‘Cyberselfish’ author takes aim at techno-libertarianism as her book returns from the dead

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It’s hard for books about technology to age well. They always risk becoming outdated as companies rise and fall, and as one hot new product is replaced by the next. But last year, “Nerd Reich” author Gil Durán declared that it was time to revive the career of Paulina Borsook, who he said “saw it all very clearly and tried to warn us 25 years ago.” Later that fall, The New York Times reported that Borsook’s “Cyberselfish” — first published in 2000 — was finding new fans who want to understand why the tech industry “lost its way.” Now, long after going out of print, “Cyberselfish” is returning in a new edition from Tin House. Borsook told me in a Zoom interview that the book is meant to be “almost a travelogue” of her attempts to understand what she calls the techno-libertarian influence on Silicon Valley culture. “That’s a 12-year-old view of the world,” Borsook said, describing it as “a kind of basket of beliefs” that’s “violently anti-regulation,” despite the fact that “no sector of society had benefited more and suffered less from the government than these guys.” In her telling, “even after the dot-com crash, that attitude was just there, percolating around, contaminating the aquifers. It was uncorrected, and it just spread out more and more.” Borsook has yet to publish a second book, and she said that after “Cyberselfish” was first released, “no one was interested in anything I might have to say about anything, tech or not tech, forever after.” But last year, she began to notice that prices for used copies were beginning to creep up, and she was starting to see “very out-of-the-blue, I-did-not-know-these-people posts on social media about how important this book was,” as well as inquiries from “European academics,” eventually leading to more press coverage and the new Tin House edition, with a new introduction by Durán. Keep reading for our full conversation, edited for length and clarity, in which Borsook discusses AI, how Silicon Valley has transformed in the past 25 years, and what advice she has for young people seeking a career in tech. Do you want to talk a little bit about how your interest in techno-libertarianism started, and how you decided that there was a book in this? Everything with me is always inadvertent. I started knocking around tech circles, however we define it, in the early-middle ‘80s, in the Bay Area. And then I would say, starting around maybe the early ‘90s, I would hear these — to me — very weird, offhand remarks that some people would make that I couldn’t make any sense out of. It’s not my nature to argue with people. It’s my nature to listen, and so I didn’t have the term for it except libertarian. But it seemed very screwy because initially, I grew up in Pasadena, which was [the home of the] Caltech-JPL space program, and so the parents of the kids I knew were another STEM culture. When I first got into Silicon Valley, I thought, “Oh, this is just another STEM culture like I’m familiar with.” And those guys [at Caltech and JPL] had a very clear sense of what the government can do for you, were not into enlightened self-interest. It was a different personality type, and they certainly didn’t self-anoint with how glorious and grand and magisterial they were, even though they were doing great things. I was just listening, I guess, and being confused. Even then, I knew no sector of society had benefited more and suffered less from the government than these guys. So why are they acting like this? So, backstory: My agent picked me up right after my MFA in Columbia, and he said to me, “You know, it’s really hard to get fiction published. Do you have a nonfiction book in you?” And I said, “Well, there’s this weird subculture that I’ve been observing that I don’t understand, and any time I don’t understand something, I want to explore it.” That got me down the rabbit hole of looking at this stuff and writing about it, and I consider it really almost a travelogue, in the sense of “Black Lamb and Gray Falcon” or that kind of stuff, almost more than, “This is a polemic.” It’s more like: snapshot, snapshot, snapshot. I just fell into it, and also I’m sufficiently narcissistic that I felt I was uniquely qualified to write about this, and no one else was paying any attention, and that was very important to me. I haven’t done a backread of all the other books written about the tech industry before “Cyberselfish.” My sense is that you do recognize, say, reading Steven Levy’s work that there is this alternative philosophy, libertarian streak running through Silicon Valley. But no one really pulled it out and put it under the microscope in that way. That’s really true. And then most of the writing — certainly in the ’90s, but maybe later — was very celebratory. It wasn’t, “Wait a minute, what’s going on here?” I heard [New York Times reporter] John Markoff give a talk about six months ago, and he said something I really liked. He said, “Silicon Valley is a multicultural place.” By which he didn’t mean your country of origin. What he meant is there’s all these different kinds of cultures in there, and he was always more focused on these countercultural [elements,] that kind of thing. I’m never saying that wasn’t there. I’m just saying there was this other thing that I was more interested in. So they’re running in parallel. I don’t even think they’re in conflict. It sounds like you don’t see the techno-libertarian side of it emerging from the counterculture, but rather [as] distinct cultures within Silicon Valley. One of the distinctions I made in — I call it TDB, that damn book — is that distinction I made between Ravers and Gilders, and the Gilders being the social conservatives. I named them after George Gilder, who was this repellent thought leader of the early ’90s, very conservative, very reactionary, very backward-looking. And then the Ravers, in homage to John Perry Barlow, drugs and sex and rock and roll, “we’re going to Burning Man,” much more culturally liberal. And that distinction has held up, because you have that in contemporary Silicon Valley. You have these Christian nationalists and conservative Catholics in positions of leadership, and then you also have the Burners and people having interesting experimentations with sexuality and drugs and the [effective altruist] and AI worlds. And so, what’s the counterculture bit of it? Maybe the personal freedom aspect of it is countercultural. Another weird thing we always have to point out is that the [San Francisco] peninsula votes blue, still. Ro Khanna is the congressman from there. So I’m really talking about culture rather than electoral politics. [And I’m talking about] the leadership class here, the tech overlords. It’s not so clear to me how much the rank and file are like this, though probably more than when I was more familiar with what was going on there. Because I think a lot of people have been attracted to work in crypto or AI, and they’re not thinking about the greater political surround. But they’ll drink whatever they’re handed, and they don’t much care. We can point to people who are in charge, who have these [right-wing] beliefs or are allied with the Trump administration. There’s another executive class that maybe doesn’t have exactly the same beliefs, but is able to make themselves very comfortable with it. And then you have that same diversity that you were talking about. There’s different communities, different cultures underneath. I’ve certainly spoken to people who work for someone like Elon Musk, and they’re like, “Yeah, I don’t love this guy, but right now, I can’t afford to lose this job.” Right, I think there’s a lot more of that going on than in times past, because there’s greater precarity in terms of employment, and so people [say,] “I’ve got a job, I’m going to hold on to it.” […] Or, “I don’t espouse the beliefs that they’re giving out, but my project is okay.” Those kinds of things always go on. For you folks who aren’t familiar with the book and maybe have a general sense that there is a libertarian strain in Silicon Valley, can you say more why — if somebody thinks, “I believe in technology being liberatory, and maybe it can free us from the shackles of government bureaucracy and things like that,” why is techno-libertarianism a bad thing? First of all, that’s a 12-year-old view of the world. I didn’t really have a good word, but it was a kind of basket of beliefs, and now we’d say maybe a cloud, and it was violently anti-regulation. It was bad borrowing from biology. “Let’s just let things evolve and they will be fine.” They have no idea how much government has subsidized and made possible their life, their world, all the R&D. Government can do bad things. I’m an old hippie. I know about the war in Vietnam. I know what the CIA did with Allende. So I don’t want to come across [as if] I think it’s all okay. I don’t. But this sector of society has less to complain about. And one thing that just makes me grit my teeth right now is a lot of these guys are moving to Nevada to live on the Nevada side of Tahoe, because they want to escape California taxes. Sergey [Brin] saying, “California is turning into Soviet Russia.” Are you nuts? Because the thing is, they all love Tahoe. Why do they think the water of Tahoe is so pure and blue? That is decades of government intervention and interference, environmental scientists, regulation. I mean, there’s this inability to connect the dots and lack of history. To what extent is what we’re seeing now with the tech industry, with their alignment with the Trump administration, with all these other dystopian things going on, how much of that is a shift? And to what extent is this all one story, continuous with what you were seeing before? Unfortunately, I see more the continuity. Excuse me for [my own] bad borrowing from biology, but […] I really see the Netscape IPO is when things really began to change, and Silicon Valley was invaded by the finance bros, and a real change in attitude. You got the culture of flip and flee, all that kind of stuff. Even after the dot-com crash, that attitude was just there, percolating around, contaminating the aquifers. It was uncorrected, and it just spread out more and more. When you have things like Airbnb or Uber, which are strictly financial plays, they’re not technology innovation by my definition, but there was too much investment money in the world that didn’t know where to go. It would invest in these things, and these people would parrot this language. So I thought, “Ah, this is left over from 15 years ago,” in terms of their self-justification. And the way that something like Airbnb fought so hard against any kind of regulation and anything that would ask them to be any kind of a good community actor in the communities they basically destroyed, in a lot of ways, in terms of the housing market. It’s like, “Yeah, that’s that attitude I was talking about way back then.” It’s like Giardia in the water system. You can say, with good reason, that there was a lot of wonderful stuff that came out, and all the children of General Magic and all the great things that they created. I would never say that’s not true, but I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about the business culture of these people, how they see themselves. Sociopathy is a business virtue in a way that was never there before. How do you see the rise of AI through that lens? It’s perfect. “We don’t need to be regulated. We’re the most brilliant, genius, wonderful people in the world.” I see AI right now as a big Ponzi scheme. You probably saw that really horrible ad that Apple did a couple of years ago, for one of their new computers, and they had all the musical instruments and all writing and [it all went into] the hydraulic press. How did Apple become so tone deaf? This is not the Apple that all the quote “creative class” loved for so many years. It’s not the Apple of the 1984 ad. But they still see themselves in this liberatory way. If you buy the stockholder theory of value, it justifies whatever the AI companies are doing because of the stock play, not because it’s intrinsically valuable. In the last couple of years, [“Cyberselfish”] has had this renaissance, leading up to the current reissue. When was that something that you started to notice? This was maybe an exercise in masochism, but a couple of times a year, I’d look at the used book platforms, and it was selling for three bucks, which means that the seller is making more money on the shipping and handling than on the book, which is really humiliating. I would say starting maybe a year and a half ago, I began to notice the prices are creeping up — not hugely, initially, but they were creeping up. And also, I was beginning to be contacted by European academics who wanted to talk to me. And I thought, “How did you even hear about this?” And then there were some very out-of-the-blue, I-did-not-know-these-people posts on social media about how important this book was, it shouldn’t have been forgotten, this is wrong. Long story short, I got led to Gil Durán, who wrote “The Nerd Reich,” and then we went for lunch, and we realized we are kindred spirits. Around that same time, Steven Levy, who was working on a piece for Wired about “How did I get it so wrong?” — and of course, I’m sitting here thinking, “Yeah, Steven, how did you?” — Steven contacted Gil and talked to him for 45 minutes, and Gil said, “You should really talk to Paulina, she’s been tracking this stuff forever.” So Steven never quoted Gil. He never contacted me. And when Steven’s piece came Gil put this incredible rant on Bluesky saying I got everything right. “We really need to support her. Let’s try to bring this book back into print.” And between that and the podcast I did with him, all of a sudden, you could not get a copy of TDB for love or money. [In the new edition,] there’s the new introduction by Gil, but otherwise it’s the book as it appeared [in 2000.] Absolutely, and then I wrote a little introduction, going into more, “This is how this came back from the dead.” The acquiring editor at Tin House, she said to me, “Don’t change a word,” which is exactly what I wanted to hear. Because I think it’s an artifact of a time and place. And with a book like this, if you start thinking, “Well, should we update this? Should we add to that?” it turns into a different book. People were glomming on to the book as it was. They weren’t saying, “Oh, it would be great if we updated this.” So, no, it’s not updated. Hopefully, it’s not naive of me to imagine that there are people who might read this interview, read your book, and they are mostly on-board with what you’re saying about the tech industry and techno-libertarianism. Maybe they work at some big tech company [or] they have a startup themselves, and they’re like, “I don’t agree with the Peter Thiels and Elon Musks of the world.” Do you think that those people can reform or change the tech industry from within? I want it to be true, because one of the questions that I’m getting these days, and I wish I could answer it better, is running into young people, they’re in CS or engineering or something, and they want a career in that, and they don’t buy this toxic stuff. “What can we do?” And I go, “I’m not sure, because first of all, AI is sucking up all the investment money right now. So if you want to do almost anything, if it’s not AI-related, you can’t do it. Or a military-industrial thing. Government is so broke right now. Can you get a job in government? I’m not sure. Even the state governments, or I’d say the nonprofit sector, but that’s not doing well, either.” I have this frantic thing of, I adore these kids and I want to support them and I don’t know what to tell them to do. It used to be that you could start a small company, a small consultancy, just you and a friend or two, and it didn’t have to elephantise as a grotesque growth, you could just bootstrap, but the revenue supported the growth, and you could do that. I’m not too sure how much of that world still exists. I think during the app era, you could also do that. I’m not sure now, but I never want to underestimate the both desperation and ingenuity of people, and so it may be possible. I think your larger question — which is, do I think these big companies can be reformed from within — I think all it takes is a change. They’re amoral enough that if it’s not in their interest to link arms with the MAGA thing, they’ll do something different. I’m very cynical about it. But I think the people who might be thinking about what used to be called appropriate technology, I’d love to see those people get funded or find a company that does that. It could be possible — whether they can do it within the venue of the hyperscalers, I don’t know, but I would hope that they could spin off and maybe do something else.