24
Some scary, profound and dangerous insights here that should be a wake up call to all of us to get the eff off all for-profit internet platforms: “I have never seen a more powerful and rich group of people who saw themselves as the victim so intensely.” This is so, so dangerous.
This: "While Silicon Valley liked to regard itself as a meritocracy, she calls it a “mirrortocracy, full of people who liked their own reflection so much that they only saw value in those that looked the same”. She suggests a reason the leaders so often ignore the impact on customer safety is “they had never felt unsafe a day in their lives”.
I worry sometime that ovarit might fall prey to this: Swisher notes “in the new paradigm, engagement equals enragement”. It has certainly made GC feminists huge targets.
My question is how can we all know this is true and not care: > Even if it was never the intention, tech companies became key players in killing our comity and stymieing our politics, our government, our social fabric, and most of all, our minds, by seeding isolation, outrage, and addictive behaviour.>
Tech has set women back decades bc of this. What it has done to children is unforgivable.
The Tech bros are our new Roman emperors. The power they have over society is unprecedented and really scary.
I worry sometimes that Ovarit might fall prey to this. Yeah, to be fair Ovarit was set up with the sole aim of being a place where GC feminists could openly talk to each other, vent, and share information without censorship. It is what it says on the label. These tech organizations are like the liberal men in the last Victoria Smith article - lots of posturing pretending they support women, papering over the undercurrent of misogyny.
Burn Book sounds interesting.
It's certainly enragement and we know that stress is bad for ourselves.
It's a good read. Anyone who has followed tech media knows Swisher's long been one of the best straight-shooter tech journalists. An early insider, she's fair minded, breaks stories right and left, is not mean spirited but one of the sharpest "take no prisoners" thinkers. BB is basically her autobiography with an emphasis on how she first came to cover DC/NoVa tech for WaPo back in the late 1980s/early 1990s when everyone else dismissed tech as a who cares fad, while she covered it as a business story. Her academic and professional cred is impeccable as if she was destined to cover that industry; right time, right place, right person. The book is worth it as a trip down memory lane for techie Gen X/Boomers as well as for youngers on how digital so easily came to own the universe - and Congress - in only a decade or so. Bonus, she names names; can afford to at her all but untouchable professional level. Her reveal on insider corporate tech and media is spot on.
I like Kara Swisher, mostly. I’ve valued her journalism for most of our lives. Thanks for posting this, I forgot about it soon after it came out.
During her publicity, I learned that she comes from a wealthy family. This is one of the reasons why she has been an independent writer, naming names. She also hasn’t made billions off the technical secrets she knew about. A woman with her own money doesn’t need to get a real job. Other women of her generation might have been able to do similarly confrontational journalism, but the magazine they wrote for failed, so they had to work in marketing / pr / customer service / hr in the same industry they had been investigating. A lot of my writer friends ended up like that.
I’m glad Kara made it. She believes that kids can be trans though, alas.