Kara Swisher Quotes

A garden is never Finished, and nor are you: Become, I think, a garden again, And never, like a garden, cease.

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.

He was right, and even more so when he said: “The better we get at getting better, the faster we will get better.

We had, in essence, privatized our public discourse and were now allowing billionaires to implement the rules of the road.

I have always maintained that the people who ultimately succeed are the creative ones.

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.

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.

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.

Ten days later, speaking on Kara Swisher’s Recode Decode podcast, the influential venture capitalist Bill Gurley voiced concern about a bubble.6 Gurley had attended an investor conference in Las Vegas where he heard five of eight unicorns talk about “trillions” in their presentations. “We have done something in the ecosystem to encourage this type of outlandish promotion, where you need to use words like ‘trillion,’” Gurley said. “And I think it’s dangerous. When we act like we have the right to disrupt everything or eat every industry, we look like entitled brats,” he continued.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Twitter, stupidly renamed X, has mutated into a platform where the richest man in the world offers his retweet support to racist, sexist, and homophobic conspiracies.

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.

In 1993, I tried out the Mosaic browser, created by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina while they were grad students at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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:

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.

when the violence actually does harm, the companies respond with nothing more than apologies and persistent insistence that they will “do better.” But they will not do better, because they are incapable. In fact, the way the platform was built—the architecture, the DNA, the very bones of it—makes it impossible for them to “do better.

Pao would have even less luck in her next job at Reddit, the online comment network where she was ousted as interim chief executive only a few months after she lost the Kleiner Perkins trial. During her Reddit tenure, Pao was attacked relentlessly for trying to remove revenge porn and all other manner of racist and misogynistic hate speech (the classics!). In that “controversy,” she was subject to a truly heinous series of attacks on her personally by Reddit users, which veered into violent threats. What started out as small became global and huge, as do most attacks on the Internet against women, which quickly become a swarm of hate.

it was a relief to talk to Bezos. He had none of the awkward social deficits, and while he was more obviously venal, I appreciated that he never spewed the “I’m changing the world” craplets that had become de rigueur among the tech set. He had truckloads of enthusiasm about his business, but Bezos never was breathless about any of it.

You have no real ability to ward [disruption] off or to avoid it,” Iger said. “Except by embracing it in some form and using it for the good, or your own good. And so, I just really believe that when it comes to changes that technology is bringing in our businesses, or in storytelling, for instance, bring it in and use it to your advantage. It’s that simple.

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frequently wrong, but never in doubt.

I leave you to your own devices. I mean that: your phone is the best relationship you all have now, the first thing you pick up in the morning and the last thing you touch at night.

When Recode’s Kara Swisher asked Cook what he would do in Zuckerberg’s situation as Congress demanded answers to its concerns, he simply replied, “I wouldn’t be in this situation.

A wheezing and increasingly desperate traditional media company, scared of inevitable death (or worse still, irrelevance) in the hot swirl of a digital revolution, marries itself to the young, sexy and possibly sleazy starlet of the new-media society. Disaster ensues.

For example, AllThingsD broke the story that new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer had secured a $1.1 billion acquisition of blogging platform Tumblr. It was a major scoop at the time with lots of details. Yahoo quickly followed with an official announcement that included the “promise not to screw it up.” They did. Eventually, Tumblr passed from Yahoo to Verizon and, in 2019, was purchased by Matt Mullenweg, the founder of Automattic’s WordPress, for $3 million.

Remember to keep the main thing the main thing.

If you fell down yesterday, stand up today.

I kept wondering why a computer couldn’t do that work—which later happened; thank you, AI—and let humans focus on stories that readers did not know yesterday.

Single people are like TV for married people,

There’s a third place to go, which is what we call post-tragic, where you actually accept and grieve

These tech moguls are so rarely disagreed with that they now interpret valid questions as attacks.

Life is a series of next things, and you’d do well to be ready for that.

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.

Let go, live your life, the grave has no sunny corners. —CHARLES WRIGHT, “HIGH COUNTRY CANTICLE

How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?

If you can imagine your invention in an episode of Black Mirror, then don’t make it… unless it’s a simulation where lesbians can meet because that episode—“San Junipero”—watch it!—was fantastic.

If Mark Zuckerberg is the most damaging man in tech to me, Musk was the most disappointing

Zuckerberg wasn’t an asshole. He was worse. He was one of the most carelessly dangerous men in the history of technology who didn’t even know

the exclusion of women was not an oversight but deliberate.

The people who love you are the only ones that count,

You’re so poor, all you have is your money!

He’s a jerk,” Altman told Kara Swisher. “He has a style that is not a style that I’d want to have for myself. But I think he does really care, and he is feeling very stressed about what the future’s going to look like for humanity.

The dire situation had been aggravated by elected officials who, a quarter century into the Internet age, had managed to pass exactly zero legislation to protect anyone. Democratic institutions that we hold dear had crumbled in the face of what all this digital engagement has wrought: no privacy protections, no updated antitrust laws, no algorithmic transparency requirement, no focus on addiction and mental impact. It is breathtaking to think that there are no significant guidelines governing these areas. However flawed, there are laws for everything but tech companies.

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.

Sue Decker, who was president at Yahoo, once asked me the simple question: “Why do people leak? Are they just disgruntled?” Since I liked Decker, I decided to level with her. “It’s easy to say they’re disgruntled or sneaky,” I replied. “But they leak because they feel like you’re not listening to them and that you do listen to me. And, therefore, employees believe the best way to effect change that needs to happen is to leak. To me.

Index There is no index, people. So, you have to read the whole book all the way through to see if you’re in it. I’ll be honest—most of you are not. Still, read it all, even though it’s hundreds of pages. Think of it like doom-scrolling Twitter—

And while there were exceptions, the richer and more powerful people grew, the more compromised they became—wrapping themselves in expensive cashmere batting until the genuine person fell deep inside a cocoon of comfort and privilege where no unpleasantness intruded.

It was a weird boy wonderland, not unlike Pinocchio’s Pleasure Island, except no one minded the transformation from human into donkey. Instead, they relished it.

The article noted, “A second senior U.S. defense official speaking on the condition of anonymity to be candid, said that there is no system comparable to Starlink and that the cost is likely to run into the hundreds of millions of dollars over the next year. This person had sharp words for Musk saying he ‘dangles hope over the heads of millions, then sticks the DoD with the bill for a system no one asked for but now so many depend on.’ ” The kicker concluded, “ ‘Elon’s gonna Elon,’ the official said.

Chapter 6: the end of the beginning (page 98) I have always maintained that the people who ultimately succeed are the creative ones.

Chapter 7: the golden god (page 125) In other words, I won't go changing to try and please you, which is a piece of advice I would think about for myself and my career many times after hearing it from him. Changing, for sure, but with certain values and mainstays that would never alter.

Chapter 11: staying vertical (page 182) "The people who love you are the only ones that count," he* said to me. Then, tearing up, he added, "Don't waste your time on anyone else." *Steve Jobs

Chapter 11: staying vertical (page 182) The speech had a key line: "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.

Chapter 15: pivoting (page 273) The takeaway from the show-and Gray's overall point-was that everyone is interesting if you ask the right questions. This has always been my approach to interviewing. While I have no particular secret, I approach every interview with these three goals: (1) to make it a conversation, (2) to not be afraid to ask the question everyone is thinking, and (3) to conduct each discussion as if I were never going to interview that person again.

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.

Chapter 12: good bones (page 210) As famed management guru Peter Drucker said, "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it.

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?

Chapter 11: staying vertical (page 185) "You've got to find what you love," Jobs told the graduating class. "And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle.

I came to realize that many tech titans’ warped self-righteousness fueled them more than money, power, and the growing legions of obsequious enablers on the payroll. It inevitably curdled their souls, creating an arrogance that masked what was a deep self-hatred and anger. I have never seen a more powerful and rich group of people who saw themselves as the victim so intensely. Which is why, by nature, they insisted on reframing every failure and mistake they made as an asset—even when it was a failure and, sometimes, a very damaging mistake. Of course, they loved quoting Edison’s quaint trope: “I have not failed. I’ve just found ten thousand ways that won’t work.” But this declaration leaves out a lot about who’s responsible when things go terribly awry and real people get hurt. And because of the reach and amplification of tech, that hurt scaled quickly and continues to this day.

Osnos 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.

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

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.

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.

masking them behind a genuinely infectious maniacal laugh, a curiously baby-fat face, and an anodyne presentation of pleated khakis, sensible shoes, and blue Oxford shirt. Still, from the start, I had no doubt that Jeff Bezos would eat my face off if that is what he needed to do to get ahead.

because I believe that with great power comes great responsibility.

The mind of America is seized by a fatal dry rot—and it’s only a question of time before all that the mind controls will run amuck in a frenzy of stupid, impotent fear.” With

Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now, take what’s left and live it properly. What doesn’t transmit light creates its own darkness. —MARCUS AURELIUS, MEDITATIONS

so far the record is pretty clear that tech leaders have largely abrogated their responsibilities around the deleterious impact of their products, either in pursuit of more growth and profits or to duck any incoming flack. That was especially clear in the 2024 election, as companies such as Meta and X drastically cut back on their safety and moderation teams. A stark contrast from the 2016 election, when social media companies felt pressured to evaluate how their lack of moderation may have affected the results.

What I hate is persistent puerile behavior and lack of care about the pain it causes, qualities too often tinged with odd personal grievance and deep-seated insecurity. These are grown men, who use excuses to dismiss the damage they create.

What’s most curious about Swisher’s role in the Valley is not whether her connections and conferences compromise her—beyond grumbling about her Google conflict, not even her rivals can name a big story she’s pulled up short on, and she’s broken more big stories in the industry than anyone else—but how she’s managed to elevate herself into Silicon Valley royalty by writing about Silicon Valley royalty, often acerbically.” He was dead right—while I had not become them, I was part of the scene in a way that was starting to feel uncomfortable. I had been a camera, at times an eviscerating one, but it was long past time to use all that knowledge I had gained to finally tell people what that photo actually showed. And while I was hardly an amanuensis, I had already started thinking my role needed to change much earlier, in fact. I said so at a SXSW panel that year, which the article quoted: “More and more, as I’ve thought about our new endeavor, at some point, we’re going to have to start pissing people off more. And I think about that a lot. Sometimes I see people and I think: ‘Soon, I’m going to screw you.’ I do, I think that a lot more…. Things are going

When I started covering the nascent sector in the 1990s, I had truly believed in tech’s ability to transform the world, to solve problems that had plagued us for centuries and allow us to finally see our commonality over all our differences. My belief that everything that can be digitized would be digitized turned out to be true. The Internet, which others had mocked, had become nothing short of miraculous. And, as it turned out, also disastrous. The dire situation had been aggravated by elected officials who, a quarter century into the Internet age, had managed to pass exactly zero legislation to protect anyone.

Democratic institutions that we hold dear had crumbled in the face of what all this digital engagement has wrought: no privacy protections, no updated antitrust laws, no algorithmic transparency requirement, no focus on addiction and mental impact. It is breathtaking to think that there are no significant guidelines governing these areas. However flawed, there are laws for everything but tech companies.

As inane as he looked, it was the best investment of time and money of Musk’s life, his net worth rising $200 billion by the end of 2024, with tens of billions after that and more to come in the future as a loud part of the administration as “efficiency czar,” who would remake the government in his image. That appointment was announced soon after Trump won, in yet another stunt-like manner, as the head of DOGE—the Department of Government Efficiency—with fellow look-at-me billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy. I quickly dubbed the effort the Department of Grandstanding Edgelords, which, given its undefined power, staff, and efficacy, sounded more like something out of an episode of The Apprentice.

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.

False or misleading claims by billionaire Elon Musk about the U.S. election have amassed two billion views on social media platform X this year, according to a report by non-profit group Center for Countering Digital Hate” (CCDH). That

And Trump, ever the coin-operated politician, was happy to comply, until inevitably it would be in his interests not to.

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.

And in fact, we bought and paid for the Internet at its beginning, but largely tech companies have benefited from it. It is rightfully ours to own and use to better humanity rather than cheapen and deaden it.

Which brings us to the question, “Will AI kill us?” I can only answer at this moment now that I’m not as afraid of AI as I am fearful of bad people who will use AI better than good people.

can tell you how we got that way, because of what I know about a critical element: the wholesale capture of our current information systems by tech companies, and their willful carelessness and sometimes filthy-thumb-on-scale malevolence (we’ll get to Elon in a minute) in managing it. When combined with enormous financial self-interest—a point I make at the start of this book, when describing how Silicon Valley potentates marched up to Trump Tower in late 2016 like sheeple to pay homage to the president-elect—it is basically a familiar trope: Greed (of the few) over need (of the many). And that has resulted in damage and the warping and siloing of us, courtesy of many of the people—though not all—you have just read about in this book. These characters don’t want to reign over only tech like kings, but also over everything everywhere and all at once throughout our society. To update the old Facebook maxim of “move fast and break things”: “Move fast and crush everyone in the way of what our small, elite, and extraordinarily wealthy group thinks the world should be like.

There’s a third place to go, which is what we call post-tragic, where you actually accept and grieve through some of the realities that we are facing. You have to go through the dark night of the soul and be with that so you can be with the actual dimensions of the problems that we’re dealing with and you’re honest about what it would take to do something about it.

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.

What is more troubling to me is that Musk’s behavior is emblematic of that of tech’s most heinous figures, who now feel emboldened to enter the analog world with the same lack of care and arrogance with which they built their sloppy platforms

I actually believe he’s staying out of the election, which is nice,” Trump told the podcast Bussin’ with the Boys. He added that he liked Zuckerberg “much better now.” Of course, Trump had earlier threatened Zuckerberg with prison.

But no laws regulate almost all of it, despite the Biden administration giving it a shrugging try—efforts that are sure to be wiped out under Trump as the rich get richer and the most powerful get more so. A bummer, right? But not unexpected if you have been paying even the slightest amount of attention for a while.

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.

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.