Episode 2256: David Kirkpatrick on his twenty year odyssey from digital idealist to sceptic

To conclude our trilogy of interviews with prominent tech journalists to celebrate the upcoming twentieth anniversary of the DLD Conference, today’s interview is with David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect and founder of Techonomy Media. In contrast with Steven Levy and John Markoff, whose attitude toward Silicon Valley doesn’t seem have dramatically changed, Kirkpatrick’s thinking has undergone quite a radical shift over the last twenty years. As he acknowledges, he’s been transformed from a Facebook believer into one of its most acute critics. And, in contrast with Levy and Markoff, Kirkpatrick’s intellectual attention has also broadened, shifting from the internet to focusing on technological fixes for global warming.

David Kirkpatrick is a longtime technology and business journalist, author and media entrepreneur, known for his work connecting technology developments to societal impact and progress. He is an expert on internet companies and social media, and is now focusing especially on climate tech and the climate economy. He is also known for moderating on-stage conversations with tech leaders. Kirkpatrick's bestselling 2010 book, The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company that is Connecting the World, was published in 32 languages, including Catalan and Vietnamese. It was a finalist for the Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year as well as the Gerald Loeb Award. In subsequent years, he has written extensively about the growing societal harms caused by Facebook/Meta and social media broadly. His articles include 2018’s Facing Facebook’s Failure for Techonomy, and earlier that same year, The Facebook Defect, in Time Magazine. In December 2023 he published Vinod Khosla Can See the Future: It Just Got Hazy for a Minute in The Information. Kirkpatrick founded and for 12 years led Techonomy Media, which hosted conferences on technology, innovation, business, and their connection to social progress. Techonomy’s mission was to highlight ways technology could improve society and human lives. Among his numerous onstage interviews there were Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Benioff, John Chambers, Commerce Sec. Penny Pritzker, economist Jeffrey Sachs, Patrick Collison, DARPA Chief Arati Prabhakar, Sen. Cory Booker, Nandan Nilekani, and Sean Parker. He also has served as a moderator at Burda Media’s DLD conference for 19 years, interviewing a wide range of leaders including Mark Zuckerberg. Kirkpatrick worked for Time Inc. for 30 years, mostly at Fortune Magazine, where he was for many years senior editor for internet and technology. Many years earlier, while serving as a copy clerk at Life Magazine, he served as unit chairperson of The Newspaper Guild at Time Inc. He founded and hosted Fortune’s Brainstorm conference series beginning in 2001 and for six years wrote its Fast Forward column. At Brainstorm he hosted and interviewed Pres. Bill Clinton, Israeli Pres. Shimon Peres, Senator John McCain, and numerous technology