Taking shots at tech CEOs from Facebook’s birthplace

JUST A FEW BLOCKS from the dorm room where Mark Zuckerberg launched the first version of what would become Facebook, Gov. Maura Healey and tech journalist Kara Swisher got some digs in at the billionaire boy wonder.

“I was just struck by the hubris, the naïveté – though he isn’t really naive,” Healey said of the version of Zuckerberg unspooled in Swisher’s Burn Book: A Tech Love Story. When considering Facebook’s impact on world events, disinformation, and the wellbeing of its users, Swisher said, “he’s not stupid. He’s quite smart. It’s that he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. But he doesn’t care.” 

Swisher likes to quote the French philosopher Paul Virilio, who said, “When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane, you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution.”

Her conversation with Healey was the last listed stop on Swisher’s book tour, which has drawn some side eye for purporting to take tech titans to task while featuring conversations with industry leaders like Laurene Powell Jobs, Disney CEO Bob Iger, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and former AOL CEO Steve Case. Healey, however, has been sharpening her knives for tech companies for years, including leading a coalition of attorneys general to investigate ways in which Meta, Facebook, and TikTok were specifically designing their platforms to attract a young user base. 

The conversation was a reversal from the 2022 interview with Healey on Swisher’s “Sway” podcast, where the tech journalist and then-attorney general bonded over each being, in Swisher’s words, “a feisty lesbian who likes taking on big power players.”

In 2022, Swisher prodded Healey for specific goals in her race for governor. This time around, Healey took the primary interviewer slot, congenially probing Swisher’s past and present relationship with technology over her decades covering Silicon Valley’s tech boom. The ticketed event, hosted by Harvard Book Store, was not listed on the governor’s public schedule.

In front of a friendly audience, packing First Parish Church near Harvard, Healey seemed at ease. She and Swisher ribbed former President Donald Trump for hawking $60 patriotic bibles. “‘Make America pray again,’ is that what he’s doing?” Healey joked. 

They also turned to another liberal state governor grappling with tech companies and leaning in on artificial intelligence. California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced an executive order last fall focused on preparing for the proliferation of AI tools. Healey announced the formation of an artificial intelligence task force in February, and her economic development bill seeks $100 million for an Applied AI Hub to facilitate artificial intelligence development and training across the state. 

Along with generally complimenting his governance, Swisher and Healey joked about Newsom’s good looks. “He’s got great teeth!” Healey remarked, and Swisher reminded her that the West Coast governor also has excellent hair. “Just a pair of lesbians, objectifying Gavin Newsom,” Swisher said, cheekily, as the audience guffawed.

But a sense of unease with the dynamics underpinning the tech landscape permeated the discussion. The biggest players in the industry – the Elon Musks and the Zuckerbergs – were framed as dangerous disasters, though maybe a new generation of tech leaders are more genuinely mission-focused, Swisher said. 

It’s still a very male industry, from the venture capital side to the tech workforce. Healey assured a Black woman in venture capital who asked a question that the state was glad to have her, and there should be more diversity in Massachusetts tech.

Of artificial intelligence, either much-lauded as a breakthrough of efficiency or much-maligned for stripping creative work for parts, Swisher said it’s mostly “marketing right now.” Some type of artificial intelligence, she noted, “is already in your lives” rather than being a distant possibility. But far from revolutionizing work and art, at the moment, she said, “it’s writing your emails for you, only worse.” 

It wouldn’t be a conversation with Gov. Maura Healey without the intrusion of Beacon Hill’s favorite buzzword – competitiveness.

Healey zeroed in on Swisher’s thesis that “nothing fuels engagement like enragement.” How then, “do we – in this world, in this moment – compete for people’s attention and engagement,” Healey asked, “if we know so much that what’s fueling people’s interest is clicks?”

If the online human condition is, as Swisher feels, “a constant, persistent traffic accident” driven by grievance politics, she offered a rosier alternative vision of what it could be. Tell stories, talk to those with different opinions, and try for common ground, she said.