I mostly know Swisher from her various podcasts. She's fairly funny and level-headed about the inherent stupidness of much of the technology industry. I tried her earlier book There Must Be a Pony In Here Somewhere, but didn't make much headway, largely because I wasn't that interested in AOL as a company. I vaguely remembered reading an article about the company in Wired back when it was still a going concern and even then it was categorised as dull. I'm sure there's more to it and Swisher's book probably explains a lot of the now-incomprehensible AOL Time Warner merger. But it wasn't for me.
I tend to read books about business and technology when I go to sleep. I find them weirdly comforting. I particularly like books about ambitious hardware or software projects, such as ‘Showstopper! The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft’ by G. Pascal Zachary, which is full of technical detail or ‘Careless People’ by Sarah Wynn-Williams, which is full of weird, subhuman behaviour. The latter surprised me not with the callousness and ignorance of the technology entrepreneurial class, but more that anyone was shocked by it. The most surprising part of that book was that the author ever thought that Facebook could be a tool for genuine social good. It felt like an idea from long, long ago.
Swisher’s book is more of an overall precis of Swisher’s career and a round-up of the most notable figures in Silicon Valley. Although there’s promise of gossip, there isn’t much. Although fairly blunt, none of the commentary feels unfair, which is a fine line to tread.
Extracts
I’m not saying these are the best bits, but I’m trying to clip things from books that I find interesting. Just imagine the pencilled notes in the margins saying “yes, so true”.
Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
Sandberg, for her part, listened and then said in her silky-smoothest of voices some version of “Calm down, Kara. We’re handling it.” Well, they didn’t handle the propaganda. Not from the Russians. Not in Iran. And not in Sri Lanka, where a Buddhist mob attacked Muslims over false information spread on Facebook, prompting a government official to tell the New York Times in the most perfect of metaphors: “The germs are ours, but Facebook is the wind.”
Spalding Gray’s show Interviewing the Audience, which I saw five times at the Kennedy Center in the 1990s. You could actually see it countless times because each show, Gray pulled three audience members onstage to talk.
the much-discussed Section 230 gives the sector an unusual amount of protection. Still, most regulators and politicians are utterly missing in action. Europe has done a much better job in large part thanks to the scourge of Silicon Valley, Margrethe Vestager, the Danish politician who headed the European Commission for Competition.
goat rodeo