Last week saw the release of Kara Swisher's Burn Book, the highly anticipated career memoir from a titanic, justly celebrated veteran of tech journalism. Considering her unique, outsize stature in Silicon Valley, and her decadeslong record of landing bombshell inside scoops about the single most important industry of the 21st century, Swisher's choice to promote her latest project with the help of famous friends (Don Lemon, Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey, etc.) certainly makes sense. What makes much less sense, however, is her selection of tech-world executives. The book tour is going to be lit -- with guest moderators like @RobertIger, @laurenepowell, @mcuban, @donlemon, @reidhoffman, @sama and more. Some of the "moderators" on her tour include Laurene Powell Jobs, Disney CEO Bob Iger, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and Lean In board member Adam Grant. Per NPR's Steve Inskeep, she personally requested that these folks "interview her on stage," in a series of conversations she intends to turn into individual podcast episodes.

Under the auspices of “being green,” we have given our printed word over to a cyber-medium that cannot be touched or felt or folded. Our information is as volatile as the authority protecting our storage devices. Eliminating a book or changing its text can be done by literally pressing a button -- without a fire or an erasure marking, without smoke, without evidence. Our data is ephemeral along with the web in which we weave it. This paper considers the current ease of censorship, and that the non-permanence of data and links can wreak havoc on our societal infra-structure if the wrong entities (human or machine) with the wrong motives have the control to determine its fate.