A woman’s eye view of the very bad boys of tech
A rendition of a ‘burn book’ Photo credit: [1]
Tech Journalist Kara Swisher’s 2024 Burn Book: A Tech Love Story is an irreverent, humorous, and at times downright frightening memoir that helps drive home the many reasons why we need more women at the highest echelons of STEMM.
By Patricia A. Maurice
31 March 2026, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19217386
Kara Swisher is a pioneer and entrepreneur of tech journalism. Her 2024 Burn Book: A Tech Love Story [2] is a good read for any woman in STEMM who wants to gain a better understanding of some of the key events and developments of tech history over the past few decades. She writes eloquently and with insider-knowledge about the unique and immensely wealthy and powerful characters of Silicon Valley and its Seattle counterpart. She has personally known and interviewed — often over the course of decades — icons like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos and Sheryl Sandberg, along with journalists like John McLaughlin and media moguls like Rupert Murdoch, Michael Eisner, and Bob Iger. Although she openly admires Steve Jobs, who might have been quirky but was devoted to giving consumers innovative and excellent products, she also exposes a culture that is too often misogynistic and without any values beyond making as much money as possible. If you read this book, you will see why many people simply don’t care if leaders are narcissistic self-serving, power-hungry and dishonest — because that’s exactly what far too many leaders are. Of course there are also many great leaders. This book, however, is more about poking fun and criticizing than about eulogizing.
This is not a scholarly work — it is a snarky view from the eyes of a journalist. So, while I cannot recommend the book if you are looking for dry, dispassionate historical perspectives, many readers may find it both amusing and interesting.
Read it for the history, through a woman’s eyes
The tech industry is dominated by men at all ranks and positions. Only a few women like Sheryl Sandberg have broken into the billionaire tech club – and she was a marketing executive rather than a tech guru. Moreover, she has been every bit as controversial a figure as many of her wealthy and powerful male colleagues.
Melinda French Gates certainly has had a front-row view of the tech industry, but though she has a technical background and worked at Microsoft, she has focused more of her energy on philanthropy, especially in recent years [3]. Kara Swisher’s Burn Book and her ongoing journalistic endeavors provide an all-too-rare opportunity to learn about the tech industry from a woman’s perspective. Swisher isn’t just a tech journalist as she was married for almost two decades to Megan Smith, an MIT graduate who was a Vice President at Google and later became Chief Technology Officer of the United States under President Barack Obama.
Any woman who is a leader in STEMM academics today likely knows at least some of the history of the tech bros, if for no other reason than that their stories permeate our culture. I have followed some of the details and characters perhaps a bit more closely because my husband is a computer scientist who was an early researcher of the world wide web. In fact, in 1994, he was interviewed about the web for a newspaper in Ohio, where we were both professors at the time. I still laugh when I think about how the female reporter seemed to be quite taken by his tall, movie-star-like good looks, deep voice, and technical knowledge. Although I met some luminaries while tagging along at my husband’s conferences and seminars, I learned a lot from this book. Kara Swisher has not attempted to give a history of the science behind the technological innovations but rather of the personalities who have driven the big-name corporations, including many companies that thrived for a short time and then were acquired or went under.
For example, I often have wondered about the history of one of the few successful tech companies co-founded by a woman, bluemountainarts.com, which allows users to send greeting cards digitally. As described in this book, Blue Mountain Arts was founded by Susan Polis Schutz and Steven Schutz out of a traditional, physical greeting card company they had started in 1971. She describes the pair as “unlikely Web types, with hippie personas and a lot of chill. They had started their business out of the back of a Volkswagen van in Colorado, and didn’t pay much attention to the fast-moving sector.” When Susan called Kara to ask for advice on whether to accept a takeover offer, Kara recommended she “Take as much cash as you can get… then run fast for the hills.” Interestingly, Susan and Steven’s son Jared (who took his mother’s maiden name as his last name) was also an entrepreneur who later became the governor of Colorado. The book is full of such excellent little nuggets of history.
Read it because it’s funny
I found the book fast paced and fun to read. Although I got a bit irritated by over-use of words like ‘grok,’ Kara Swisher’s use of the English language is often hysterically funny. She is not afraid to speak truth to power, generally employing wry humor. For example, she dubbed Rupert Murdoch “Uncle Satan” and described Jeff Bezos when she first met him as “feral” and like a “frenetic mongoose.” As she put it, “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.” She has called Facebook, Twitter, and Google “digital arms dealers.” She conjures many humorous but often aptly frightening images. She has even dubbed herself a “cranky Cassandra” — her snarky humor extends to herself.
Read it to understand why having women in tech matters
While I would argue that the entire book is a case study of the need for women in tech, Chapter 10: The Uber Mensch, is particularly cogent. “Uber mensch” is a double entendre because “Uber” refers not just to the German word meaning “over” or “super” but also to the ride-sharing tech company whose sexist core put women client’s lives and safety at risk. She writes that “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.” She also argues that “Heterogeneity in nature makes for stronger species, but tech was pushing forward one of the most homogeneous structures possible, in which true differences would never inform better decisions.” Very well said.
Read it for the P2P ratio
Chapter 14 is one of my favorites because it introduces what Kara Swisher calls her “Prick to Productivity Ratio” (P2P). For example, she gives Steve Jobs a P2P of 8/10 because he could “undoubtedly be a prick” but his productivity was so amazing that he got the highest denominator score. Although the original scale was meant to be from 1 to 10, she ranks Elon Musk as ∞/WTF — and her book was pre-2025. This ratio is a powerful concept I wish I had known to apply to some of my colleagues back before I went emerita. It’s good to remember to apply humor especially to difficult situations. Of course, it is also often best to limit the humor to one’s own private thoughts.
Read it for the warnings
In the final chapter, titled “Come with me if you want to live”, Kara Swisher describes her life after moving back to the East Coast (in 2020) and during the pandemic. Looking back, she writes that “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.”
Her discussion of the potential benefits and dangers of AI is already a bit outdated (things are moving fast). But, in answering whether AI will kill us, she answers, “I’m not as afraid of AI as I am fearful of bad people who will use AI better than good people.” We have all been warned about AI – a previous post conveys some of these warnings [4]. Another post describes the need for policies to promote the ethical and appropriate use of AI in universities [5]. Personally, I’m also afraid that good people are often turned bad when they get power, and AI is powerful.
Read it because it might make you angry
Sometimes, getting angry is necessary to drive one to engage in what is often called “good trouble.” In her final chapter, Kara Swisher describes an interview with tech ethicist Tristan Harris, in which he describes people who are ‘’pre-tragic, which is when someone actually doesn’t want to look at the tragedy — whether it’s climate or some of the AI issues that are facing us or social media having downsides.” Her book will open your eyes and hopefully make you want to look carefully at tragedies that may be unfolding through the world of tech. Tech has given us many benefits, but it has also done damage to some sectors and institutions.
Whether you become angry at the author or at the personalities and system she pokes fun at, anger can make you think and that is always good. We need to recognize both benefits and downsides of tech and act through voting, research, teaching, and the power of our own purses.
Conclusions and questions for further thought
After reading the book, I felt it was more important than ever to educate women and girls in tech and to foster more female representation in the tech industry.
Here are some questions for readers to consider:
● How have you been helped or harmed by the tech industry?
● How might you use the power of your purse to exert influence?
● Do you know the meaning of the term ‘burn book’? If not, rather than ‘googling it,’ ask a friend.
Notes and References
[1] Figure generated using the AI program Draw Things then edited by P. Maurice
[2] Swisher, K. (2024) Burn Book: A Tech Love Story, Simon & Schuster, New York.
[3] See our previous post: https://www.epistimi.org/blog/the-moment-of-lift-by-melinda-gates
[5] https://www.epistimi.org/blog/development-of-generative-ai-policy-at-lund-university