Authoritarians or A-holes? Kara Swisher on Tech's Biggest Egos

Offline with Jon Favreau

Crooked Media

Society & Culture, News

4.7 • 2K Ratings

🗓️ 11 February 2024

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Kara Swisher, longtime tech reporter and author of the forthcoming memoir Burn Book, joins Offline to talk about the tech tycoons who think they’re qualified to run our country. She and Jon break down Silicon Valley’s ever growing self importance, whether its leaders are more or less fascist than we think, and how big tech ate the media industry alive. But first! Max and Jon explain why Apple’s Vision Pro headset is the company’s most impressive—and depressing—gadget to date, and how Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are saving American monoculture.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This grievance industrial complex is really quite deep and many of them personally.
0:04.4	You know, Elon of course is the patron's saying of that.
0:06.7	Everybody's trying to get him, everyone's trying to bring him down, everybody sucks,
0:10.9	like this week it's the immigrants, next week it's the gay people
0:14.7	the trans people you know it just everybody sucks but them and the reason they
0:20.4	don't suck is because they're rich. I'm John Favreau.
0:24.0	Welcome to offline.
0:27.0	I'm John Favreau. I'm Max Fisher.
0:30.0	And a lot of you might recognize the voice you just heard as Kara Swishers,
0:34.0	the award-winning journalist Silicon Valley Whisperer and author of the soon to be released,
0:38.4	Burn Book.
0:39.6	Kara's already got a long piece in New York magazine that's adapted from her hotly anticipated
0:44.0	memoir and it's unsurprisingly about a lot of the tech overlords she's
0:47.8	interviewed and terrified over the years which is why I thought of her when I came across a recent Atlantic piece titled
0:54.7	the Rise of Techno authoritarianism and a recent Axios piece about the same topic
1:00.0	that's more sympathetically titled, the rise of techno optimism.
1:05.0	Some call it authoritarianism, some call it optimism.
1:07.0	Those are the two choices that we have.
1:10.0	It's one of those two and maybe both.
1:12.0	Both are about the reactionary political turn that a lot of Silicon Valley types have taken.
1:17.7	Your Elon's, your Peter Teals, your Mark Andresians.
1:21.6	Do they represent a dangerous new kind of authoritarianism, or are they just misunderstood
	...

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