The Miseducation of Kara Swisher

I have no intention in reading Swisher's book. I make it a personal policy to read things that work to expand my understanding and after listening to an episode of Tech Won't Save Us where the author of this article was invited to speak, this book doesn't seem like it'd do so. Something Edward mentions her is how I felt about other journalists when it came to handling things like the situation of willingly platforming Nazis:

The long and short of it is that Swisher is not a good journalist—or, framed more generously, that she thrived in an industry with remarkably low standards for which we are still paying the price. For decades, tech journalism and criticism has primarily consisted of glowing gadget reviews, laudatory profiles, and reprinted press releases, all of it colored by Silicon Valley’s self-aggrandizing vision of itself as a laboratory of a brighter future.

This is effectively what outlets like The Verge, TechCrunch and other flowery outlets of the industry have become (or always were). It's fair to say that these organizations are tightly beholden to what's allowed to be printed; but that's not necessarily an excuse for those who can (and have) gone independent to continue beating the same drum. I briefly got chastised online for announcing my unsubscribing from a journalist who effectively did this. It took them to privately address them to finally have them shift their stances^[1]. There's really one way this happens and Edward says it plainly:

This is a compelling narrative only if you ignore every available fact.

I've written a bit about my disdain for companies like Apple that take advantage of overseas labor and have an operating capacity that mimics that of the more abusive companies in the tech industry, a mantle now taken up by Elon Musk. However, in my personal experience, I found that things like this matter less depending on one's investment into a company. For example, I've been told that I should focus more on Google or Microsoft instead of Apple because of the value they provide. It strikes me as a narrow perspective to note that when I have in the past (and currently still am) critical of both of these places. Edward mentions, in the same podcast episode, about the importance of listening to the people whose labor craft these companies; the contractors instead of the C-suite, the manual labors instead of the marketing teams. By directly and uncritically consuming the party line of a company, you're doing their work for them^[2]. That's what folks like Swisher and (from my own reading and review) Casey Newton enable. We need to end the worship of the executive, consider business journalism to be no more than tabloid material and focus on people and their needs. Swisher's note of being the "tech whisperer" makes her nearly as responsible for stroking the egos of these men^[3]:

The first thing Swisher did after learning about this was to call up Yahoo chief executive and cofounder Jerry Yang. “You need to get them off your platform,” she warned, before turning to the audience to note that “I did not often warn companies, but I had seen this so many times before that I could not keep it to myself.” Other potential ethical lapses abound: Swisher advises Rupert Murdoch not to invest in Vice Media, Mark Zuckerberg calls her late one night for her feedback on an essay he is writing, Page asks Swisher for help writing an essay extolling the virtues of Google—including its long-ignored “Don’t Be Evil” commandment—and Elon Musk asks Swisher for her thoughts on what to do with Twitter shortly after acquiring it.

If Elon Musk is calling you for advice — you're not someone I can take seriously. Edward ends this with something that reminds me of something Anil Dash has written about the ultra-wealthy and their need to exist in a bubble:

I use “we” loosely because Swisher’s intended audience is not you or me, but instead those with power: she writes about and for them. Over the course of a long and storied career closely reporting on the tech industry and its titans, she has aped their motions, sat at their dinner tables, drunk their wine, gone to their weird parties, played with their baubles, repeated their lies, and offered them counsel. Swisher may style herself as Silicon Valley’s critic laureate, but she’s much closer to the court fool.