Kara Swisher Quotes

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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—