Burn Book: A Tech Love Story: Summary & Key Insights

When I began covering technology for The Washington Post, the word ‘tech’ didn’t yet conjure the glamour or scrutiny it does now. In the late eighties and early nineties, I was chasing stories about phone companies and PC startups. Silicon Valley was still a scrappy subculture driven by eccentric engineers and dreamers who believed they could change the world from their garages. Working as a young reporter, I learned quickly that this world demanded persistence: CEOs didn’t want to talk, and the people who did were often selling fantasy. But persistence—ferocious curiosity combined with a refusal to flatter—became my trademark.

Moving to *The Wall Street Journal* was a turning point. Walt Mossberg and I built a form of journalism that took technology seriously, not as gadget porn but as a window into how power would shift in the 21st century. Every launch, every acquisition, every offhand comment by a CEO seemed like a clue to the future. And while these men—I say ‘men’ intentionally—held court with bravado, I was taking notes on something larger: ambition transforming into dominance.

Those early years weren’t glamorous. I covered endless press events, often the only woman in the room, and learned how to see past jargon to intent. That instinct—to cut through hype and find motive—would become essential as the small players I was writing about grew into the architects of our everyday lives.

The 1990s were a dizzying time. The Internet exploded from fringe curiosity to cultural revolution. Companies like AOL, Yahoo, and Netscape became household names almost overnight, and suddenly the geeks were the rock stars. I was there to chronicle it all, skeptical but fascinated. I watched fortunes made and lost before lunch, ideas crash as fast as they rose, and I learned more about human psychology than about modems or browsers.

Everyone believed they were reshaping the world. Many were. Yet underneath that optimism was hubris. The Internet was positioned as democracy’s great equalizer, but even then I could see patterns that would later haunt us: centralization of control, surveillance disguised as convenience, and a press corps too easily seduced by ‘disruption.’ My reporting was less about predicting specific companies’ success and more about interrogating how power was migrating from traditional institutions to platforms built on charisma and code. Even as we celebrated innovation, I was asking: who will guard the guardians?