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This book does not in any capacity mean to replace the original book but to serve as a vast summary of the original book.
Summary of Burn Book by Kara Swisher: A Tech Love Story
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Burn Book is a memoir by award-winning journalist Kara Swisher, detailing the evolution of the digital world and the tech industry's founders who wanted to change the world but broke it instead. Swisher has interviewed tech titans like Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Sheryl Sandberg, Bob Iger, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Meg Whitman, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, and Mark Zuckerberg over three decades. Despite the damage she chronicles, Swisher remains optimistic about tech's potential to help solve problems and calls for better, more thoughtful choices. The book is a love story to, for, and about tech from someone who knows it better than anyone.
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Summary of
Burn Book
A
Summary of Kara Swisher’s book
A Tech Love Story
JUSTIN REESE
Summary of Burn Book by Kara Swisher: A Tech Love Story
By justin reese © 2024, justin reese.
All rights reserved.
Author: justin reese
Contact: [email protected]
Cover, illustration: justin reese
Editing, proofreading: justin reese
Other collaborators: justin reese
NOTE TO READERS
This is an unofficial summary & analysis of Kara Swisher’s “Burn Book: A Tech Love Story” designed to enrich your reading experience.
DISCLAIMER
The contents of the summary are not intended to replace the original book. It is meant as a supplement to enhance the reader's understanding. The contents within can neither be stored electronically, transferred, nor kept in a database. Neither part nor full can the document be copied, scanned, faxed, or retained without the approval from the publisher or creator.
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This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. You agree to accept all risks of using the information presented inside this book.
Copyright 2024. All rights reserved.
PROLOGUE
Sheeple Who Need Sheeple
On December 10, 2016, the tech industry experienced a significant shift when Elon Musk, Tesla and SpaceX CEO, was invited to meet President-Elect Donald Trump at Trump Tower. This event was a surprise for many tech titans, who had previously been excluded due to their liberal leanings and opposition to Trump. Musk, who later became a troll on Twitter, was one of the few tech titans who did not fall back on practiced talking points.
Musk's attendance at the summit was seen as a photo op, with no stated agenda. He dismissed threats of Trump's divisive fearmongering and campaign promises to unravel progress on issues such as immigration and gay rights. Peter Thiel, a contrarian investor and persistent irritant, also supported Trump's vision for the future. However, Thiel had stopped communicating with the author, and the author did not attempt to contact him.
Some tech leaders, including Sheryl Sandberg, who had been a prominent supporter of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, had openly opposed Trump's stances during the campaign. Many of these leaders pushed back when Trump called for a shutdown of Muslims entering the United States and announced a plan to severely limit immigration. Two of the invitees, Musk and Microso's new CEO Satya Nadella, were immigrants themselves.
This kind of casual hypocrisy became increasingly common over the decades that the author covered Silicon Valley's elite. As the richer and more powerful people grew, they became more compromised, wrapping themselves in expensive cashmere batting until the genuine person fell deep inside a cocoon of comfort and privilege.
The author, a journalist and analyst, advised tech leaders to make a strong public statement on key values and issues important to tech and its employees at Trump Tower. He urged them to resist Trump's stances against immigrants, defend science, and invest in critical technologies that point the way to revolutions in health and transportation. However, these CEOs accepted Trump's invitation with no conditions, giving up their dignity for nothing.
On December 14, the people who had helped invent the future slipped in through the back entrance of Trump Tower to enable a fascist. The tech companies were supposed to be different, but they had increasingly had troubling consequences from a flood of misinformation to a society becoming isolated and addicted to its gadgets.
The author wrote in one of his first columns as a New York Times columnist in 2018, stating that Facebook, Twitter, and Google's YouTube have become digital arms dealers of the modern age. They have mutated human communication, turbocharged discord, weaponized the First Amendment, civic discourse, and politics. They would argue that they were no worse than cable networks like Fox News and that there was no easily provable causality that they polarized the populace.
The author also noted that every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress. Trump won the election thanks in large part to social media, and it is easy to see a direct line from FDR mastering radio to JFK mastering TV to DJT mastering social technology. Today, malevolent actors continue to game the platforms, and there is still no real solution in sight, because these powerful platforms are doing exactly what they were designed to do.
The tech industry has faced significant challenges in recent years, with the Trump tech summit being a major turning point for the industry. The lack of humanity in the industry has led to a lack of safety tools and anticipation of consequences. Many founders and innovators have been careless, starting with "break" and leading to damage around the globe. This carelessness has led to issues such as Twitter becoming a platform where the richest man supports racist, sexist, and homophobic conspiracies, AI's deep fakes and misinformation opening a virtual Pandora's box, and TikTok making parents feel better by employing safety features for teens.
Tech companies have become key players in killing our comity and stymieing our politics, government, social fabric, and minds by seeding isolation, outrage, and addictive behavior. The "Star Wars" view of the future, which pits the forces of good against the Dark Side, has been successful, but the "Star Trek" view, where a crew works together to travel to distant worlds, promotes tolerance, and convinces villains not to be villains, has also won.
Innocuous boy-kings who wanted to make the world a better place and ended up cosplaying Darth Vader feels like science fiction, but everything that happened at the Trump tech summit was a result of the carelessness of tech companies. The industry needs to put more safety tools in place and anticipate consequences more to fulfill its promise.
Babylon Was
The author shares his personal story of growing up in Roslyn Harbor, New York, and the impact of his father's death at the age of five. He grew up in a modest West Virginia upbringing, where his father was a Navy lieutenant commander and later took on a civilian job at Brooklyn Jewish Hospital. His father died before he had even moved in, leaving him with no living face.
The author recalls many nights like this, but never saw his father again. He tries to preserve his memories, but years ago, he almost gave up on it. As he prepares to make arrangements for his father's funeral, he remembers the pain and the silence that followed.
Dr. Louis Bush Swisher, who died from complications of a brain aneurysm over 20 years ago, was 34 years old. His brother Jeff tried to wake him up, but he didn't wake. The author's mother eventually called for him to open the door, but he didn't. The firemen arrived, and the author stayed in his room until the ambulance arrived.
The author never saw his father again, and he lingered for weeks through January and finally died after two horrible operations. They buried him on a cold February day, and the author didn't attend the funeral.
In summary, the author's relationship with tech began as a love story, but it turned sour over time. The author's story highlights the importance of preserving memories and the impact of technology on our lives.
The author's father's death led to a difficult upbringing in Princeton, where his stepfather took over and sold his house and dog. This led to a comfortable upper-middle-class environment, but also a series of casual cruelties. The author's stepfather taught him backgammon and Risk, which helped him become a good tactical and strategic thinker. Despite being smart, the author became bored easily in school and was a closeted lesbian.
During college, the author attended the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, which was not his first choice. Despite the Jesuits' influence, the author's college classmates were drunk and fornicated, making Georgetown the worst fit for him. The school faced a contentious legal battle with a student group called Gay People of Georgetown University, which fought funding and prohibited gay people from meeting on campus.
As a freshman, the author applied to transfer to Barnard University, but was told by a junior named Roberta Oster that she would write for her and be a star. She convinced the author of their pending journalistic genius and started reporting for the school paper called The Hoya. By the end of their freshman year, the author won the student journalism award, the Edward B. Bunn Award, which brought them attention and acclaim.
The author, who was a student at Georgetown University in D.C., read the Washington Post daily and was disappointed when they published a short story about a speech by a notorious military murderer from El Salvador. They called Metro editor Larry Kramer and debated the story, leading to Kramer hiring them as a stringer for the paper.
Working for the Post was more fun than school, but it was more focused on propaganda and how groups like the Nazis used media and communications tools to manipulate their populace and demonize targeted populations. The author was particularly drawn to Vito Russo's book The Celluloid Closet, which traced the portrayal of gays and lesbians in Hollywood compared to their real-life experiences.
The author's dream was to follow his father into the military and work as a strategic analyst or at the Central Intelligence Agency. However, pushing against the negative attitude towards gays was nearly impossible at the time, and the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" rules were atrocious.
With discrimination blocking his first-choice career path, the author applied to Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, but found the program run by quaint professors and lacking computer skills. After graduation, the author applied to several newspapers and was rejected. He returned to D.C. and began freelancing, eventually joining the Washington City Paper when its new editor, Jack Shafer, was without a staff.
The author initially felt out of their depth, but eventually accepted the role and refused to be undercut by men. They have always been like this, believing that it is hard to negate them and encourage them to try harder.
The author, a journalist, worked under the boss of John McLaughlin, a pioneering TV scream fest. McLaughlin was a powerful figure, known for his speeches for Richard Nixon. He was also a cruel human being, demanding toast from staff and even his chief of staff. The author was initially hesitant to leave, but McLaughlin never did.
During his annual party, McLaughlin kept staff waiting for invitations due to perceived slights. He even threatened to ding an undersecretary in the Reagan administration. The author, who was a liberal, questioned McLaughlin's intentions and feared he would eventually become powerful.
McLaughlin was also a sexual harasser, harassing a friend of the author. The author quit on the spot and later was deposed in a lawsuit against McLaughlin. The author spoke to Eric Alterman, a Washington Post magazine writer, about McLaughlin's behavior, which included a quote from a former staffer.
