Synopses & Reviews
Paulina Borsook has been stirring up a ruckus in Silicon Valley since her days as a regular contributor to
Wired magazine. She will ruffle feathers again with this spirited, funny, gimlet-eyed look at the worldview of the digerati--one she terms "violently lacking in compassion, ravingly anti-government, and tremendously opposed to regulation."
In Cyberselfish Borsook journeys through and rants about high tech culture, profiling the worlds of ravers, gilders, cypherpunks, anarchocapitalists, and other Silicon Valley life forms; and exploring the theory and practice of what she dubs "technolibertarianism" in all its manifestations. Whether she is attending Bionomics conferences or hanging out with Wired staffers, reading personal ads or evaluating high-tech's sorry philanthropic record, Borsook is full of original observations, mordant wit, and furious passion that readers wake up to the social and political consequences of having computer geeks run the world. Cyberselfish is sure to raise the hackles of high techies and to clarify what makes the rest of us so nervous about the brave new cyberworld.
A Note from Paula Borsook:
It's been said that religion plays a larger part in American life than in other places--and so it is in high-tech, where the dominant, if often not so overtly expressed creed is libertarianism.
Cyberselfish is a gonzo, playful look at these well-known-within-high-tech/little-known-outside-it high-tech sacred beliefs. I wrote the book because the geeks I started stumbling into in the early 1980s were clearly different in their political and psychological approach to the world than the ones I knew growing up in the Jet Propulsion Lab/aerospace technology culture of post-World War II Southern California--and it wasn't obvious to me why this should be so. Trying to figure this out matters, because high-tech's unique combo of those with measurably superior puzzle-solving brains in force with those who know how to skim profit from product creates intellectual stylesetters who will have a disproportionate say over the shape of things to come.
Since I can't abide reading shouldsy-oughtsy books that preach and yammer and shake their fingers at you, I didn't write one.
While I do have some serious things to say in Cyberselfish, included a fair amount of reporting, and articulated worries about where high-tech's value-systems may be leading, I couldn't resist engaging in some Bad Attitude.
Review
"...cuts through the usual techie propaganda... Cyberselfish is a fabulous read." Seattle Weekly
About the Author
Paulina Borsook was a contributing writer at Wired during the magazine's glory years. Her fiction, essays, humor pieces, and journalism on technology and culture have appeared in print and on-line at publications including Newsweek, Mother Jones, San Francisco, Salon.com, Suck, and Feed.