innovators in the world, right? I just came away the book with like a, I don't think disappointment is the right word, but surprise, I guess.

Surprise that it was so bad. I didn't really learn too much that I hadn't. Reading not all of her work, but pretty much most of her work over the past few decades and listening to a lot of her interviews and talks and not really coming away with like an accurate sense of who she was from the book. Coming away with like a much more bullshitted persona, which is hard because then I'm like,

oh, I was right. You know, there's nothing there. Yeah. I think it's really interesting, right? Because in my review, I basically talked about how the book shows how she created her own reality distortion field, right? To present herself as, you know, this major tech critic of Silicon Valley. She did love jobs, you know, she really loved jobs. Yeah, totally. And, you know, I want to talk a bit more about jobs a bit later. But just because you were mentioning the Trump moment there, and how that is positioned in a lot of tech journalism, but in particular, in this narrative that Kara Swisher tells as being kind of this moment where Silicon Valley revealed itself to be something different or, you know, however you want to put it. And I feel like that moment is the moment that so many of these journalists that this

narrative has kind of adopted is because it's a moment not when Silicon Valley changed, but when the perspective of so many of the people who covered it changed on what it really was, right? Because there was this belief that Silicon Valley was doing capitalism differently. It was like this more kind of liberal capitalist industry that believed in these values that liberals claimed to uphold, right? And of course, you had the creation of these narratives during the Clinton administration when they were trying to present the internet and digitization in this particular sort of a way as, you know, going to do all these like great things in the economy and blah, blah, blah, from more of the political perspective. But then the shift in the Trump moment is because all of these tech CEOs

kind of go and kiss the ring. And it's very clear that they're much more focused on their profits, the size of their companies, all of these sorts of things over these supposed, you know, liberal progressive values that they benefited from having ascribed to them, but I don't ever think really championed themselves, but knew it was like a positive kind of marketing thing. You know, I don't know what you make of that, but that's kind of my read on it. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, a lot of these sorts of journalists are not frankly that interested

in thinking about technology. They're children in a candy shop and they're smart children at the candy shop. You know, they realize they get to be able to have all the treats and that if they're really smart, you know, they'll be able to get free candy afterwards if they, you know, somehow brand themselves as the savviest candy consumer, right? If you've read the book, listener,

it's interesting in that there's so many technological innovations and moments highlighted. And think about the analysis that's being offered. I think of, for example, the chapter on streaming. Kara does not really offer any real attempt to understand why streaming happened, why cable was dismantled, why the firms that dominated streaming did, what the financial ambitions were, what the business strategies were beyond taking the streaming companies at their word. A lot of oohs and wows as they proliferate. A lot of like tut-tutting at people resisting the proliferation.

A lot of insisting and promulgating this narrative about the inevitability of digitization. It is a bit insane to offer that when a basic analysis of why streaming proliferated begins with the fact that Netflix and the firms that copied it lied about their numbers and also leveraged and used a lot of debt and outside capital in some cases to fuel a period of low prices to acquire rights at a discount when no one really knew whether there was any value in this thing unless they generated the hype cycle, which is again like a pattern in tech land, right? In Silicon Valley where it's like some new idea might not actually be a good idea, but if you spend enough money, then that's the valuation of it, and you get other people to eventually raise it, right? Creating hype, generating debt, attracting consumers, insisting on inevitability much like she does,

trying to build a moat around something that everyone now believes is real, and lying about the value of it, who's there, who's watching it, how many people are excited about it until you suffocate all the other alternatives. The chapter on streaming doesn't really do any sort of analysis beyond, I talked to this person, I talked to this person, I talked to this person at this industry event at this industry event. And I did not get a second opinion. I did not try to parse out or think about how we got to this moment, right? You know, this is a framework for almost every chapter that deals with some major technological innovation. And I think that ends up becoming like a key element of a lot of these access journalists,

right? They understand, some of them are really smart. And I think Kara is up becoming a key element of a lot of these access journalists. They understand. Some of them are really smart. And I think Kara is a smart one in that she's a big cynic. And I think it's very clear if you read her work in that she understands you don't really have to do too much work to sit at the level that she is. She has built herself up as someone who does dogged scoop reporting. She's built herself up as someone who is able to get access to companies and their internal documents and their memos. She's built herself up as someone who then will give executives and

financiers a chance to talk about their thing in a space where they can wax poetic and there will be a few pushback questions and everyone leaves happy, right? But she's not going to push them on the goal or the ambition or the political economy or the morality, any of the actual things that would pop into your brain when you think about something. And instead, just kind of sideline coach play-by-play analysis, right? This is a key part of how a lot of these access journalists thrive. You know, there's a whole school of people who were raised around Kara Swisher, who were mentored by her, who were her mentors that trade in this sort of journalism. And it dumbs down, you know, the practice of criticism.

And it narrows the vision of criticism. And it narrows the vision of reporting that makes all of us worse off because these people just are people who realize they can get rich and well-respected and access and privilege if they just maintain a veneer of irritation, if they pretend to be a gadfly, right? When they're really just a fruit fly. Yeah. And I think it's clear to say that there are people who have been mentored by Kara Swisher who went on to do really great and critical work. But at the same time, there are also a lot of people who kind of exist in her mold. And in some cases, you know, without naming names are trying to kind of become the next Kara Swisher. I think people who pay enough attention would know who I'm talking about there. Casey Newton? Yeah, exactly. All the names. Yeah. I probably just should have went for it. Yeah. I remember it was like 2022, 2021,

when he was getting like criticized for coverage of Uber and how he was not critical enough in covering the gay economy. And he replied to a tweet of mine basically saying that like, that's just business journalism or something like that. And I was like, yeah, this says so much about your approach to these things. And like the approach of so many people who have that particular perspective that is also held and kind of forwarded by Kara Swisher in this kind of version of tech journalism that has treated people and, you know, the public, the reader, the people who are trying to understand it so poorly. Because as you say, you know, when you look at this reporting and this work that Kara Swisher is doing, so much of it is laundering like elite opinion of the people who kind of rule the tech industry and rule Silicon Valley and have done so much to change so many of our lives,

and in many ways, not for the better. And, you know, you said how you kind of came in contact with Kara Swisher's work. For me, I would say it was around a similar time that I started to become aware of her. But the kind of event that always stood out for me, because of course, a lot of the work that I was doing early on when I was writing about the tech industry was around tech and cities and transportation, right? The gay economy and Uber, but also self-driving cars and smart cities and things like that. And the thing that always stood out to me when I was thinking about this was, of course, the event in 2014 at the Code Conference where she appeared in this video,

basically promoting Google's self-driving car, which was later called the Firefly, and saying that it was delightful, cool, and quote, conceptually where things are going. You know, saying all these positive things about this unproven technology that Google was trying to push out into the world. Of course, we later learned that there were serious safety issues and stuff with the way that they were testing these things. But, you know, that was not something that Kara Swisher was going to, you know, really kind of question or interrogate in that moment. That event appears in my book as well, Road to Nowhere, because I thought it was so indicative of how the tech

industry and how tech journalism helped to promote these ideas that were actually really harmful to transportation and to our cities and actually to addressing the real transportation problems that we have. And so that, you know, kind of moment always stood out to me when I thought about Kara Swisher and the role that she played in tech journalism. And over that kind of moment always stood out to me when I thought about Kara Swisher and the role that she played in tech journalism. And over the years, I've listened to interviews that she's done with tech CEOs, particularly Elon Musk. I tried listening to her podcast Pivot with Scott Galloway, which is just the kind of thing that makes you want to tear your hair out. Even more for Scott Galloway, I think, than for Kara Swisher, because I don't like that guy either. But it's like, you know, she has held and continues to hold this really

important place within tech journalism, where she is revered and kind of held up as this important figure. But so often when you plumb these approaches to these various issues, as you were talking about, and as she goes through in the book, you see that time and again, she is often on the wrong side of these things or misunderstanding what is actually happening because of the way her approach works. And that leads to a poor understanding for the public, but also allows these companies to have both written a lot about and have been very critical of. But in the book, she presents a kind of revisionist narrative of her approach on Travis Kalanick, the CEO of Uber. Do you want single motherfucker who wrote in favor of it, and many of them pretend to this day that they never ever wrote a thing or seamlessly have transitioned to criticism of it without acknowledging what they got wrong. And I think it's important for people who were wrong on Uber and Lyft to acknowledge it because it would make it much easier or help in the cause of trying to articulate to the public why it's a threat, that you have a company that was so plainly, plainly illegal, but was able to convince

everyone who wasn't a labor reporter or a really good business and financial editor, right? Because you had people like Alphaville and FT who were on this as early as the labor reporters were. People who weren't them were like, oh, well, you know, like I get it. I call a taxi with my phone. It must be better. You know, they're not, they're nice and they give me snacks and they're like of my servant. No, they're so cheap. I don't know how they're so cheap. Yeah. I can get them anytime I want. No impulse to analyze the underlying conditions, to question why Uber is presenting itself in one way or another, how it is that something so plainly illegal is operating, why it is that people are willing to make excuses for something so plainly illegal.

The role in which our views of technology and the digital allow corporations to smuggle in old ideas, right? Because if you acknowledge all that, it makes it easier to inoculate the population against the cyclical nature of this, right? Because then it emerges in crypto, and it emerges in Web3, and it emerges in the metaverse, and it emerges in AI, right? And smart homes and all that bullshit. This idea that if you just let us privatize,

if you just let us undermine the laws that are there for people's wellbeing, if you just give us and cede to us more autonomy, these private firms and the private sector in general, if you cede more autonomy to it at the expense of your own, we can better organize your life because it'll be more digital. Because these journalists have not acknowledged the role that they played in the propaganda campaigns of Uber and Lyft, we are going to suffer that same thing over and over again, right? Because none of the lessons are going to be translated, right? And organizers and activists and advocates are still going to have to convince people that there's a connection when the people who were part of the problem won't even acknowledge

it and are still doing the shilling for the new thing right so Kara Swisher I think to get back from that sidebar I think Kara Swisher and this body of journalists whose analysis of Uber and analysis the good economy was oh look at this shiny digital tool that I think buffs out a lot of the things I personally dislike about taxis can be generalized out to a larger example of my theory about how the digital is the future, the digital will transform everything, right? That my ability to call an app, my ability to get a service immediately, my ability to get it cheaply is evidence that I'm right and that we need to pay more attention to it on my terms. And I should talk to all the people who are behind building it. And almost all of these analysis until, you know, labor reporting became more

central to this story until people really started listening to the reporters. We've been talking about this shit for years. you had people being like, ooh, I signed up as an Uber driver. Let's see how that was like. Wow, it's really freeing. I might give up this writing shit. Embarrassing stories like that were the norm for years. And you have people like Swisher

who tried to adopt a more sophisticated version of that. Sitting down talking with Uber chief executive Travis Kalanick, being like, what's your vision of the future? Why does everyone hate your vision of the future? It seems like you're doing such a bold thing, right? And giving a company that is operating illegally room to express its propaganda and its vision and wax poetic about how evil taxis are are imply corruption. There's certainly, and there has been corruption in one way or another with various taxi sectors and state governments. But the idea that there's like a large cartel, a taxi cartel that has

put wool over the eyes of the government was one that proliferated in large part because of journalists like Kara Swisher, who just would not ever question that and would agree because of course there was, because why else would taxis suck compared to Uber, right? So I think with Swisher and with her body of access journalists, right, the main thing I hate about their coverage of Uber is the poison pill, of course, that's left with us in dealing with future private technological innovations that are just going to be used to privatize things and generate more profit, but also because they had almost no curiosity outside of the C-suite, right? And you talk about this in your review as well, right? The real problems are what are being done to the

white-collar employees, right? What's being done with the executives, what's being done with the workers in the company, and also flattening that analysis to a pretty flat level, right? The failure to understand that Uber was operating illegally and thus operating in a way that viewed almost everything and everyone as a means to an end, as expendable, as an obstacle. There was no ability to connect that to the fact that it had a rancid, toxic, disgusting workplace culture. And of course it did, right? It didn't view the drivers as human beings. To not view the drivers as human beings, to have engineers, to have executives not view a large section of your workforce as not human beings, it's not a large leap to say this sort of person is also going to treat women in the workplace not as human beings, right? And assault

them and harass them or talk about them in insane ways that once reported on became the focus, right? And the insistence that this was the workplace issue, right? And this also ends up wiping away or burying other modes of analysis that would have also provided clear analysis. Because not only then does Kalanick's ouster, as Kara herself presents, get ridden as a culture war against Kalanick, that people are realizing you can't run the company this way and they oust them because they're sick of it. You lose the actual story, which is that the reason that Kalanick got ousted is because the board wanted to go public and he didn't think that Uber was ready

to go public because he understood the business model, right? He understood that they needed to be firmly integrated and monopolize all their major markets and a lot of global markets before they could go public or else they would face years, decades of unprofitability. And you focus on cultural issues as the primary problem and everything flows from that, right? You lose out on any curiosity about the labor conditions for the people who are doing the driving are. And in fact, you view them with some disgust. You know, you pretend like you hate the fact that he's automating the drivers when in reality, you're fine with that. And you say that over and over and over and over and over and over again, right?

And you hope that he does that. You seem to believe that, you know, the problem Uber is that it just doesn't have the right CEO. It needs a more diverse team because if it had a more diverse team, they wouldn't be pulling up records on people who are accused of rape. They wouldn't be spying on people who are critics. Their lived experiences would provide more guardrails, ignoring the fact that even if that were the case, the business model of the company is such that it needs to exploit a large pool of people, of laborers, and have a lot of them idle so that it can have tiny wait times and lower prices, and that it also needs to pay them sub-minimum wages so that your rides can be cheap, or it has to use its technology to exploit the

customer and charge them as high as possible and figure out ways to extract more profit. You know, charge higher prices when you go into a non-white neighborhood, charge higher prices when you're going along a route that's not serviced by bus or public transit, right? So you lose out in all the ways in which it is fundamentally exploitative, no matter who's at the helm. And you lose out on the larger analysis that this is still a company that is illegal. This is a company that is misclassifying people and taking advantage of its misclassification to use its business model. And it doesn't fucking matter how much money it generates for investors. It doesn't fucking matter how many cars are in the street. It doesn't fucking matter how many drivers there are. It's illegal and it's starving its drivers and it's withering or competing with or trying to undermine public transit.

But none of this pops into her mind and it didn't pop into most tech journalist's minds until you started to get a swell of labor reporting and until you started to get a swell of labor reporting and until you started to get a swell of the organizing and until, sadly, you had a spree of suicides. So that's the thing I really hate. It's like there has to be such a massive cost and massive loss of life, right, of public sector possibilities, of whole horizons, of people's lives and also of political horizons before people go, oh, wow, this is bad. And then they write a half-assed thing that doesn't let us understand how we got there because they want to free themselves of guilt. I want to pick up on the cyclicality of what

you're saying there, right? Because talking about the real lack of understanding the core of the business, the actual business model that these companies were pushing is key and it's totally lacking in what Swisher was writing. And the thing that really kind of boiled my blood about the way that she presents these things in the book is, as you were saying, at the time in 2014, around this period, she was happy to be chummy and friendly with Travis Kalanick. In 2014, at the same code conference I was talking about where she was promoting the Google car, she was saying that Kalanick was not as much of a jerk as I thought he was, and calling taxi companies evil, as he was saying. That same year, she wrote a glowing profile of

Kalanick in Vanity Fair, where there was no hint of the criticism that she suggests she had of him in the book. Because in the book, she says that Kalanick's rise made her, quote, sick to my stomach, and that he represented, quote, the ever uglier face of tech. But in 2014, the moment that she's talking about, she's not seeing any of this. And one of her examples for why Kalanick made her feel this way was because he said on stage, quite glibly, that he wanted to see human drivers replaced by AI and that it would cut the cost of delivering an Uber. And so this is presented as like, oh,

this guy is so evil because he's so willing to replace workers, even though at the time and still Kara Swisher very rarely talks about workers, especially those types of workers. But it was even more shocking to me because I was just reading that on March 20th, she did an event with the CEO of GM, Mary Barra, where she said that she prefers autonomous vehicles to human drivers, like the same sort of thing that she was saying Kalanick was like so evil for saying back in 2014. And I think it just shows how fake and how false the attempt to present herself as this kind of critical person, you know, as this critical eye on the tech industry, as this person holding them to account really is.

And you see that again, as you were saying, the cyclical nature of these things and how it leads us to misunderstand them. When the crypto and NFT boom came along, Swisher again was promoting crypto as a retirement investment on her podcast, Pivot with Scott Galloway. And when she was called out with that, she made a tweet where she said, quote, crypto is by no means over. It's like the early internet, kind of repeating the crypto talking points. She was also repeating talking points on NFTs. You know, CNBC, you know, had her on there. And she said that just because it's digital doesn't mean it's not a value. I guess it's worth saying that in the book, she also has criticisms of crypto now that the boom is over. And now we're in this moment of generative AI. And she has once again become one of the big boosters. In the book, she talks about how generative AI is going to be a new Cambrian explosion. And she is frequently kind of repeating these talking points. And she's very friendly with Sam Altman. She even had Sam

Altman interview her at one of her book events. So it shows the closeness that she has with these people and how when it really matters, when we're in the moment when people need to understand what these companies are doing and the impacts that these business models are having on people, journalists like Kara Swisher are promoting the talking points of industry and not doing the criticism, but then afterward trying to rewrite the narrative and pretend that they were on the right side the whole time. I feel like, you know, the only tech journalist that I've seen that has done any sort of reflection on the role, I think, is Farood Mandrew, who was a columnist at The Times. And he has my eternal respect for that, even if I disagree with some of his takes less and less over the years.

And he's not even explicitly a tech journalist though, right? No. Yeah. He's just a columnist. He's talked a lot about tech. He did write or focus on tech earlier, you know, at some points in his career, especially like I think when he would write some for the New Yorker, but now is, yeah, mainly would work as a columnist, political, sometimes tech. But, you know, like that is someone who wrote a piece being like, whoa, I was part of the propaganda and I fell for it. I fell for it. I advanced it. I advocated for it. And now I realize I fucked up and then maybe it's too little too late, but I just wanted to say that. Almost every other journalist who has been involved in this and who has just done marketing,

who has just written free copy, who has just done free propaganda like Swisher, which is ironic because she studied propaganda in college, as she likes to say in the book. These people are lower than dirt because they understand. They understand what the paths before them are. They can lose a lot of the access, a lot of the fans, a lot of the support, and probably have to recraft in one way or another the relationship to their audience and to other publications and the type of writing that they do. Maybe that's a scary process. That's a lot of work. wealthier, affluent, Silicon Valley, white collar audience that they have, the access to their bosses and their managers and their financiers, the invites, the support networks, the career tracks, the appointments, the books, the jobs by making what is probably

to them a small compromise. But in reality is everything because it dooms the rest of us to dealing with this constant assault on our senses with propaganda about the value of things that are making our lives worse. There are so many journalists who I think understand, or I would, I'm surprised don't, but I would assume understand that Silicon Valley is not an unambiguous good. It's not even like an ambiguous good, right? That it stands on the shoulders of public funding and financing, but it does a lot of harm and it extracts a lot of value from the rest of the world. And it also has a huge amount of externality that no one really bothers to reckon with. And

when they do are dismissed. And some of them insist that we're in the midst of this tech lash. We're in the midst of this upsurgence of criticism. And I think there's a difference between like it being more visible and us being able to talk more about it. And like, they're actually being a larger shift because at the end of the day, if we were, then would we have had the past four years that we did? Would we have had the proliferation of surveillance tech during COVID as these firms unilaterally tried to introduce emotional surveillance or affect and facial recognition in public spaces? And as police departments integrated these, would we have an upswa of military contractors operating with, you know, relative impunity while integrating these businesses into their tech companies and their platforms?

Would we have the sort of implosion of controlled demolition, it outsiders criticizing or, you know, even at some legacy publications criticizing. But if we also had some of these people who are access journalists, you know, naming how problematic and how immoral these things were instead of just simply kind of giving everything in a very demure, detached, objective tone. I think that's part of the problem here. It's like, what is journalism to be, right? If we're going to pretend like tech criticism is everywhere, then we should ask, why is it that if there's so much criticism of tech, they seem to still be charging along, right? And part of it is because of how much power they have, but then also part of it is because that critical attitude has not actually

penetrated the core of what reporting is understood to be. And the core of what reporting is understood to be is still largely influenced by these sort of access journalists who are marketing themselves as brands. The real dynamics driving the shape of the industry are there. And maybe the flavor, maybe some of the language, maybe some of the language, maybe some of the positioning, maybe some of the acknowledgements are influenced by criticism. But this is not a fundamental change, and this has been apparent. Evgeny Morozov wrote in the Baffler, like a review of Nick Carr's book, Automation in the Cage, like what, like 10 years ago? And the problem was still there. What is the role of a tech critic in the United States? When it comes to technology, it's hard to think of the task he wrote essentially as a

useful one. Even though we are surrounded by people insisting that tech criticism has never been more universal, we are still dealing with firms that have immense amounts of power, and their main interlocutors, and their main channels to the public being subservient and obsequious and stenographers. And until that relationship changes, it doesn't really matter because that primary relationship still provides them a channel directly to people's minds and hearts and brains to spill propaganda into about what technology should be and what form it should take in our daily lives and to policymakers, right? Absolutely. I think that's such a good

point and you've laid it out so well, right? The really serious problems in the approach that journalists like Swisher have and what that means for how the public understands the tech industry, what these companies are doing, technology more generally. And I think that you see that, you know, time and again throughout the book where she talks about how she was still a believer in technology in Silicon Valley after the dot-com crash, which she admits that she didn't see coming. There's also, of course, the mantra that she says that she held throughout this whole period that, quote, everything that can be digitized will be digitized, suggesting that this is

inevitable, right? Nobody should try to stand in the way of what Silicon Valley is doing. And she tells stories where she's chiding, for example, the Wall Street Journal for not shutting down its printing presses like in the 90s or something when they were still making a ton of money off of this stuff and just accepting like digitization and how they were going to kind of be trampled over. And similarly, as you were saying earlier with streaming services, saying the same thing to Hollywood, like, why aren't you just kind of giving up all these legacy parts of your business and just going fully in on digital early and like sacrificing all of these profits that you're making. And the other piece of it that I felt was really revealing about the approach that she has and why she tends to hold up these CEOs and these

billionaires who she does have these close relationships to, even though in the book, she tries to present it as more of like a distant sort of thing that I don't know about other readers, but I wasn't really buying when she talks about having a prick to productivity ratio, where she gives quote flawed people a little break. So you know, these CEOs can be doing terrible things to workers can be thrashing the environment can be disrupting the way that economic systems and legacy industries work. But that's okay for Kara Swisher, as long as they are being productive, as long as they are changing the world, you know, being disruptive, and of course, returning her phone calls, most importantly of all. What does that say to you about the approach that she has about these things? And the idea of

even though she is a journalist, even though she's trying to present herself as a critic, ultimately, this worldview of Silicon Valley is still very closely held and promoted by this person who you would assume being a journalist is trying to hold the industry to account. You know, I have gotten into arguments with some people who trade in this. It's hard because there's some journalists who obviously have access and they're a million times better than the other types of access journalists. I mean, look at the platformer, for example, right? Casey Newton versus Zoe Schiffer. Zoe Schiffer is a great labor journalist and has been for years. I think Zoe Schiffer for a long time. I think that there are lots of journalists who are able to, and I mean, that's part of it, right?

Being able to get a source, communicate with them. Maybe they give you some inside information. Maybe they give you some quotes. Maybe they help provide some color on background or off the record that can help you think about what's going on and get to the facts. And there's a difference between having these sources that are helping you actually get to the facts and find out information you wouldn't have been able to get on your own, and having these sources shape your worldview, right? And I feel like what most of these access journalists who I have a deep problem with are that they allow them to shape their worldview.

And they don't usually talk too much about the relationship that they have with some of the most powerful sources that they have. But I mean, if we're being real, if some motherfucker runs a massive tech company and you've got his number and he's just calling you as a rule, me personally, I will discount most of what you have to say about that person. And maybe that someone might hear that and think, oh, that's a little too harsh, but reading Swisher, for example, like you talked about answering the phone calls, you know, maybe before reading the book, you think, oh, well, you know, she has their phone call because maybe they're going to call her and talk about a story

she just wrote, or maybe they're going to try to push back and she'll write about that conversation. Right. And then you read the book and the phone calls are like, can you help me write this essay, please? Can you help me do my homework? Can you help me sell this to the public? You know, what the fuck? And also, if you just think about it for a second,

it is fine if you have a bunch of mid-level managers or workers, people actually doing things that might be contrary to the company's public persona and narrative with your number and calling you. If you have the chief executive of a company on call, what are they really going to say to you other than, that's definitely not what happened. I think you should drop the story or some fluffy access profile where you get a chance to sit down and talk with them. And they give you really rehearsed and practiced and massaged points about how beautiful their next innovation is going to be, how brilliant their next product is going to be, and how everything is going well. Or why that failure, that misstep wasn't actually a failure misstep, or it was a

valuable lesson. You know, like it's the value to me of having access to someone who is running the ship approaches zero when thinking about the cost and the ability that they'd have in influencing your opinion over time. But that's why I'm not the Times columnist. And that's why I don't have the New York Mac podcast, right? All these things, which if I did, I would blow my head off. What I want and what I enjoy is talking with workers. Because talking with workers is where you learn the most about how a company actually operates based on the ways in which I think the managers interpret commands from the top and subject the people underneath them to them. You learn the most about Uber's business

model from its drivers. You learn the most about Facebook from its content moderators, right? You learn the most about Google from its contractors who are essentially employees, but are just misclassified for a multitude of reasons, right? These are the places where you learn the most, where the most vulnerable population, how they're treated by people immediately above them who have more power, but don't actually have a reason to fully subject the people to the power, right? And I feel like the value of a scoop or of insight into the company and its operations and its business model declines once you get up to a certain point and reaches zero once you get to that CEO or you get to that C-suite. How much

are you really going to learn from Sheryl Sandberg for an hour and a half? You're probably going to get some new theory that she's trying out for a book that she wrote or had someone ghostwrite about the value of the nonsense and the word salad that she just gave you for an hour and a half. You're not actually going to get a good sense of why it is that Facebook does what it is, right? And if you do, it's probably going to be one pocked and redacted and obfuscated and spun to distract from important points, right? And so I think that's also then the second point, which is like, how much do you think that these people are telling the truth? And I think a lot of these access journalists really do believe, or maybe think, hey, look,

if I'm in a room one-on-one with this chief executive and maybe their PR person, they're going to tell me the truth or they're going to be frank with me in a way that they wouldn't if I were in some other way trying to get the truth from the company. Or I'm smart enough where I can ferret it out, that I can present to them this narrative that I got with everyone else and confront them and their inability to confirm or deny or their deviation from the truth is an important part of the story and should be reported, right? You know, I think all of this just comes down to like, I think you can construct a really good story without having to have a chief executive buzz in your ear all the fucking time or a chief marketing officer or some executive. And that I understand the narrow ways in which it's valuable,

especially if you're trying to construct a gotcha or if you're trying to construct a fuller picture and their denial or their adherence or their openness is part of that. Or if you're profiling them, sure. But to have their number on call or to be answering their calls at any point or to have a Discord where they come in and they chat with the members of your Discord is disqualifying almost immediately to me. And it's hard to imagine scenarios where it wouldn't be unless you're like going to record every single conversation and leak it. If you're doing that, then Godspeed, fifth columnist. But are any of them doing it? No, because they'd lose their career at a second and then never get access to the journalism or whatever. Well, Ed, that's a little bit hard

to hear because, you know, I was going to take this episode as an opportunity to announce that tech won't save us is pivoting. And we're going to be having Sam Altman on next week to talk about how generative AI is so great and changing the world. Yeah. I'm taking a job at Uber. I'm going to be working in their PR team. You do good at that. You wouldn't be the first. I know. But, you know, I think like picking up on what you were saying, you can clearly see that with Swisher, you know, going beyond the book,

what she was doing recently during the ouster of Sam Altman from OpenAI, where she was kind of the conduit for Altman's narrative of what was happening. And in the book, you have that kind of reprinted as what actually happened in the case of Sam Altman's ouster as CEO of OpenAI and his eventual return, when we actually had reporting that came out later that suggested that there were quite a number of concerns with the way that he was running the company and the way that he was treating employees that were actually playing into what happened there, but were not part of the Swisher narrative of how that all played out.

And, you know, you can see that quite clearly in the book where certainly she'll say some, you know, critical things about the people who it's okay to criticize these days, the Travis Kalanick's of the world, the Mark Zuckerberg's, of course, you know, Elon Musk, we haven't even gotten into all that. But then, you know, she still lauds praise on many of these people who are doing incredibly terrible things like the CEO of Airbnb, who has obviously had an incredible impact on people's access to housing and housing prices. You know, Sam Altman, of course, is in her good books, despite everything that he has been up to. I guess,

just briefly, before we kind of end these things off, there were two people in particular that I did want to bring up and talk about her kind of relationship to. And that is, of course, Steve Jobs, who is this figure who's basically held in reverence as this godlike person for people who believe in this Silicon Valley ideology because of what he did with the iPhone and the iPad and how he turned Apple around. But at the same time, there is plenty of reporting on how he was not just a terrible boss, how he took credit for the work of people below him, how he mistreated many of the employees at Apple, but also how in his personal life, he was pretty much a piece of shit. And then of course, the other one is Elon Musk, who, you know, some people would say kind of took up the mantle of Steve Jobs

after his death, who Swisher was a very close with for a very long time, helped forward this narrative of his genius because of his rockets and his electric cars, and only broke with him when he called her an asshole and actually cut off contact with her in 2022 around the Twitter acquisition. So what do you make of the relationship that she has with these two powerful men, how she presents this in the book, and what it shows about her and her relationship to these things? You know, the only executive that really gets like a love letter in Burn book is Steve Jobs, right? And the others get the admission of like love letters having been written for them, but burned because they disappointed her in some key way. But it's Jobs that kind of sails and soars above it in ways that

I think when you called your review like the reality distortion field, kind of get to the heart of it, right? There are points in the book where I think Kara Swisher suggests that she views a kinship with other people in Silicon Valley, that she was bored by school, she was too smart for school, she could have done anything she wanted. She deals with a lot of people who are dumber than her, who have antiquated ideas about technology, that she's an innovator, an entrepreneur, that she has visions for merging the digital and the physical. And of all the tech executives, Jobs is probably the one that's easiest to like, you know, if that's what you think about yourself, to project that onto him, right? Like you pointed out, Jobs is someone who, you know, stole ideas, ran a horrible workplace.

The influence he had on, you know, the digital and on the world is undeniable. And what is to be argued and contested is, was it good or bad, right? And you would think, as Swisher goes through and talks about many of the things in our world, that there would be a reflection that goes, huh, almost all of these things have been amplified and carried forth in the world because of Jobs' influence and pushing out and merging and converging most of the digital onto the phone and onto the app store and creating and pushing and helping catalyze this process of solving problems through apps that can then be mass downloaded, right? And I think opening the way to this sort of solutionism,

where every social problem, every political problem, every economic problem, there's an app waiting to be made or that has been made, which can solve it. Which I think it's clear to say in the book, Swisher says has been disastrous, and mainly kind of puts the blame on Zuckerberg, but Jobs escapes all kind of responsibility for that. Yes, exactly. Right. Jobs is like either a saint or someone who I think the biggest criticism she has of him is that he was an asshole sometimes in interviews and lied to her. Yeah, no fucking shit. Yeah, she has like basically two chapters of praise for Jobs and maybe like a couple sentences where she admits that he wasn't always the greatest person. Yeah. And it's a bit insane because as your review talks about, as we've talked about here, I mean, this is a guy whose phones were constructed

in factories where people were killing themselves and threw themselves out of windows such that they put on suicide nets. And that after that, even when labor practices were changed a bit, that suicides might have dropped, being exposed to chemicals that were creating up until that point unseen cancers and chronic illnesses and fatal disorders that took advantage of almost every single person that came across him in the C-suite, in the company itself, and in the contracted and subcontracted workforce, and in the regulatory landscape, and the consumers, and the firms that were working with them, right? But this is someone who's praised because they had a transformative effect on the world, and that because they represented the avatar of the digital is inevitable right and this is kind of i think like a perfect

encapsulation of carrie swisher's really shallow analysis of technology is much thought put on thinking about what it meant for the digital to be advanced in the way that jobs did? Is there much thought put into how the advent of a smartphone changed people's relationship to technology or changed the relationship of startups and of entrepreneurs to technological development? Is there any thought put towards how those shifts narrowed or expanded certain possibilities for technology or changed incentives or accelerated capital accumulation in these firms or the valuation of these firms? No. Is there any thought put onto the effects of having these phones put everywhere, right? Having parts of society modeled on this experience of having a device, specifically a smartphone, a communication device, constantly in communication with other devices,

having it being your main browsing portal, having advertiser surveillance platforms be the gates through which you have to pass through constantly to access any part of the digital world? No. There's no actual interest in thinking about how the world works, only in describing it in such a way where everything is wonderful all the time until it isn't. And the reason why it isn't, isn't because there was a snake in the garden. It isn't because the apples were rotten. It's because they didn't know how good they had it. And some of them were seduced by Trump, right? Or, you know, as maybe the book kind of, you know, like you said, by the end, when it admits it's disastrous, that some of them didn't get into this with the best of intentions. They weren't true to technology.

They failed technology. Technology didn't fail us, right? And almost all the analysis, when there is a pointing out, it's like, well, you know, Zuckerberg had never been born. I'm sure we would have had a much better society. It's not clear if that's the case, because again, if you do an analysis of thinking through, okay, what affected the creation of this app store, of smartphones, of an app-driven, solution-oriented mindset to Silicon Valley, to the flush of capital and to the

tightly concentrated network, what effects did all of these converge on and have on ideas about community, ideas about politics, ideas about labor? Well, inevitably, someone probably would have tried to make something like Facebook. Inevitably, they would have also tried to make a giant pile of money leveraging advertising, right? And surveillance and data collection on people. It makes me think of Malcolm Harris's book, Palo Alto, and kind of the arguments that he makes that it's more about the forces than the individuals, right? If Zuckerberg or the Musk weren't around, there would have been somebody else to kind of move these things forward, even if it wasn't specifically them and their companies. This was the direction that capitalism was going, where it saw the opportunity for these profits.

And you can't just say, oh, if Mark Zuckerberg wasn't there, then everything would have been better because there just would have been a different Zuckerberg, right? Yeah. I mean, and it's funny you mentioned Palo Alto because Palo Alto was published, what, a year, almost a year to the date before Swisher's book, right? You couldn't have two more different analyses of what's going on with Silicon Valley. We have Malcolm Harris's analysis, which spends a lot of time on individuals but situated in their context, looking at the forces that they were a part of and swept up by, and the forces that they unleashed, right? And constructing a very historical, a very materialist account of what Silicon Valley is, why it became the way it is, what effect that had on the world, and what effect the world then had on Silicon Valley, right? Versus someone who thinks that the sun shines out of Steve Jobs'

ass, right? And is so narrowly concerned with an almost pageantry of avatars of the digital right that there's almost no concern with how the world is actually working with financial flows or with with political economy right or with social dynamics or with labor there's almost no concern about any of that it's just a horse race right It's just a commentator looking at a horse race. And that sort of analysis has been advanced by her for a long time and to great detriment, right? Because it also makes me think about, for example, how some people might have reacted to Palo Alto, right? I think the book got largely near universal praise, but when it got criticism, you would see it along lines that made it sound like there wasn't enough respect for the individuals. And it's like, what the fuck are you talking

about? This is a tone looking at how this region of the world became such a consequential force, right? Across centuries. It is insane to kind of bemoan that this or that figure wasn't probably focused on enough. When we're looking at forces that transcend people's lives and that are unleashed by some of the actions that individuals do sometimes, right? But that more often than not are shaping scores more people, millions more people, billions more people at this point, right? My swisher kind of gets it backwards and thinks, well, the digital only comes into being around the time that she starts reporting. She's born.

There's a section where she has an interesting history of the internet. And she basically is like, whether or not you think the internet was made by the government or the private sector, whether or not you think it was a product of weapons research in the military or bootstrapped entrepreneurs. I was born the same year as it, right? That the digital begins there, right? And everything that comes out of it is solely individuals and business dynamics that spring out of individuals and their psychologies interacting with one another. And that also is one of the shallow things, right? When you don't have the sort of large material explanatory framework, you fall back on this lower level psychoanalytic one.

What are the main analyses of Zuckerberg and Kalanick and Sandberg and every single fucking executive mentioned, right? Largely, if you really sit down, she just goes back to the level of this is an asshole. This is a weird kid. This is a sweaty, nervous motherfucker. This is a shifty motherfucker. This is a duplicitous guy, right? Focus on personalities and this idea that the personality shaped the product. Sure, to some extent,

it takes a certain type of person to make a certain type of firm. A business model that views people as expendable is probably gonna be a product of someone who views people as expendable. But to end the analysis there and not ask, okay, well, you know, why are these sorts of people being drawn

into this sort of development? I'm using this descriptor constantly to describe people in these types of work. Is it that there's a larger sort of great attractor here that is pulling in these sorts of personalities? And then maybe I can focus on that great attractor itself and ask what feature of the market, what feature of the industry is selecting for these types of behaviors and these types of personalities? And that maybe that's worth more analysis than like trying to psychoanalyze why Mark Zuckerberg was sweaty the first time I met him. That's more interesting and would yield more realistic answers than it's because he was scared of how tough I was in writing, you know, like what or whatever it is that she said in that section. Yeah, I guess to end off this interview, you know, thinking about that way of approaching the tech industry, but also the broader criticisms

that you've been making through this interview about, you know, the way that tech journalism actually works. One of the things that stood out to me, as I was thinking about this, as I read the book, as I was seeing the response to the book and to my review and things like that is that, you know, we were talking about how there are journalists who were kind of mentored by Swisher, and some of them kind of took her mold and others didn't. One thing that I don't know if you've had this experience, but every time I write about Swisher, I always have journalists reach out to me saying, you know, you're spot on, this is right, but it's not something that I can say publicly. You know, I never dig further than that. I usually assume it's because of some kind of past connection to her or not wanting to burn bridges or whatnot. And you were also talking about how, you know, a lot of these journalists who did write these

kind of positive things in the past haven't come out and kind of made amends for that or talked about why they did it. You know, I wrote recently on my Disconnect newsletter about how I became a critic and how, you know, back in the day, I was totally an Apple fanboy. And for a while, I believed that streaming services were good for artists. And, you know, I believed in like fully automated luxury communism and that everything was going to get automated and this was going to be good for everybody. These were very dumb beliefs that I held for a little while. And it that has kind of shaped my views on the tech industry and how I developed to present herself as someone who has always been critical of the tech industry, and is not just kind of putting it on today as a facade or some way to present herself and kind of make up for the history that she has? And also, how do you think it benefits her and also the billionaires who she talks to, to suggest that she is actually a critic and that she is holding the industry to account in a way that she isn't.

If I were a journalist who got a lot of it wrong, I would try to rebrand myself in a few ways, right? Of course, you do that first rebrand, which she did, where it's not really a rebrand such as like a, whoa, like what the fuck is going on here moment. And that's them going to Trump Tower, right? And part of that might've been genuine, I'll grant me in the most generous reading and that a lot of people who were incurious about Silicon Valley's core dynamics, when Trump won and the tech company said, well, what's up, dude? How are you doing? And kissed the ring at the tower. I think some people realized and woke up that that was because they were being naive. And some people realized or felt that they could make a career for the of this group, realized this plus the tech lash, the so-called tech lash that was happening or in the moment of happening, suggested that there was going to be a sort of critical shift in at least the tone of journalism.

And that one could, as she has done over the years, she's presented herself as hard-h when she's not as, you know, a tough questioner and interviewer when she's not. And similarly, you could present yourself as, you know, a hard critic when you're not or a tough commentator when you're not with the post Silicon Valley Trump collaboration, right? Much in the way that she did for just in general for tech, right? So I think part of it is, you know, that pivot, that revisionism was an understanding that you don't really have to do too much. In fact, you just have to do what you've been doing for a while, where you say one thing and you do another, right? And that for the most part, people will

cover for you, right? Because just looking at R2 reviews, R2 reviews and maybe the New York Times reviews are, I think, probably the only negative reviews I've seen. If you look at them, I think at least R2 mentioned a real life interview she does and how she talks about it in the book. And the disconnect is so large that you have to wonder why no one has done that. And maybe it's because everyone just doesn't see it, or maybe everyone did think that that was very critical. Or maybe a lot of people are, like you said, personally connected and invested and owe something to her or friends with her and don't feel comfortable supporting a criticism of her,

even if they might recognize that it's valid, right? So looking at that gulf between how she actually is in these interviews and how she's covered and talked about, right? Throwing softballs to people at the Code Conference for years, and then being able to talk about it as if she's a hard-hitting journalist, and then seeing that the coverage of her is as a hard-hitting journalist, I mean, that helps fortify in your mind, whether you're cynical or not, that you don't really need to change too much, that you're on the right track. The most critical you get of Swisher, outside of these tech critics who are saying she's part of the problem, is Swisher herself being like, oh, well, sometimes, as she says at the end of the

book, I was a camera. I was a little too convincing. I was a little eviscerating, but sometimes I was useful. And I really liked how you put it when you talked about, and sometimes you were in the camera, you know, sometimes you were in the shot, spreading the propaganda with them. And Swisher's attempt is to tap into the imagery of that early period where she used to carry a camera around with her to these parties to suggest a sort of youthful naivete. There's this youthful energy about it that she's trying to connect to like, oh, well, you know, like I missed some things for good reasons. I had the best intentions going into this. And it just turns out that these people were hiding something behind the surface that I couldn't capture because I was just capturing the surface level.

And that metaphor is a lot more correct than she understands, right? I think she was a superficial level observer of technology for many years, realizes it, and also realizes that she can continue to position herself as such, but still get her flowers and still get her accolades and still get her access because she has forged ahead the path because of how unwilling people are to challenge and criticize her, because of how she's cultivated her network, and because it's advantageous to everyone involved to pretend like she is, right? If you're a chief executive, you, whoa, whoa, look at me. I went on kara swisher's show the most feared tech journalist i gotta ask the hard questions yeah yeah you know

i gotta ask the hard questions i don't need to do all this other shit with actual journalists who would would put my feet to the fucking fire because i did with with swisher right you know so she plays a role in their ecosystem and their propaganda in allowing them to also just avoid confrontational and hostile interviews, right? I think about like, for example, one version of this at The Verge, right? I think The Verge had this interview with Dara Korshahi maybe four years ago where he was like, Uber is going to be the operating system of your city, right pushback right no pushback at all the verge is also the go-to for a lot of mark zuckerberg's kind of softball interviews as

well and google in fact didn't they have like an executive editor leave for one of google's divisions and he's an executive at google now it's like dieter storm or something like that um dieter bone i think yeah you know like the executives know where to go and will go there because they understand there's some dance, there's some agreement. They're not going to get hit over the fucking head. You know, they're not going to get shot in the back. There's no ambush that's really going to happen in a lot of these instances. Right. And if there is, they're not going to go back again.

Right. So you have to preserve that access in one way or another. If you're a smart entrepreneur, if you're a smart chief executive, you're going to go to the places that might seem like they'll draw some blood, but in reality aren't, right? And they'll give you enough space to say something insane, like we're going to be the operating system for a city, or we're engaged in a war with big taxi and a cartel, and they're just bullying a widowed startup like us. You are going to be strategic about it. You're not just going to go there because you're like, well, I love journalism and I want to support the third or fourth estate, whatever the fuck it is.

No, you're there. You're the chief executive because you're looking for ways to ensure you're seeking profits. You're doing your duty to your investors, you're preserving your firm, and you're somehow undermining competition, regulation, oversight. And what's a great way to do it? Well, if Kara Swisher was actually a critical tech journalist, it wouldn't be going on her show at all. And yet they're all on the show. I mean, it's such a very simple thing to think about. Why is it that they all talk to her it's not because they love the game it's not because they love journalism and their efforts by her to kind of insist that it's a game of sorts that they're there because they understood how it works right she goes wrote

for some conservative nut in the early uh 80s and 90s who was a monster and sexually harassed a bunch of her colleagues and she kind of like gives the way the game in her worldview where she's like, I kind of got along with him. I kind of liked him because, you know, and we understood that it was a game that I, I despised him, but I liked him. I respected him, but I hated him. And she also says that she like publicly criticized him or like spoke to a journalist about what he was up to. And she was like, he respected that. Yeah. He was like, you stabbed me at the front. Yeah. That's how she kind of views all of this, right? It's a game. And I think she assumes other people think it's a game and doesn't stop to

think, huh, why are all these executives talking to me? Is it because of how smart I am? Is it because of how brilliant I am? Is it because of how much I get to the bottom of it and they appreciate these things? And I think she's smart enough to maybe understand that it's not, but her ego is large enough. And she says it herself. It's one of her points of pride. That's someone who is a poison pill for journalism, just straight up. Has been bad for journalism, has made tech journalism worse, has narrowed the standards and the ideas and the visions other people have had for journalism, and has infected a lot of people with this idea that digitization is inevitable and good. And even if she does this fake bullshit mea culpa in the book,

it's insufficient because the damage has been done. Well, hopefully, Ed, she'll respect us stabbing her in the front in this episode and in our reviews. I suspect she won't because she has blocked me on Twitter. But Ed, always fantastic to speak with you to dig into the issue of Kara Swisher, her attempt at a rebrand, but also what she tells us about tech journalism and the relationship between Silicon Valley and the journalism industry. These are all things we need to understand, especially if we want to better hold them to account and make sure people actually understand what these companies are doing and how their business models work. Always fantastic to speak with you about these things. Thanks so much. You too. Thanks for having me on. Ed Ongwezo Jr. is the finance editor at Logix Magazine and a co-host of This Machine Kills podcast. Tech Won't Save Us is made in partnership with The Nation Magazine and is hosted by me, Thank you. and making a pleasure of your own. Thanks for listening and make sure to come back next week. Thank you.