Kara Swisher’s “Burn Book”

: A Tech Love Story is a part-memoir, part-history that chronicles her decades-long career reporting on Silicon Valley and the tech industry’s most powerful figures. Swisher offers a behind-the-scenes look at the rise of the digital world from the early 1990s to today, sharing personal anecdotes, interviews, and sharp critiques of tech leaders such as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and others

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The book is both a love letter and a reckoning with the tech industry-Swisher admires the innovation and potential for good, but she is unsparing about the industry’s failures, including its culture of greed, lack of accountability, and the societal harms caused by platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube
. She highlights how tech’s promise to “move fast and break things” often led to real-world damage, calling out the egos, missteps, and ethical blind spots of its leaders

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Despite her criticisms, Swisher remains cautiously optimistic about technology’s future, especially as generative AI ushers in a new era. She urges the industry to make better choices and for society to demand more responsible innovation
. Throughout, Swisher’s writing is witty, candid, and deeply informed, making Burn Book both an engaging personal story and a critical historical document of Silicon Valley’s impact on the world

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