Heath Brown reviews Burn Book: A Tech Love Story, published today by Simon & Schuster.
Kara Swisher begins her recently published love letter to engineers in a very unusual time and place: not in Menlo Park, Cupertino, or Seattle, but in midtown Manhattan. Swisher is not pictured in a scene of her in a Silicon Valley office district, but when she snuck through the back door of Trump’s tower for a face-to-face meeting with the president-elect in early 2016. I’ll tell you. Donald his Trump is Chekhov’s gun. burn the booklooms in the background as it plummets over time from AOL to Yahoo to Google to Facebook.
In the early days after his election, Trump was busy fixing the appearance of the White House. He had just unceremoniously fired the man in charge who helped organize the preparations, Governor Chris Christie, to accept praise from the top leaders of America’s Silicon Valley who had gathered in a conference room for a photo. I was making time in my schedule. opportunity.
in burn the book, Swisher said he couldn’t believe they would fall for this ruse, but he still warned them not to fall for Trump’s trap. She implored anyone who would listen that President Trump was not interested in their advice on technology policy, but simply wanted to be submissive to them and photographed to improve his image. To tell.
Some say tech CEOs ignored Mr. Swisher’s advice and headed to the meeting, including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Tesla’s Elon Musk, Apple’s Tim Cook and Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg and others all filed into the shiny lobby elevator. 25th floor.
The meeting ultimately went as Swisher had predicted. As Trump aired the footage on the evening news, CEOs remained silent about their disagreements with him on everything from immigration to climate change.
Nevertheless, in a short video of the meeting, we were able to get a rare candid moment with the president-elect. As the group sat down, President Trump reassured them, saying: It doesn’t matter, we don’t have a formal chain of command. ” Only this time he wasn’t lying. President Trump’s White House is a leaker’s dream, with many staffers citing the president’s promise that the protocol would serve more like “Facebook for you” than a commander-in-chief’s edict. .
Mr. Swisher has made a career out of befriending technology people who more or less take advantage of Mr. Trump’s media strategy. “When it comes to scoops, you’d be surprised who leaked them,” she wrote. “That’s because almost everyone is.” Everyone from waiters to interns to CEOs is in this game, and Swisher’s insights are drawn from the reality that this is how it all works.
As the book progresses from the days of dial-up connections to the era of high-speed internet, Swisher becomes dismayed by the nature of these high-ranking leakers. Many of the early crowd, including Steve Jobs, Jim Barksdale, and Meg Whitman, were thoughtful and concerned about the humanity of technology. Later generations like Elon Musk and Travis Kalanick score primarily high on her “Inspire Productivity” index, and are often described as childish, arrogant, and prickly. doing. Swisher calls Zuckerberg “one of the most careless and dangerous people in the history of technology,” and sees Facebook as a shaky bridge to the future she seems most concerned about. plays the role of
Over time, Swisher shifts his focus from tech geek to government geek, coming full circle and returning to Washington, DC. There she started as a student at Georgetown University, interned, and then began working as a cub reporter for a television station. washington post. By January 6, 2021, Swisher was living in the Capitol and tracking Trump’s movements on Twitter. On that sad day, Chekhov’s gun was fired. After the violence at the Capitol, Trump was quickly banned from Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. It’s nothing more than symbolic punishment for years of using these platforms to spread disinformation and undermine democracy unchecked.
This means that Swisher was probably still around when Joe Biden was sworn in as president, but the 46th president is barely mentioned in the book. (Biden appears on page 158).
This is surprising, considering that four years after tech leaders converged on Trump Tower, they were earning a seat at the table in the Biden transition. But unlike President Trump’s invitation to kiss his ring and pose for a photo, officials at Airbnb, Uber and Lyft, as well as other employees at Amazon and Google, have all said that Biden’s actual He volunteered to join the transition team.
They were all led by Jeff Zients, now the White House chief of staff, who at the time had just completed a two-year term as a board member at Facebook. Mr. Zaients left the board in March 2020 and sold his shares in Facebook weeks before Mr. Biden began assembling his transition team. In the fall of 2020, Zients led the COVID-19 Task Force, helping prepare for the transfer of control of the vaccine rollout.
He wasn’t alone. Former Facebook executives Jessica Hertz, Zaid Zaid, Austin Lin and Erskine Bowles also served in key positions on the Biden transition team.
At first glance, this doesn’t seem to bother Swisher. She’s not averse to someone making money, and a number of them, including Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), and Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) He praises human policymakers’ understanding of technology. There are a few members of Congress, former Rep. David Cicilline (R-Calif.) and current Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.).
Nevertheless, Biden’s transition (and ultimately the presidential White House) differed from the Trump administration in another important way. That means no information was leaked. As I completed research for a book scheduled to be published this May, I contacted hundreds of members of that transition team. Most people ignored my messages, but many others politely gave up the opportunity to speak. For some, it was a non-disclosure agreement signed during the Biden transition that would bind them for at least a year after the transition ends on January 20, 2021. For others, it was just the rigid culture of that transition, firmly established after the Biden transition. The tragic leak of John Podesta’s emails in 2016.
Whatever the reason, just to be safe, the transition team sent everyone a secure laptop and all messages had to be sent through the encrypted app Signal. The formal chain of command was widely understood and firmly adhered to.
I’m not sure if Swisher’s contacts share as much now as they once did. It is unlikely that in the 90s he would have reigned supreme with the NDA as it does today. With the corporatization of technology and the shift of its leaders to positions of political power, it seems inevitable that there will be fewer leaks from the field, and thus fewer scoops collected by Swisher in the wild west of the internet.
It’s probably a good thing that the technology sector has grown a bit, and Mr. Swisher will no doubt appreciate it. But it would also likely result in the public having less insight into the conspiracy. Swisher’s has provided us with insider information over his 30 years. And our understanding of how this fast-growing sector operates has only gotten better for the field. It is not clear what the next 30 years will hold. But at least the chance to hear Swisher call the next generation idiots and fools will make the burn feel good.