Ramstad: Famed tech journalist Kara Swisher burns it all down

The most Kara Swisher thing that Kara Swisher did with her new book “Burn Book: A Tech Love Story” was to make sure there was no index.

“So you have to read the whole book all the way through to see if you’re in it,” she wrote inside. “I’ll be honest — most of you are not.”

No business journalist in this generation has carried more clout within the industry they cover than Swisher. On Tuesday, speaking in downtown Minneapolis to promote the book, she described how she became both loved and hated by some of the wealthiest and most influential people in American business.

“I tended to separate the adults from the man-boys,” Swisher told the audience at Westminster Presbyterian Church. “You don’t need to be childish to invent things.”

For 15 years, Swisher and I were part of the 40-or-so person team covering the technology industry at the Wall Street Journal. I was based in Dallas and then in Asia, far from the core group in San Francisco that included Swisher. Still, I’d have a nice addition to my retirement account if I was given $1 for every time someone asked me to be introduced to Swisher or Walt Mossberg, the Journal’s first — and legendarily scrupulous — tech product reviewer.

While I was covering the PC war between Dell and Compaq in the late 1990s, Swisher recognized that power was rapidly shifting away from manufacturing companies to newcomers focused on the internet, like Netscape, Yahoo and America Online.

In the book, Swisher said the Journal’s focus on PC hardware and software was important. “But to me, that was like focusing on the inside of the mechanical watch — an assortment of gears, calipers, and gaskets few people understood or cared to know about. The Internet was different. I was determined to tell people not how the watch worked, but what time it was,” she wrote.

After a year or so, Swisher became a columnist. Her influence grew as she punctured the hype and pretense of the mostly young men at those internet firms, while breaking news about their latest deals or firings. “One of the things I like about tech is the immediacy and the urgency of the people in it,” she said at Westminster on Tuesday. “They’re making things.”

She and Mossberg later hosted can’t-miss conferences that became news-making events with figures like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg. In recent years, she gained more fame as a columnist at the New York Times and podcast host for Vox and New York magazine.

Swisher’s optimism about the transformative power of internet companies diminished after the social media business emerged. Privacy flew out the window. Addictions and mental health problems ballooned. Political and economic power concentrated. Regulators failed to stop any of it, or do anything about it.

“There is no regulation on tech,” Swisher said. “They can’t murder people, but they do damage in a different way. It’s not as obvious as cigarettes, but there are addiction issues, suicide issues, mental health issues.”

Swisher said she’s had high hopes for Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Minnesota’s senior senator who has developed expertise in antitrust matters and proposed several laws to arrest the power of the search firms and social media companies.

“She tries really hard, and every time she calls me and says ‘This time, I’m getting it through.’ And I say, ‘No, you’re not,’” Swisher said. “This has become our thing.”

The Minnesota Democrat has been repeatedly outgunned by the cash and lobbying tech companies have directed at members of Congress and the political parties, Swisher said. It’s something the senator has often discussed publicly.

“She gets the stuffing kicked out of her by the tech companies, who spend so much money on lobbying, and both Democrats and Republicans fall for that,” Swisher said.

“This industry managed to slip through at a time where our politics are so fractured, and they’ve made it more fractured and they’ve taken advantage of that fracturing,” she added.

The European Commission is more aggressive, and its latest law, called the Digital Services Act and enacted last month, is designed to prevent harmful activities online and the spread of disinformation. Swisher hosted the commission’s antitrust chief, Margrethe Vestager, on a podcast this weekend. “The very simple logic is that what is considered to be illegal offline should also be considered and treated as illegal online,” Vestager told her.

Swisher ends “Burn Book” with a chapter on artificial intelligence, or AI, the current “next big thing” in tech that’s vacuuming up loads of capital and talent, and producing huge valuations and growth. She wrestles with the uncertainty about the effects of AI, which is crystallized in the perennial-but-sensational question of whether it will kill us.

She told the audience in Minneapolis that, just like at the start of the internet era, the AI industry is cloaked in enormous promise and hype.

“Any technology is a weapon and a tool,” she said. “History shows that bad people want to use it as a weapon.”