In 1994, Kara Swisher, a reporter fascinated by the burgeoning tech industry, sat down with Steve Case, the cofounder of America Online (AOL), and listened as he outlined exactly how the company was going to change the world. When she returned to her desk at the Washington Post that afternoon, she told her boss that this—the internet, the tech industry, the ultimate goals of connectedness being touted by entrepreneurs like Case—was what she wanted to spend her career writing about.
That decision, and her move a few years later to San Francisco to become the first dedicated internet reporter for the Wall Street Journal, launched Swisher’s career as the most prolific chronicler of the tech industry’s booms and busts. Known as much for her iconic aviator sunglasses as she is for throwing shade at some of her tech bro sources, Swisher is the quintessential insider-outsider—what New York magazine dubbed “Silicon Valley’s most feared and well-liked journalist.”
Swisher, a 2024 fellow at the Sine Institute of Policy and Politics, has now published a tell-all memoir of her three decades on the tech beat, spent rubbing elbows with the likes of Steve Jobs, Sergey Brin, Susan Wojcicki, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. Burn Book: A Tech Love Story showcases Swisher’s hold-nothing-back style of journalism, which has earned her both accolades and acrimony.
“I conduct interviews like I’m never going to talk to the person again, but I don’t go out of my way to be mean,” Swisher said at a Career Conversation seminar hosted by the Sine Institute in April.
Burn Book is, at its heart, a memoir following the course of Swisher’s career, which parallels the explosion of the internet, the dot-com boom, the rise (and sometimes the fall) of companies like AOL, Netscape, Yahoo, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Uber, Twitter, and Tesla. It also tracks Swisher’s increasing frustration with the power dynamics of Silicon Valley, in spite of—or perhaps because of—her growing closeness with the big-time players in the technology world.
“The people behind these tech companies have gotten richer, more powerful, more unaccountable, and more arrogant,” says Swisher, host of On with Kara Swisher, cohost of the Pivot podcast, and editor-at-large at New York. “When I started covering them, they weren’t the center of the universe, and now they are.”
That message—and the implications of that power for the devices and apps we use every day—is one of the things she hopes readers take away from Burn Book. But her story has myriad lessons about sexism, politics, history, media, and technology.
“I didn’t write this book for tech people,” Swisher says. “I wrote it for everybody else.”
By the turn of the millennium, Swisher writes in her book, she had begun to feel trapped by her weekly Wall Street Journal column. The Long Island native had also begun to view many of the claims made by tech moguls as lies and deceit—most tech CEOs were not motivated by a philanthropic desire to change the world for the better as they often claimed.
As she writes in Burn Book: “I came to realize that many tech titans’ warped self-righteousness fueled them more than money, power, and the growing legions of obsequious enablers on the payroll. It inevitably curdled their souls, creating an arrogance that masked what was a deep self-hatred and anger. I have never seen a more powerful and rich group of people who saw themselves as the victim so intensely.”
In 2003, Swisher left behind her column and, with longtime colleague Walt Mossberg, launched the All Things Digital conference series. That series, in which the duo interviewed high-profile players in the tech world in front of a live audience, became a prestigious part of the technology media landscape and spurred them to create the online publication All Things D, followed later by Recode.
Swisher’s “invaluable knowledge and unique perspective on the past, present, and future of technology and innovation” is what prompted Amy Dacey, SPA/MA ’95, executive director of the Sine Institute, to tap her for the AU fellowship. Sine’s sixth cohort also included Larry Hogan, former Maryland governor; Thomas Nides, former US ambassador to Israel; Daniella Senior, CEO and founder, Colada Shop; Manisha Singh, founder and principal, Sunstone Strategy Group; and Patrice Willoughby, senior vice president of global policy and impact, NAACP.
“Kara provided sage insight on the benefits—and dangers—of technological innovations like social media and AI and offered advice on how to navigate the rapid pace of change,” Dacey says. “I hope students who came to her events better understand the complexities and risks that can arise from tech innovation and that they are inspired by Kara’s tenacity, courage, and relentless pursuit of the truth over the course of her career.”
Today, Swisher is an outspoken critic of the take-no-responsibility attitude that she says persists in much of the technology world. She blames that attitude on the failure of both domestic and foreign policymakers and says that it is leading to misinformation, conspiracy theories, and national security problems. She argues that technology should not be controlled and shaped only by a few CEOs. Instead, she stresses to young people, like the students she spoke with at AU, that they can, over their lifetimes, play a key role in holding the wealthy and powerful accountable by lobbying for policy changes.
“It is an astonishing thing to think about the most powerful companies in the world and the richest people in the history of the world not having any regulation applied to them,” Swisher said during her conversation with CNN journalist Audie Cornish in March, hosted by the Sine Institute. Policymakers, she said, have ceded to corporate lobbyists who argue that too much regulation will squash innovation and lead to economic disaster. “Honestly, I think what squashed innovation is our reliance on [these companies] to self-regulate and prevent disaster after disaster,” she said.
But Swisher also retains some of the excitement and optimism about tech that first drew her to the internet beat in 1994. At the same time that she finishes a book tour for Burn Book, she is traveling around the world reporting on the potential of artificial intelligence and other new technology to tackle society’s most pressing challenges for her next book.
“The way we’re going to be changing things in medicine and health care and climate change is incredibly exciting,” Swisher told students at the Sine Institute during one seminar. “Everyone focuses on a lot of negatives of tech, but I think it’s important to think about the positives.”