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's a lot. 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. And it goes on.

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.

Plus, if you're tired of all the well-earned negativity directed at tech giants these days, and you just want to hear about one good and useful thing, Swisher, who wrote in her April 5 New York Times column about giving birth while clutching her BlackBerry, can help you out with that as well. These days, she's really into riding on rented wheels from scooter start-ups, for example.

A 56-year-old, hard-charging lesbian who pretty much always sports aviator sunglasses, Swisher—both surprisingly and unsurprisingly—has emerged as the American journalist to turn to for tech assistance of the existential and intellectual kind.

The surprise is that she emerged from a segment of the journalism world, tech writing, that is filled with publications and writers who tend to coddle the industry they rely on for scoops—a back-scratchy symbiosis that has contributed to the present tech morass. The unsurprising part is that, at a cultural moment when thinking people are desperate for clear-eyed, no-bullshit takes that are arrived at with integrity, they are turning en masse to Swisher, who was present at the creation of the modern internet economy—conducting rabid early interviews with tech executives over AOL instant messenger, according to a 2014 New York magazine profile.

She's not afraid to hit publish on a story that will take billions off a company's stock value (as she once did with Twitter), and she's been notably transparent about how she navigates the challenges of having come to personally know and understand the people whose dumb ideas she frequently needs to bash. (Swisher was married for 15 years to Megan Smith, an executive at Google.)

Maybe Swisher can explain how she's managed to pull off all these tricks, and simultaneously have people like Zuckerberg still agree to interviews, when she appears at Benaroya Hall on May 7 as part of the Seattle Arts & Lectures Journalism Series.

If not, maybe it will all come out on the campaign trail; Swisher, who earlier in life wanted to enter public service by being a government spy (but decided "being gay was an issue," according to New York), recently announced that she's running for mayor of San Francisco in 2023.