Kara Swisher on Tech Billionaires: “I Don’t Think They Like People”
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 1 April 2024
⏱️ 29 minutes
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Summary
Kara Swisher landed on the tech beat as a young reporter at the Washington Post decades ago. She would stare at the teletype machine at the entrance and wonder why this antique sat there when it could already be supplanted by a computer. She eventually foretold the threat that posed to her own business—print journalism—by the rise of free online media; today, she is still raising alarms about how A.I. companies make use of the entire contents of the Internet. “Pay me for my stuff!” she says. “You can’t walk into my store and take all my Snickers bars and say it’s for fair use.” She is disappointed in government leaders who have failed to regulate businesses and protect users’ privacy. Although she remains awed by the innovation produced by American tech businesses, Swisher is no longer “naïve” about their motives. She also witnessed a generation of innovators grow megalomaniacal. The tech moguls claim they “know better; you’re wrong. You’ve done it wrong. The media’s done it wrong. The government’s done it wrong. . . . When they have lives full of mistakes! They just paper them over.” Once on good terms with Elon Musk, Swisher believes money has been deleterious to his mental health. “I don’t know what happened to him. I’m not his mama, and I’m not a psychiatrist. But I think as he got richer and richer—there are always enablers around people that make them think they hung the moon.”
This segment originally aired on March 1, 2024.
Transcript
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| 0:44.1 | Things people love. |
| 0:49.4 | This is the political scene, and I'm David Remnick. |
| 0:54.6 | Over the last 30 years, tech companies, the upstarts of the business world back then |
| 0:59.7 | became the business world. |
| 1:03.8 | Microsoft is rated the most profitable company on the planet by some rankings. |
| 1:08.6 | Apple and Alphabet, which owns Google, are way up there as well. |
| 1:12.2 | Tech companies have amassed incredible power. Their impacts on privacy, on mental health, |
| 1:18.6 | on journalism, on just about everything, we're only beginning to understand it now. |
| 1:26.6 | One of the sharpest voices on the evolution of the tech industry, and often one of the funniest, |
| 1:31.1 | is the journalist Kara Swisher. She knows better than anyone how the internet came to define so much |
| 1:37.1 | of our lives. And since the 90s, she's been influential and even feared in Silicon Valley, |
| 1:42.9 | and she's just published Burnbook, a tech love |
| 1:45.9 | story. It begins with Kara Swisher's time at the Washington Post where we first met. |
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