Even Silicon Valley dislikes Silicon Valley.
More than two-thirds of residents agreed in a 2024 poll that the tech companies have partially or completely misplaced their moral compass. And that was before so many in tech embraced the Trump administration.
Some of those who believe tech lost its way are finding explanations in a book published a quarter century ago.
Paulina Borsook’s “Cyberselfish” saw the seeds of disaster in the late-1990s dot-com boom, which, she argued, transformed a community that was previously sober, civic-minded and egalitarian into something toxic.
Silicon Valley, Ms. Borsook wrote, hated governments, rules and regulations. It believed if you were rich, you were smart. It thought people could be, and indeed should be, programmed just like a computer. “Techno-libertarianism,” as she labeled it, had no time for the messy realities of being human.
At the time, Silicon Valley was just a bunch of young people boasting and hyping. But Ms. Borsook predicted that when the tech world had amassed sufficient money and power, it would start imposing its beliefs on everyone outside the valley.
“If empathy has now become a distasteful personal failing; if surveillance capitalism has become the default shrugged-off business practice; if the environmental impacts of A.I. are waved away: then we are alas living in the tech-driven culture I saw headed our way 30 years ago,” Ms. Borsook said in an interview. “It’s terrible that I was right.”
Her prescience did her no favors. “Cyberselfish,” published in 2000, was such a setback to her career that she refers to it as “T.D.B.” — That Damn Book. She never wrote another. She spent years as an Airbnb superhost in exchange for free rent. Now, at 71 and in poor health, she lives a precarious life in the East Bay of San Francisco, dependent on a Go Fund Me that friends set up.
Her revival began in May with Jonathan Sandhu’s radical political criticism site, FakeSoap. “She was too right, too early, and too unwilling to flatter the cathedral of code,” Mr. Sandhu wrote. It accelerated recently with “The Nerd Reich,” a podcast by Gil Duran, a former spokesman for several California politicians. His talk with Ms. Borsook garnered over 120,000 views on YouTube in three weeks. Ms. Borsook’s champions are celebrating her on social media. “I was quoting Paulina Borsook before it was cool!” the speculative fiction writer Charlie Jane Anders bragged.
“Cyberselfish” has been out of print forever, but the secondhand copies have all been scooped up. Amazon does not have any. Even libraries say they don’t have it. Would-be readers have placed “wanted” notices on X to no avail. International publishers are asking Ms. Borsook about republishing it.
Ms. Borsook’s comeback arrives at a moment of soul-searching for some of the Silicon Valley writers who have charted its rise to power over the decades. How did the glorious dreams of liberation through technology — immortalized in Apple’s ad asserting that the company would save us from “1984” — morph into the current landscape of trillion-dollar companies flexing control over everyone’s life?
“I Thought I Knew Silicon Valley. I Was Wrong” was the headline on Steven Levy’s September feature in Wired magazine. Mr. Levy, like Ms. Borsook, has been around the valley forever, but his reporting generally reflected, and sometimes celebrated, the view from the executive suites.
Now those executives are behaving in unexpected ways. Mr. Levy noted, for instance, that Apple’s chief executive, Tim Cook, presented President Trump in August with a special engraved statute — which the writer called “the most dubious, most obsequious product in the company’s near half-century.”
Mr. Levy wrote, “Here’s something that took me by surprise: how quickly and decisively the visionaries I chronicled aligned themselves with Trump, a man whose values violently clashed with the egalitarian impulses of the digital revolution. How did I miss that?”
The Techno-Libertarian Ethos
The mid-1990s was an era of great hope for the freedom that computers would inevitably bring. John Perry Barlow, a onetime lyricist for the Grateful Dead, wrote a Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. It was addressed to governments and those who believed in traditional governments:
“On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather,” the declaration stated. “We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.”
Ms. Borsook found the hatred of government puzzling. “No one has benefited more and suffered less from the government than the inhabitants of Silicon Valley,” Ms. Borsook said. “I always wondered, Why are they so mad?” Much of “Cyberselfish” traces the roots of a budding techno-libertarian ethos among the tech elite, a philosophy that scorned the greater good in favor of the bottom line.
“The notion that because one is rich one must be smart, however fallacious, is deeply embedded: People can equate piles of money — or the promise of it — with good sense, wisdom, and savoir faire,” she wrote.
Ms. Borsook saw things differently from her boosterist colleagues for two reasons. One, she had deep experience in Silicon Valley, so knew the technology that was being celebrated. And two, she experienced a personal tragedy. She grew up in Pasadena, the heart of the Southern California 1960s engineering culture that made the moonshots and the internet possible. When she was 14, a friend shot her with a Colt .45, a horrendous accident that left her with a traumatic brain injury.
“There was no way I could have gone to law school, medical school, public policy school, become a geologist, gotten an M.B.A., learned a foreign language — in some ways I remain cognitively as I was at age 14,” Ms. Borsook wrote in an autobiographical essay. She had a hard time processing information in an academic format.
So she drifted into the world of computers. She worked at Data Communications magazine, covering the 1984 news conference where Bill Gates introduced Microsoft Windows to the world. Her view of tech was practical, the way many engineers thought at the time. It was just like indoor plumbing or electricity: infrastructure, not magic.
“I would never argue that technology hasn’t done some good things,” she said in an interview at a Mexican restaurant near her apartment on a recent rainy East Bay afternoon. “I just don’t see why this toxic ideology had to accompany it. These are tools. I mean, modern dentistry is great. But your dentist doesn’t insist you worship him.”
In 1993, a new San Francisco publication called Wired began publishing. “The Digital Revolution is whipping through our lives like a Bengali typhoon — while the mainstream media is still groping for the snooze button,” a co-founder, Louis Rossetto, wrote in the first issue. Ms. Borsook was among Wired’s earliest and most prolific contributors. She was also one of the few women.
Wired was one of those publications that come along at the right moment, like Rolling Stone in the late 1960s or Playboy in the 1950s, creating as well as covering an emerging way of life. In Wired’s case, it embraced technology as culture. The magazine made geeks sexy, which in turn made Wired hot.
The geeks were creating the future that Wired wanted. By the end of the decade, Wired editors had developed a list of hot stocks that were sure to capitalize on the tech boom, and licensed the magazine’s name to a real-life fund that invested in the companies.
It was all too cozy for Ms. Borsook. “I couldn’t, simply couldn’t, entirely get with the program — nor keep my mouth shut about it,” she wrote in “Cyberselfish.”
“Cyberselfish” was dropped by its first publisher, then picked up by a second for less money. It was published just as the dot-com boom began to unravel. It got some good reviews. The New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani called it “smart, funny and irreverent.” But it didn’t sell, and it didn’t lead to anything.
“It flatlined me in the cultural universe,” Ms. Borsook said.
Kevin Kelly, the executive editor of Wired from its founding until 1999, said he only vaguely recalled “Cyberselfish.” He rejected Ms. Borsook’s notion, made at length in the book, that the magazine validated and encouraged the more unsavory aspects of the tech industry.
Silicon Valley Truth and Reconciliation?
Ms. Borsook’s friends remember hard times. “Paulina saw the dark lining in every silver cloud and insisted on her own intuitions — she followed her muse rather than money,” recalled Jeff Ubois, a former entrepreneur. “There wasn’t much market demand for pessimism and foreboding in San Francisco.”
She wasn’t the only critic of Silicon Valley. Clifford Stoll, an astronomer and writer, wrote “Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway” in 1995, saying the internet would never be anything more than a toy. The book’s predictions garnered a lot of attention. “No online database will replace your daily newspaper,” he wrote.
In 2010, with newspapers reeling, Mr. Stoll renounced his own book. “Wrong? Yep,” he said in an online forum. In 2025, living not far from Ms. Borsook in the East Bay, Mr. Stoll has changed his mind yet again. “Only a fool believes that technology is a cornucopia of wonderful stuff without a price to be paid,” he said in an interview.
Even Wired, for so long a booster, has become increasingly Borsookian. It now reports aggressively on Silicon Valley. A recent video: “Has the U.S. Become a Surveillance State?”
“Hope it works out,” Ms. Borsook said of the magazine’s newfound fervor. Her own attitudes have remained remarkably consistent. New rhetoric came along, she noted in a 2015 “Cyberselfish” update, but the political impulses always remained the same.
“I still believe in regulation and that there is such a thing as the public good and don’t believe the market can or should provide everything,” she wrote. She added that the vast amounts of money generated by the valley were, as always, at the root of the problem. Money is power.
So what is to be done? In the new issue of In Formation, a very irregular tech-critical tech magazine with the slogan “Every day, computers are making people easier to use,” Ms. Borsook proposes a Silicon Valley Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
She imagines testimony from a long list of tech journalists turned investors as well as reporters turned celebrants. Also: confessions from the men who came up with the labels “sharing economy,” “disruptive innovation” and “thought leader.” The proceedings would, at the least, clear the air and provide greater understanding.
Her editor asked, “Is this humor or is this serious?” Ms. Borsook’s answer: “I don’t know.”
David Streitfeld writes about technology and the people who make it and how it affects the world around them. He is based in San Francisco.
The post The Writer Who Dared Criticize Silicon Valley appeared first on New York Times.
