// TECHCRUNCH — INTELLIGENZA ARTIFICIALE
‘Cyberselfish’ author takes aim at techno-libertarianism as her book returns from the dead
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 They always risk becoming outdated as companies rise and fall, and as one hot new product is replaced by the next.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 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 the tech industry 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.