Paulina Borsook saw there was something rotten afoot in Silicon Valley in the 1990s, and in her book Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech, she set out to document and understand a peculiar mindset she saw emerging. Originally published in 2000, Paulina’s observations in Cyberselfish have proved truer now than when it was first written. She saw that the culture of high tech was determinedly anti-government, even as it owed its growth to government subsidization.
That tech prioritized the idea of progress and profits and ignored all costs. That it co-opted the language of evolution to make human decisions and power structures seem inevitable. That the industry was hyper-male and tended toward hyper-misogynistic.
That its figureheads possessed great wealth but were abysmal at sharing that wealth through philanthropy. Cyberselfish was published into a moment in which tech and its leaders’ reputations were immaculate and unquestioned. Thanks to a surge of interest in her prophetic insights, Cyberselfish will be reissued this fall to a world that’s finally ready to listen.
The following is an excerpt from the new edition. Cyberselfish was written as a description of a subculture. It was never intended as a book of prophecy, but that sadly is what it has turned out to be.
Social scientists and historians probably have a name for what happens when a minority culture becomes a majority one: What was written about here has become the dominant ideology of Silicon Valley leaders. The trends and ideas of this subculture coming into domination have had effects far worse than I could have imagined back when I was working on the project in the 1990s. Happy days, Cyberselfish was fortunate enough to have been well and widely reviewed all over the world when it came out, but it did not sell well.
No doubt the dot-com crash (“let’s not think about those tech fools we got taken in by”) followed by 9/11 turned attention elsewhere. Thus the book went out of print decades ago, only a few years after it was published. Sometimes the algorithm gives, in contrast to all the times it takes away.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
