With her height of 157 cm and her aviator glasses, Kara Swisher is the most feared tech journalist in the United States. For years, she managed to get Silicon Valley moguls talking even though they knew nothing of her biting wit, her taste for the scoop and her abrasive criticism. “Smart people like smart interviews,” she tells us via Zoom. But today, tech no longer amuse him. Too much concentration in the hands of a small number who are accountable to no one: money has produced its usual effect of corruption, she believes.
In her new book, released on February 27 (Simon and Schuster), the 61-year-old columnist does not fear burning what she loved. The title, Burn Book, is a reference to the practice of American teenage girls, illustrated in the film Lolita in spite of myself (Mark Waters, 2004), to write down in a book what they really think of their classmates. The subtitle talks about “tech love story”, but the disillusionment is apparent from the first line: “In the end, it was just about capitalism. »
The star of tech journalism does not blame Silicon Valley moguls for making billions, but for claiming to want to improve the lot of the human species. In the end, they built lawless multinationals that care little about the social consequences of their inventions. Like eternal teenagers immersed in their video games, and everyone takes “for player number 1”.
“They are not only lying to the press but to themselves,” she writes. But no one can lie to Kara Swisher for long. When she was little, her mother called her “Tempesta”, because of her propensity for confrontation. One Sunday morning, his world collapsed when his father, chief anesthesiologist at Brooklyn Jewish Hospital (New York), did not wake up. She was only 5 years old. She still thinks about it every day, but, beneath her armor, she has no “never stopped moving forward”.
Attempted by the CIA
His career began at the student newspaper at Georgetown University in Washington. She was tempted by the CIA, but homosexuals were not welcome there. After graduating from the Columbia School of Journalism, she studied in Washington alongside the star of a conservative show at the time, John McLaughlin, a thug whom she quickly rebuked and denounced.
“Most people in this town stab you in the back. Kara stabbed me in the front,” he later remarked. The journalist highlighted the appreciation of her book, with a comment from Elon Musk dating from May 2023, almost a medal: “Kara has become so shrill that only dogs can hear her”…
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