Tech journalist and Re/code co-founder Kara Swisher has spent two decades sniffing around board rooms and harassing tech executives and venture capitalists over Instant Messenger, and now she's looking to pivot into an entirely new line of work, albeit seven years from now. She tells the Chronicle that she'll be running for Mayor of San Francisco in 2023, because she no longer wants to sit on the sidelines as the nation's most tech-connected city fights over how close a relationship it should have with the tech industry. And apparently 2019 is too soon?
She tells Inc. that the delay is because she's currently too busy with her job at Re/Code.
New York Magazine recently called her "Silicon Valley's most feared and well-liked journalist," and that's in part because she's been around for a long time. At age 53, she's been covering the tech industry basically since the beginning of Web 1.0, and the Industry Standard was already saying, in 1999, that she was "the writer who has most influenced public opinion about the internet economy."
She's also openly gay, lives in the Castro with her two dogs, and would likely be a highly progressive candidate for the mayor's office she's already had a falling out, professionally, with investor Ron Conway over things she's written, so don't expect big campaign funds to come from him.
But as to what her positions might be, or how she'd plan to solve some of the city's most difficult problems, we'll have to wait and see.
What she has said, via the Chron, is this:
We all yammer about politicians and how bad things are, and I think it important that we stop bellyaching and act if we want change. Also this whole election cycle has struck a chord in me that I have always thought about, related to professional politicians and how we need to shift thinking about who should serve and the duty of citizens to be, you know, citizens. There is an important and necessary role for good government and I hate this wholesale tearing down of it. Also the increasing divide between tech sector and the city is something that I think a lot about. Not that I have solutions as yet.
