Kara Swisher witnessed the tech revolution. Now she wants to burn the industry

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The tech industry sold Americans a bill of goods, promising to change the world for the better but instead harvesting everyone’s data to build powerful empires.

That’s the message in a fascinating new memoir, “Burn Book,” by the tech journalist Kara Swisher, who hosts a multitude of podcasts and is a CNN contributor.

I wanted to get Swisher’s view on how the government should look at regulating a tech industry that has spent decades trying very hard to avoid regulation of any kind.

There are things the US government should be doing but isn’t with regard to social media, she told me. But perhaps more importantly, there are things every country needs to be working together on to put guardrails on the emergence of artificial intelligence – which has such great potential but is also quite scary.

Our conversation, conducted by phone and edited for clarity, is below.

What is a burn book?

WOLF: The title of the book is “Burn Book,” which is a provocative title. What are you trying to do here?

SWISHER: It’s kind of dead obvious. I wasn’t like trying to be a hidden, like, aren’t I being clever kind of person.

It’s based on “Mean Girls,” which is now back in the news because the movie came out, weirdly, at this time. It’s the book that you write that you have with your friends that you burn people in.

It’s usually a high school thing where you burn people, you know, gossip about people and what you really think of them and what people are really like – and a lot of it is you telling the truth about people that you can’t say out loud.

So that’s what it was. But I mixed it with a tech love