A High Protein Book Diet
Reading the online world through Kara Swisher, Taylor Lorenz, and Naomi Klein
I’m recovering from a surgery which means I have plenty of time to do a lot of nothing with my body. So to heal up, I’m consuming a high protein media diet, and gave myself the opportunity to knock out three must-reads from my 2023-24 list.
The books I’ve been hanging out with are Burn Book by tech journalist extraordinaire Kara Swisher, Extremely Online by extremely online reporter Taylor Lorenz, and Doppelganger by critic of late capitalism Naomi Klein.
Read together, these are working in tandem, providing a snapshot of today’s weird and wild, completely fractured, upside down and unbalanced world of media, money, fame and technology.
Let’s start with Burn Book. It’s part Kara Swisher’s hagiography of herself, who chronicles her own rise to tech A-lister and constantly name drops her access to Silicon Valley’s elite. It’s part hefty critique, of these moguls’ consolidation of power and swing to the right. And true to the title, it’s part dish -- a diaper-clad billionaire baby shower? Check. Mark Zuckerberg literally sweating through an Illuminati hoodie? Check. The inside scoop on high profile divorces? Check. But it’s most interesting as a history of Silicon Valley and her own fascination with it, the wonder of the young mostly men who bottle the magic of the moment, create massive companies, and turn into today’s moguls. She has been able to create a unique career, provoking and asking difficult questions of the billionaire class while creating her own media empire that keeps her in the conversation.
Extremely Online is the history of the internet, Taylor’s version. It traces the rise of online celebrity from Paris Hilton’s command of social media to the blogosphere to TikTok hype houses, going into detail about the personalities, drama, and deals that Taylor Lorenz adopted as her beat when no one else would. While Swisher covers the big hardware and software companies in Silicon Valley, Lorenz covers the human ware that makes the most of these leaps in technology. Primarily coalescing in New York (Tumblr, BuzzFeed, bloggers and It girls) and in LA (TikTokkers, hype houses), the people that have redesigned fame for the 21st century make thousands or millions, or sometimes 0 because they were too early or not savvy enough. They are chasing visions and building their lives on the internet, similar to the Silicon Valley boys but without the pedigree of dropping out of Ivies and Sand Hill Road backing. They are even more likely to find lightning in a bottle--so many of their tales start with expressing themselves, then finding an expansive audience, then finding brands and other moneymen knocking down their doors to get a piece of the attention they’ve generated.
So we have two intertwined histories of the internet…and then we have Doppelganger, Naomi Klein’s exploration and explosion of a concept, based on her personal experience of benign consistently confused with Naomi Wolf, another writer of note who started her career with The Beauty Myth, a book that, along with Klein’s No Logo, were definitive parts of 1990s feminism and critiques of capitalism
These two women’s careers rose in parallel, whip smart thinkers about politics and power, until they diverged. With Wolf leaning ever rightward and eventually being caught up in the Right Wing Grievance Industrial Complex as an anti-vaxxer and a Steve Bannon favorite, Klein finds herself often name-checked in complaints about Wolf. She uses this to delve into all kinds of modern versions of the doppelganger: the tension between our true selves and the personas we create online, the data shadow that follows us everywhere that we have little control over, the persistent haunting of biases and stereotypes, and of course the growing gap between her as a left wing thinker and Wolf as a recently minted figurehead of the radical right.
Reading all three of these books together is a snapshot of digital culture, or rather of all culture through the lens of our online world, where fame, money, privacy, safety and self all intertwine. What’s interesting about this snapshot is that many of these challenges are radically new to humanity. The world has always been neck deep in war, disease, dangerous weather patterns, and ugly politics. But the vagaries of how to manage our online selves, or who owns the data that represents all of our behaviors, or who if anyone can control AI have all been birthed more or less in this century.
For Swisher the solution is to be the perpetual gadfly. She clearly enjoys speaking truth to power, as well as the media empire she’s built doing it. For Lorenz, this world has entertainment value; the ups and downs of influencers who make and break their name on the internet are just fun, while also tracking the depth of bad behaviors that the internet-famous engage in for the clicks. Klein gives us a deep dive and food for thought, finding a delicate through-line in many of today’s maladies and offering up a smidge of empathy as a salve for today’s woes.
If you don’t have some extremely offline time to read them all, here’s a few conclusions across the three books.
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