The Political Scene | The New Yorker
News:Politics
Kara Swisher landed on the tech beat as a young reporter at the Washington Post decades ago. She would stare at the teletype machine at the entrance and wonder why this antique sat there when it could already be supplanted by a computer. She eventually foretold the threat that posed to her own business—print journalism—by the rise of free online media; today, she is still raising alarms about how A.I. companies make use of the entire contents of the Internet. “Pay me for my stuff!” she says. “You can’t walk into my store and take all my Snickers bars and say it’s for fair use.” She is disappointed in government leaders who have failed to regulate businesses and protect users’ privacy. Although she remains awed by the innovation produced by American tech businesses, Swisher is no longer “naïve” about their motives. She also witnessed a generation of innovators grow megalomaniacal. The tech moguls claim they “know better; you’re wrong. You’ve done it wrong. The media’s done it wrong. The government’s done it wrong. . . . When they have lives full of mistakes! They just paper them over.” Once on good terms with Elon Musk, Swisher believes money has been deleterious to his mental health. “I don’t know what happened to him. I’m not his mama, and I’m not a psychiatrist. But I think as he got richer and richer—there are always enablers around people that make them think they hung the moon.”
This segment originally aired on March 1, 2024.
Why Is Marjorie Taylor Greene Trying to Oust House Speaker Mike Johnson?
Georgia’s Secretary of State Prepares for Another Election
Trump’s “Bonkers” Immunity Claim, with Neal Katyal
A Student Journalist Explains the Protests at Yale
Jonathan Haidt on “The Anxious Generation”
The Morality Play Inside Trump’s Courtroom
Ronan Farrow on the Scheme at the Heart of Trump’s New York Trial
A Bipartisan Effort to Carve out Exemptions to Texas’s Abortion Ban
Will an 1864 Abortion Law Doom Trump in Arizona?
From WIRED Politics Lab: How Election Deniers Are Weaponizing Tech To Disrupt November
What to Expect from Trump’s First Criminal Trial
The Attack on Black History in Schools
After the World Central Kitchen Attack, How Far Will Biden Shift on Israel?
How Should Reporters Cover Donald Trump?
Should Big Tech Stop Moderating Content?
Adam Gopnik on Hitler’s Rise to Power
The Political Books That Help Us Make Sense of 2024
Why Robert Hur Described Joe Biden as an “Elderly Man with a Poor Memory”
Judith Butler on the Global Backlash to L.G.B.T.Q. Rights
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free