Paulina Borsook’s overlooked critique of Silicon Valley comes back into print

Paulina Borsook’s “Cyberselfish,” first published in 2000, spent nearly three decades in obscurity before finding fresh attention last year. The New York Times reported that readers were rediscovering the book in their attempts to understand how the technology industry lost its way. Tin House now releases a new edition with an introduction by Gil Durán, author of “The Nerd Reich,” reviving Borsook’s analysis of Silicon Valley’s techno-libertarian culture.

In a recent Zoom interview, Borsook described the book as functioning like a travelogue of her attempts to understand what she calls the techno-libertarian influence on Silicon Valley. She characterized this influence as “a kind of basket of beliefs” that is “violently anti-regulation,” a stance she found paradoxical given that “no sector of society had benefited more and suffered less from the government than these guys.”

How Borsook Discovered the Subject

The Bay Area observed from an outsider’s perspective

Borsook began circulating in technology circles during the early-to-middle 1980s in the Bay Area. She had grown up in Pasadena, home to the Caltech-JPL space program, and carried with her exposure to a different strain of technical culture. At Caltech and JPL, she observed that parents of her peers possessed a clear understanding of what government could provide and lacked the self-aggrandizing attitude she later encountered in Silicon Valley.

Starting around the early 1990s, Borsook heard remarks from technologists that struck her as strange and incoherent. She lacked precise terminology for what she was observing, only recognizing it as libertarianism. The puzzle deepened because government had visibly enabled the space program at Caltech and JPL, yet the technologists she met in Silicon Valley spoke as though government were inherently oppressive.

From fiction to investigation

After receiving an MFA from Columbia University, Borsook’s agent encouraged her to pursue nonfiction, noting the difficulty of publishing fiction. When asked whether she had a book in her, Borsook responded affirmatively. She described the subculture she had been observing as something she wanted to explore, having learned that her instinct was always to investigate things she did not understand.

Borsook framed her eventual book as resembling works like “Black Lamb and Gray Falcon” more than a traditional polemic. She presented it as a series of snapshots rather than a systematic argument. She felt uniquely positioned to write about this phenomenon, partly because no one else was paying attention to it.

The Two Worlds Within Silicon Valley

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The book identified a crucial division within the technology industry that Borsook called the distinction between Ravers and Gilders. Gilders, named after George Gilder, the conservative thought leader of the early 1990s, represented the socially conservative faction. Ravers, in homage to John Perry Barlow, embraced cultural liberalism, drugs, sex, rock and roll, and events like Burning Man.

This categorization, Borsook noted, has remained relevant to contemporary Silicon Valley. Today’s industry harbors Christian nationalists and conservative Catholics in leadership positions alongside Burners and those involved in effective altruism and artificial intelligence spaces. Despite this internal diversity, both factions shared the libertarian hostility toward regulation.

Borsook emphasized that she was discussing the leadership class and the cultural orientation of tech decision-makers rather than electoral politics. The San Francisco peninsula continues to vote Democratic, and Ro Khanna represents the region as congressman. Her critique targeted the “tech overlords” rather than rank-and-file workers, many of whom may hold different views or simply maintain employment despite disagreement with company ideology.

The Forgotten Years and the Sudden Return

The book’s disappearance

After “Cyberselfish” was first released, Borsook said, “no one was interested in anything I might have to say about anything, tech or not tech, forever after.” The book went out of print and remained in obscurity for over two decades. Borsook periodically checked used book platforms and found copies selling for three dollars, with sellers making more money on shipping than the book’s sale price.

The unexpected renaissance

Beginning roughly 1.5 years ago, Borsook noticed the prices of used copies starting to climb, though not dramatically at first. She was also contacted by European academics she had never encountered, leaving her puzzled about how they had discovered her work. Social media posts from strangers began appearing, asserting that the book should never have been forgotten.

These converging signals led Borsook to Gil Durán. After they met for lunch, they recognized themselves as kindred spirits. Steven Levy, then working on a Wired piece titled “How did I get it so wrong?”, contacted Durán for a 45-minute conversation. Durán urged Levy to speak with Borsook about her long-standing analysis of the industry’s trajectory.

Levy never quoted Durán in his piece and did not contact Borsook directly. However, Durán posted a forceful endorsement on Bluesky, stating that Borsook “got everything right” and calling for the book’s return to print. Combined with a podcast appearance alongside Durán, this advocacy made “Cyberselfish” suddenly unavailable on the secondhand market.

Continuity in Silicon Valley’s Ideology

Borsook sees the current alignment of technology leaders with the Trump administration as a continuation rather than a rupture. She identifies the Netscape IPO as a pivotal moment when finance professionals entered the industry, introducing the mentality of “flip and flee” and prioritizing rapid exits over building enduring enterprises.

Even after the dot-com crash, this attitude persisted underground, she explained, describing it as “contaminating the aquifers. It was uncorrected, and it just spread out more and more.” Companies like Airbnb and Uber exemplify this pattern in her analysis. She views them not as technological innovations but as strictly financial plays, enabled by excess investment capital seeking returns. These companies resisted regulation and community accountability while transforming housing markets and labor dynamics. The ideological justification recycled the libertarian rhetoric from the previous generation.

The Modern Manifestations

The techno-libertarian worldview produces blind spots even when its adherents benefit from the systems they claim to oppose. Borsook cited the example of technology executives relocating to Nevada’s side of Lake Tahoe to escape California taxes, with figures like Sergey Brin publicly comparing California to Soviet Russia. Yet the same people treasured Lake Tahoe itself, which exists in its pristine state due to “decades of government intervention and interference, environmental scientists, regulation.”

Borsook views artificial intelligence as “a big Ponzi scheme,” an assessment rooted in her concern that the same patterns of self-justification, avoiding regulatory scrutiny, and prioritizing shareholder value over societal benefit continue unabated. She cited Apple’s controversial hydraulic press advertisement that crushed creative tools as evidence that even companies with a history of appealing to the creative class had abandoned that identity. She noted that the tech industry’s reasoning in this case rests on stockholder theory of value, which “justifies whatever the AI companies are doing because of the stock play, not because it’s intrinsically valuable.”

The Relevance of a 26-Year-Old Critique

Borsook’s analysis resonates today because the fundamental attitudes she documented have not fundamentally changed. The precarity facing technology workers today makes them less likely to voice dissent than in past eras, while the leadership class has only grown more insulated and ideologically aligned.

The book’s return suggests that readers seeking to understand the present moment find historical analysis valuable. Borsook’s snapshot approach, rather than a polemical framework, offers a way to observe how consistent cultural patterns in technology leadership produce recurring consequences across different eras and different products.

Source: TechCrunch