Kara Swisher > Quotes

“French philosopher Paul Virilio has a quote I think about a lot: “When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane, you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution…. Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress.”
― Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

“We had, in essence, privatized our public discourse and were now allowing billionaires to implement the rules of the road.”
― Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

“A garden is never Finished, and nor are you: Become, I think, a garden again, And never, like a garden, cease.”
― Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

“Silicon Valley had perfected the image of itself as a meritocracy and touted that as one of its greatest strengths—that anyone could become a billionaire. In fact, tech has always been a mirrortocracy, full of people who liked their own reflection so much that they only saw value in those that looked the same. They keep copying themselves, choosing slight variations on the same avatar template. Financial success was proof of their talents, which was like the old cliché of starting on third base and thinking you hit a home run.”
― Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

“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.”
― Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

“The trash-talkers are the most annoying to me, aiming all kinds of barbs at journalists, the government, the “woke” culture, the state of California, and particularly San Francisco, where most of them made their fortunes. They position themselves as populist truth-tellers to their legions of stans. I don’t know about you, but it’s funny to see the world’s richest men urging people to stick it to the man, when they are the man. They are, as often as not, inaccurate and couldn’t care less.”
― Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. 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.”
― Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

“I have always maintained that the people who ultimately succeed are the creative ones.”
― Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

“summed up Zuckerberg’s attitude perfectly, noting, “Between speech and truth, he chose speech. Between speed and perfection, he chose speed. Between scale and safety, he chose scale.” That idea of “mistakes were made” in service to the bigger idea would carry throughout Zuckerberg’s career and bleed into Facebook’s culture. This approach was distilled in the “Move fast and break things” posters that adorned the company headquarters early on. While this motto was a geek coding reference to software, it was a telling choice. The aim was to “break things” instead of “change things” or “fix things” or “improve things.”
― Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

“More people across the globe get their news and cues from social media, it has a scary ability to generate anxiety and rage, and it is addictive. Expert after expert I talked to over the years has made the same point—in the new paradigm, engagement equals enragement. This is made worse by the people who run these companies, for whom anticipation of consequences is lacking and whose first instinct is to let it all through the gate, regardless of potential damage of danger. What’s the opposite of the Mommy state? Parent-free chaos.”
― Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

“People who never feel unsafe a day in their lives tend never to consider the safety of others.”
― Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

“I continue to be disturbed by the implications of a small number of homogeneous men—and they remain mostly men—controlling the next stage of computing. I’ll repeat: People who never feel unsafe a day in their lives tend never to consider the safety of others.”
― Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

“He was right, and even more so when he said: “The better we get at getting better, the faster we will get better.”
― Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

“In the poem, “A Gathered Distance,” Mark Tredinnick articulates this well. He writes: A garden is never Finished, and nor are you: Become, I think, a garden again, And never, like a garden, cease.”
― Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

“A truism began to form in my brain about the lack of women and people of color in the leadership ranks of tech: The innovators and executives ignored issues of safety not because they were necessarily awful, but because they had never felt unsafe a day in their lives. Their personal experience informed the development of unfettered platforms.”
― Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

“frequently wrong, but never in doubt.”
― Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

“I boiled the premise down to the symbols for entropy and syntropy, which are arrows pointing outward and inward, basically representing chaos and order. I had covered the chaos—break things!—and now I wanted to know what the tech powers were going to do to put things back in order.”
― Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

“Another great source of intel came from contacting employees who had quit or been fired. I often thought of myself as Silicon Valley’s HR department, conducting exit interviews right as people were ready to spill. It was time-consuming, but the effort paid off over and over. Remember: People always like to tell their side of the story.”
― Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

“I noted that power had become far too concentrated in a small group of homogeneous people and that money had done its usual job of corrupting.”
― Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

“We all need electricity, so it doesn’t have to be beautiful or delightful. That’s why the electric company gets away with draping ugly wires all over beautiful cities, ruining the view.”
― Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

“Perhaps most importantly, Jobs thought a lot about privacy. This quote is from the 2010 ATD conference, which I tried to trim down, but gave up because it’s worth reading in its entirety:”
― Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

“I had taken to dubbing them “man-boys,” which was not nice, I know, but it was true for these people who felt half-formed and opaque to me with no discernible edge or interesting bits. Worst of all, they were different in ways that made no difference. They’d insist that they wanted to “change the world” and “it was all about the journey” and “money was not the goal.” Those were all lies, of course, made more problematic by the fact that these men were lying to themselves most of all.”
― Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

“Chapter 11: staying vertical (page 193)

The experience got me thinking about what is normal and how it's different for everyone. As Jobs discussed in his Stanford speech, I was confronted by a series of questions: How much time should you spend on your personal life? How much time do you spend on your professional life?”
― Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

“Which is why it is always good to have a backup plan. Musk and especially Peter Thiel, who once had mutual antipathy, had also brought in Senator J. D. Vance, who had largely bumbled through his short tech and legislative careers, to be Trump’s vice presidential candidate. Once a Trump detractor, calling his new boss “America’s Hitler,” Vance had done a complete turnaround in much the same way Musk had. I cannot count the many times Musk had mocked and dismissed Trump to me and the pair had traded public barbs, until they kissed and made up. The same for Vance.”
― Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

“Investor Chris Sacca, who also was not invited to the meeting, likewise seemed to grasp what was happening, boiling it down beautifully. “It’s funny, in every tech deal I’ve ever done, the photo op comes after you’ve signed the papers,” he told me. “If Trump publicly commits to embrace science, stops threatening censorship of the Internet, rejects fake news, and denounces hate against our diverse employees, only then it would make sense for tech leaders to visit Trump Tower. Short of that, they are being used to legitimize a fascist.”
― Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

“Chapter 6: the end of the beginning (page 98)

I have always maintained that the people who ultimately succeed are the creative ones.”
― Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

“Chapter 11: staying vertical (page 194)

Like Jobs, I truly believe that you should push yourself in areas where you are passionate, and if you don't feel passion toward something, get out of it.”
― Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

“There’s a third place to go, which is what we call post-tragic, where you actually accept and grieve”
― Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

“Tech leaders had promised to “change the world,” but when it came to societal shortcomings like basic sexism, they simply reinvented the wheel. I found it dispiriting to watch the same problems that plagued older industries prosper in this allegedly brave new world.”
― Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

“Life is a series of next things, and you’d do well to be ready for that. And”
― Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story