Blame insularity, secrecy and timing
Doubleday; 304 pages; $28. Heligo Books; £22ask Michael Moritz, a former journalist and prominent tech investor, what book they should read to understand Silicon Valley, he always recommends two. “They are not about Silicon Valley, but they have everything to do with Silicon Valley,” he says.
Why not the masters of Silicon Valley? Part of the problem is access, as is often the case when writing about the powerful. Tech executives may let their guards down at Burning Man, but they have been painstakingly trained by public-relations staff to not get burned by writers. This has been the case for a while. When John Battelle was writing “The Search” , about online quests for information, he spent over a year asking to interview Google’s co-founder, Larry Page.
This is the sort of tirade against tech that has spread as widely as Silicon Valley’s apps. It is not wrong, but nor is it insightful. The author, Kyle Chayka, who is a journalist for the, never reconciles the tension between the cultural “sameness” he decries and the personalisation everyone experiences, with online users possessing individual feeds and living in separate informational bubbles. Nor is this a wholly new phenomenon.
Ms Swisher does not have Capote’s élan, but her book succeeds where many fail because she explores the relationship between subject and writer, which lurks in the background of most tech books. In detailing her interactions with tech bosses over three decades, she shows how the industry became more furtive and destructive, less free and fun.
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