“Burn Book” is the breezy memoir of a highflying journalist who, at 61, is still on top of her game. Speedrunning her illustrious career in under 300 pages, Swisher intersperses brief recountings of well-trodden tech-industry lore with tidbits of gossip, behind-the-scenes backstories and zesty one-liners. Along the way we encounter, through Swisher’s gimlet eyes, some of the legends of the digital economy, from Jobs to Zuckerberg to Musk.
She has a knack for puncturing puffed-up male egos, and her fans will not be surprised at how many of tech’s luminaries come off as thin-skinned man-children. In one of the book’s more amusing set pieces, a puckish Steve Jobs needles a peevish Bill Gates backstage ahead of a historic 2007 joint interview, their first public appearance together after decades of arch-rivalry. Gates — “the world’s wealthiest Goofus to Jobs’ elegant Gallant” — seemed on the verge of calling it off until Jobs broke the tension with a well-timed joke.
In another revealing pre-interview scene, Swisher marvels at how a then-26-year-old Mark Zuckerberg seemed more concerned with his unflattering depiction in the upcoming movie “The Social Network” than the real-world impacts of his product. She reflects: “This was the first, but far from the last, flash of a persistent victim mentality that would plague him and the company for years to come as fair criticisms mounted.”
Swisher’s own estimable ego fares rather better in a book whose anecdotes often serve to underscore the prescience of her predictions. Among her formative insights, as a cub Washington Post reporter covering the advent of the consumer internet, was that “anything that can be digitized would be.” What sounds obvious now was dismissed as hogwash by the media barons of the 1980s and 1990s, with whom the fearless Swisher clashed loudly and often.
Her appetite for disruption — “I am, at heart, a capitalist,” she avers — aligned her more with the bright-eyed techies whose ascendancy she traced than with the East Coast establishment her employers represented. That helped her to ingratiate with key subjects before they hit it big, from AOL chief Steve Case to Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen to Google’s Sergey Brin and Susan Wojcicki, who went on to lead YouTube. As she got to know them, badgering them for info and at times fielding their requests for advice, she honed a tongue-in-cheek journalistic credo: “Despite some evidence to the contrary, every tech mogul is also a human being.”
Don’t expect deep forays into those moguls’ psyches, though. Their characters are sketched in brief vignettes, such as the bizarre baby shower for Brin and his then-wife Anne Wojcicki — yes, Susan’s sister — that featured a dress code of diapers and onesies and “an ice sculpture of a woman whose breast was oozing White Russians.” Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, struck Swisher on first meeting as “feral,” skittering around a warehouse “like a frenetic mongoose.” And while she gets off satisfying shots at familiar targets, there aren’t quite enough incendiary new anecdotes to justify the book’s tantalizing title.
To be fair, that may be at least partly because she has not held back from singeing them in her reportage and punditry. Some of “Burn Book’s” best lines come when Swisher quotes from her previously published work, like the lead of a profile she wrote for Vanity Fair in 2014 about Uber’s then-CEO: “Every now and then, when he’s spoiling for a fight, Travis Kalanick has a face like a fist.” And her famous interviews of Zuckerberg — one in which he nearly melted into a puddle of sweat onstage, and another years later in which he ventured an ill-advised tangent in defense of Holocaust deniers — did more to torch his reputation than anything she reveals here.
While of less interest to a general audience, Swisher’s scathing sideswipes of some of the media blowhards she encountered at her own workplaces — including the late TV host John McLaughlin, whom she paints as a pompous misogynist and “truly awful human being” — cut deeper than her digs at the tech billionaires. In contrast, a venture capitalist she describes as “morally bankrupt” goes unnamed.
This is not an autobiography, and those thirsting for intimate details of Swisher’s personal life will finish the book unquenched. Still, she traces just enough of her own story to hint at the origins of both her canny self-reliance and her casual irreverence toward power and authority figures. Her beloved father’s sudden death when she was 5, the paranoid cruelty of her stepfather, societal discrimination against gay people in the Reagan era and rampant misogyny in both the media and tech industries conspired to forge a hardened exterior and wry wit. One aspect of her youth she doesn’t emphasize is the wealth into which she was born and raised, which could help to explain why she’s uncowed by billionaires who inspire fear and toadyism in others.
There’s little of the personal growth narrative that propels some memoirs. Swisher, in Swisher’s telling, started out as a bold truth-teller, ended up as a bold truth-teller, and spent much of the time in between telling bold truths. To the extent there’s a narrative arc, it’s one of disillusionment with Silicon Valley’s idealistic promise of building a better world. Having decamped Washington for California in 1996 to get in on the “Gold Rush,” Swisher made the return voyage a few years ago, a move she sees as consistent with her transition from “a chronicler of the internet age” to “its cranky Cassandra.”
Late in the book, Swisher acknowledges of her relationship to Silicon Valley that she had become “too much a creature of the place.” While she doesn’t dwell on it, the book offers some support for the critique that the brand of scoop-driven journalism she long practiced, with its fixation on the personalities and machinations of tech’s power players, came with blind spots.
One is her apparent willingness to forgive certain tech tycoons’ transgressions as long as they remained useful to her as sources. She welcomed Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, despite a track record of boorish behavior — seeming to finally sour on him only after he stopped replying to her e-mails. (Swisher says it was in fact his October 2022 tweet of a homophobic conspiracy theory about Nancy Pelosi’s husband that crossed her moral “Rubicon.”)
A more substantial oversight is that her preoccupation with the personalities of the few at the top risks obscuring the incentive systems that keep elevating the unscrupulous to those positions. A tech journalist’s memoir need not propose a radical reimagining of 21st-century capitalism. But as a remedy to what ails our digital realm, Swisher’s call for “more quiet kindness” from tech tycoons and some undefined action from regulators falls short of inspiring.
If the book feels tossed-off in parts, it could have something to do with Swisher’s preternatural workload, which these days includes hosting a pair of popular podcasts, a contributing editorship at New York magazine, and raising two young children (her third and fourth) with her second wife. (Disclosure: Swisher is married to Amanda Katz, a Washington Post opinion editor.) She admits as much in the final chapter, when she cops to asking ChatGPT how she should end the book. Mercifully, she rejects its advice.
In all, it’s a lively read from a sui generis figure, provided you don’t mind rolling your eyes now and then at how often the moral of a given encounter turns out to be that Swisher was right all along. To her credit, she’s self-aware and often funny about it. It’s just that the things she was right about — like tech bouncing back from the 2001 dot-com bust, Google drinking Yahoo’s milkshake and Facebook being manipulated by malign actors — are mostly old news by now. And the things she failed to foresee, such as how the idealistic exuberance of the early internet era would curdle into the same systems of entrenched wealth and power they disrupted, prompt not quite enough introspection about what led her, along with so many others, to get them wrong.
Will Oremus writes about the ideas, products and power struggles shaping the digital world for The Washington Post.
Simon & Schuster. 320 pp. $30
