Renowned tech reporter and Elon Musk apologist Kara Swisher received vast amounts of flack this week for defending her podcast co-host Scott Galloway’s crypto-shilling advertisement, using the least-rigorous argument that the crypto world has:
Last time I checked people had choice and this offered a range of investments. Also crypto is by no means over. It’s like early internet. Sorry if that bothers you but it is so
— Kara Swisher (@karaswisher) May 23, 2022
Writer and friend of the newsletter David Gerard dug into the company in question, one that invests your retirement in cryptocurrencies, including Axie Infinity’s (a play-to-earn Ponzi scheme) token. Galloway, who has made a successful career of saying extremely obvious stuff to an adoring audience of people with no object permanence, has stayed relatively quiet, I assume, because it’s fairly obvious that he either doesn’t give a shit or doesn’t understand what he’s talking about – or, of course, both.
What frustrates me about Swisher – who I have admired previously, but appears to have become the standard-bearer for defending powerful interests (like pulling punches when questioning Microsoft over Bobby Kotick and the disgusting things that he and Activision have done) – is that this argument barely rises to the level of “an actual argument.” Gerard has also written an exhaustive piece about this subject, debunking specific ideas about why Bitcoin and cryptocurrency are not “the early days of the internet,” but I want to take a slightly different tack, in that I very much grew up in the early days of the internet.