The world is hungry for someone to talk back to Big Tech, and journalist Kara Swisher is currently doing that on the daily. She does it through her column in the New York Times op-ed pages, through her Twitter megaphone (1.3 million followers and counting), through her popular Recode Decode podcast, on cable, via live-streamed chats and rants, and during onstage interviews with the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates at various packed tech conferences that she helps organize. It makes one wonder how Swisher came to seemingly possess, in human form, the same massive information processing power controlled by the companies she covers. Because it's not just the back talk that people want. They're equally hungry for someone to explain how Facebook, Google, Twitter, Microsoft, Apple, and other digital behemoths ended up swallowing, chewing up, and spitting out, in countless ADD-friendly bites, the world as it once existed—and Swisher explains that, too. by Rich Smith