Swisher is a great example of what went wrong in tech reporting through Silicon Valley’s long boom, from the starting gun of internet privatization to the post-Trump techlash. Journalists like Swisher got far too close to the people they covered and bought into the lies they were weaving as the money rushed in and everyone got rich. They got too absorbed in the deceptive story the industry told itself to question whether it all made sense, even as they helped sell the narrative of tech’s promise and inevitability to the public. Now we’re all dealing with the fallout of that period, and while some have admitted they got it wrong, far too many are trying to pretend they were asking the hard questions the whole time.
Swisher spends her last chapter repeating much of the bullshit about generative AI that tech executives have been spreading for the past year, calling it a new “Cambrian explosion,” musing about the ways it could improve virtually every aspect of life, and complimenting Musk for conflating human and computer intelligence a few years back. It shows just how little she’s able to cast a critical eye on what she covers, and how influenced her opinions are by the tech power players she turns to for assessments of the industry. Swisher closes the book by pasting in some nonsense generated by ChatGPT and repeating claims about driverless cars and workplace automation that feel a decade out of date. After all this time, she still can’t see through the hype when it actually matters.