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 They always risk becoming outdated as companies rise and fall, and as one hot new product is replaced by the next.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 said 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.
The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
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 at 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 Grey 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.
My sense is that writers like Steven Levy did recognize a libertarian streak running through Silicon Valley. But no one really pulled it out and put it under the microscope in the way you did.
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 are 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 a distinct culture within Silicon Valley.
One of the distinctions I made in the book is between Ravers and Gilders — 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. So what’s the counterculture bit of it? Maybe the personal freedom aspect of it is countercultural.
Another 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 about the leadership class — 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.
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 and have right-wing beliefs or are allied with the Trump administration. There’s another executive class that maybe doesn’t share exactly those beliefs but is able to make itself very comfortable with them. And then there’s that same diversity you were talking about underneath. I’ve spoken to people who work for someone like Elon Musk, and they say, “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 readers who aren’t familiar with the book and have only a general sense that there is a libertarian strain in Silicon Valley — 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 for it, 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.” These people have no idea how much government has subsidized and made possible their lives, 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 though 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 that 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 has compared California to 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. There’s this inability to connect the dots, and a profound lack of historical perspective.
To what extent is what we’re seeing now — the tech industry’s alignment with the Trump administration, all these other dystopian developments — a shift? And to what extent is it all one continuous story with what you were seeing before?
Unfortunately, I see more continuity than rupture. I really see the Netscape IPO as the moment when things began to change, when Silicon Valley was invaded by the finance bros, and there was a real shift 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 and not technology innovation by my definition, there was too much investment money in the world that didn’t know where to go. It would flow into these companies, and these founders would parrot the same self-justifying language I’d heard fifteen years earlier. And the way that something like Airbnb fought so hard against any kind of regulation, against anything that would ask them to be a good community actor, was entirely consistent with that older strain of techno-libertarianism — dressed up in new branding, but the same basket of beliefs as ever.
