The Mother of Silicon Valley Heresy: Paulina Borsook on the Second Coming of Cyberselfish

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. It is 09/02/2026 [ed.: date as spoken; file is dated Sep 1]. Almost exactly a year ago, we had David Temkin on the show. He's a technologist. He started a magazine called InFormation twenty five years ago, and it was a magazine slightly skeptical, I think, of tech, big tech, twenty five years ago, and he's brought it back. One of the, editors or contributing editors, at least, of information is a woman called Paulina Borsook, a legendary figure in Silicon Valley. She's written all sorts of interesting things, including, in 1999, a Salon piece, entitled "How the Internet Ruined San Francisco". She also had a very influential, piece in Mother Jones called Cyberselfish. And her book, Cyberselfish, that I think came out in around 2000 is now, very, very rare. It costs $196 if you want a secondhand copy. But for those of you who want to read about Cyberselfish, it was a very prescient book. It's back in print, or at least it's gonna be back in print in a couple of weeks. A book which, at least according to its publisher, is more relevant than ever, and Paulina Borsook, I think, is also more relevant than ever, and she's joining us from Oakland, Piedmont, a basement in Oakland, Piedmont. Yeah. Paulina, congratulations. How does it feel to be so prescient?

00:02:20 Paulina Borsook: Confusing. It's confusing. I mean, I—you know, it's—I always used to joke with my friends. Oh, it's not a joke. It's like on my headstone, it would say I was always right. I never lied, and no one paid any attention to me. But I can't say that no one paid any attention to me because this book has come back from the dead much to my astonishment.

00:02:42 Andrew Keen: So—back from the dead. Is that a religious reference? Has it been resurrected, Cyberselfish?

00:02:48 Paulina Borsook: I think it's been resurrected. I—and, again, I had nothing to do with it. If it would—I hate to say this, but it's, like, back by popular demand. It wasn't like, you know, I hired a publicist or anything. Like, you know, the first sense that I had that something funny was going on is that maybe a couple times a year, I would check the prices of it on the used book platforms, and it was selling for, like, $4, which is, you know, handling would be more than what the book was worth. And I began to notice the prices creeping up about a year ago about a little more than a year ago, and I thought, that's interesting. And, then I began to get, you know, Europeans wanting to talk to me again. And I thought, I wonder what's going on. And then someone I never heard of and never met posted on LinkedIn this amazing piece about how I got everything right. No one paid any attention to me. I'm totally broke, totally forgotten. Everyone's work is built on mine. We gotta step in and do something here. That post went viral. It led me to all kinds of people, including a guy named Giovanni Lostumbo, and he said, you should talk to Gil Duran. And then I—who's Gil Duran? And so Gil and I met, and, we just really hit it off. And, at the time, and he'd been hearing about me. So at the time, there was a writer for Wired who was writing sort of a mea culpa, how did I get this all wrong? And this writer interviewed Gil, who spent forty five minutes with him, and Gil said you should really talk to Paulina. She's been tracking this forever. The writer—Wired writer—didn't do—didn't reference either one of us. And this so annoyed Gil. He wrote this incredible thing on Bluesky, basically saying she got everything right. You know, Wired still doesn't get it. You know, we should do something here. And that alerted the New York Times reporter. That alerted the person who was—who's gonna publish me in the UK and Commonwealth. And, when the New York Times piece came out on November—yeah.

00:04:48 Andrew Keen: And let's just remember. The New York Times piece came out, as you said, last November, and it was entitled—big feature with a lovely photo of you in the garden—"The Writer Who Dared Criticize Silicon Valley." There was also a piece in Mother Jones, "A Tech Prophet Finally Gets a Second Coming" [as spoken; actual title: "...Her Second Coming"], so more religious language.

00:05:10 Paulina Borsook: More religious language. But the thing is once the New York Times piece came out, my agent emailed me and said we always knew you were right. And I was like, okay. And so he had something to show New York publishers, and that's how this whole thing happened. But, again, I had nothing to do with it. You know? I didn't hire a publicist or reputation management or anything else. And what I have found kind of interesting is it does seem to appeal to a younger audience because, as I've been told, they really like it that it doesn't read like a TED Talk, and they like it that it's kind of funny and literary and allusive and a little bit playful. And it's very different from the kind of stuff they're in the habit of reading. And, you know, when, Tin House bought it, what the editor said to me, she's not changed a word. It kind of stands on its own of its time. You know, I have a foreword by Gil Duran, and I wrote an afterword. But, you know, it's kind of its time, which is of the nineties, but it's also spookily prescient. Like, I've had people quoting back at me stuff that I wrote, and I went, oh, I wrote that? Okay. It's—it was such a cursed project, yet it turns out to have lasting value. And I think if you create stuff, you wanna—if you're a certain kind of person, you wanna feel that you've created something lasting value, and I've gotten that validation a lot in the last year. So that's been great.

00:06:34 Andrew Keen: The subtitle of the book is "A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High-Tech." Is Cyberselfish really a critique of libertarianism? Is that the core of the book?

00:06:49 Paulina Borsook: What I was—I was using that, you know, again, Gil talks about techno-fascism, and, you know, I don't wanna talk too much about what's going on today. But the thing is I didn't have any other language to describe what this subculture was like. You know, violently anti-government, totally anti-regulation, you know, drunk on Ayn Rand. You know, what other term would you use for people who think like that? But what I found so weird is that, as I always say, no sector of society has benefited more and suffered less from the government than people in Silicon Valley. So why are they acting like this, and why are they so mad? So I was just fascinated by them, and that's why I wanted to write about them. I mean, people laugh at me for this, but I always say when I don't understand something, I want to write about it, which doesn't mean I'm running from ignorance. It means I wanna—I'm saying, I wanna go explore this. So, you know, that's—there wasn't a better word than libertarian, and that was kind of my shorthand for it.

00:07:49 Andrew Keen: You've written for, not just Mother Jones, but also Wired. So you knew all the—what was his name? Rossetto, Kevin Kelly. Were you friendly with these people, Paulina? How did you get on with them all?

00:08:05 Paulina Borsook: Well, that's—that was kind of one of the weird things with this, which is they took me on right away. And I was a freelancer. I wasn't a staffer. And I had in common with him that we both saw technology as culture. And so they let me write what I wanted and into the way I wanted to write and Louis was very supportive of a literary kind of writing. Like, he used to give new freelancers a copy of The New Journalism, you know, which was a style of writing that came by in the seventies, which is like the writers in the piece, you know, you're not doing straight ahead newspaper writing. So I got along fine with him, in terms of a freelancer. It was totally fine. I didn't really understand the kind of nest of [unclear] I'd ended up in. You know? I'm not a nutcase free market wacko. But no one was asking me to be—I could just go and do my work. And it took a while for me to figure it out and that, wait a minute. I am kind of parting company with these people in certain ways. But the first couple of years, it didn't matter.

00:09:04 Andrew Keen: Are they? I mean, when I think of Kevin Kelly, I've always found him very gentlemanly, very respectful, very decent sort of fellow, obviously, religious as well. Same is true of Stewart Brand. Can we distinguish those sort of—I mean, maybe we can call them libertarians or certainly techno-idealists. Can we, Paulina, separate those types, the Brands and the Kellys, from, the Elon Musks and the Sam Altmans of, the contemporary world, or are they basically all the same?

00:09:41 Paulina Borsook: Well, the situation is morphed in a highly unpleasant way, which is, you know, Wired, all this stuff is into self-organization, self-regulation. That's very libertarian kind of stuff. What's going on now is this kind of, you know, military industrial complex, you know, plutocrat thing, which is I don't think what Wired was in favor of. I think they weren't seeing what the consequences were of the kind of rhetoric they were putting out into the world. I mean, I happen to believe in regulation for a lot of things, and I happen to believe in government subsidy for lots of things. And I don't think everything will just so organize itself beautifully. And I think the—what I say about—I call it TDB—That Damn Book—because it really cursed my life for years. What I say about it is kind of like, if you read it, you have metaphors and framing to understand everything that these current crop of people are spewing. In other words, it's like a Guide for the Perplexed. You know, Kevin is not like Sam Altman, except that, you know, still, they have a belief in everything that tech wants to do is fine. We'll regulate ourselves. It's all beautiful for the future of humanity. And I think a lot of people would have a lot of trouble with what's going on with the data centers and the pushback against Flock and that AI will save us. I mean, I think ordinary people are beginning to have problems with that. It is true Kevin and I almost never agreed on anything. On any given issue, we would be opposite ends of the spectrum, but, you know, it's not my nature to demonize. You know? That makes me kinda wimpy, I guess. A lot—

00:11:26 Andrew Keen: of people have written along these lines. John Markoff has written extensively. I know you're familiar with him and his work. There have been books written about Brand in particular, and, of course, Steve Jobs and the intellectual legacy of the counterculture. Do you include this in Cyberselfish? Do you see tech idealism coming directly out of the counterculture?

00:11:57 Paulina Borsook: I think there's an element of that, but I—you know, and that's been documented by other people. But I—

00:12:04 Andrew Keen: Fred Turner, of course, at Stanford has written a very good history.

00:12:07 Paulina Borsook: It's funny. I've never met him. I've heard of him. We know people in common, and he thinks my work is okay, but I've never met him. I think that was a strain in Silicon Valley. And I heard Markoff give a talk, I don't know, about a month or two ago, when he says something I thought was really smart, which is that Silicon Valley is multicultural, and they just didn't mean your country of origin. And I think that's right. And the, utopian counterculture elements that he's written about, yeah, those were there, but that's not all that was there. And I was more interested in this other thing that I was picking up on that I found incomprehensible. I mean, why are you acting like this? And, also, as I always contrasted is that I grew up in Pasadena, which is around the whole JPL Caltech space program STEM culture. And so initially, when I got here, I thought, oh, this is kind of like what I grew up around. And then I began to realize, no. There's some big differences here. So, no, Steve Jobs is not much of a player in TDB. It's kind of not relevant. I—you know, as you know, what you leave out is as important as what you put in, and this was not the big book of everything along with Silicon Valley. I was focusing on a particular subculture and what I found fascinating, funny, and a little scary about it. So you want the big book of what's from Silicon Valley, you should talk to somebody else.

00:13:27 Andrew Keen: In the nineties, did someone personify this? You've talked about Kevin Kelly. I brought up Stewart Brand as well. Does someone epitomize what you were critiquing in Cyberselfish?

00:13:43 Paulina Borsook: Well, you know, I always used to be put in this sort of point counterpoint thing with John Perry Barlow. I'm over here.

00:13:49 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And he, of course, recently died [ed.: Barlow died in 2018]. Another, very interesting character was a lyricist for the Grateful Dead.

00:13:56 Paulina Borsook: Mhmm. I mean, when I read his, what is it, declaration of sovereignty of cyberspace [ed.: "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace"], I just snorted. I mean, you know, it was grandiose. You could say it was optimistic. But, you know, I have so many arguments with him. He'd say ridiculous things like, you know, if members in Congress just got email addresses, we wouldn't have any problems with democracy. And I was like, are you crazy? Or email is fundamentally a feminine technology because it's about communication. I mean, he was so full of this essentialist techno-utopian, to me, nonsense, and I am always—you know, he called me dyspeptic, which I will frankly own. I think that's a fine compliment. I don't know. I just tend to think of technology as infrastructure, and I think of it as it can be used for good or bad. And, you shouldn't worship it. You shouldn't fetishize it. That's a very different attitude, I think. Not that there wasn't great stuff being invented. I'm not saying that. But that language of innovation, which was around in the nineties, it's still being used today, and I don't see much innovation except for surveillance capitalism, you know, financial plays. I mean, yeah, in the nineties, we had Internet, desktop publishing. You know, all kinds of stuff came along the web, of course. You know, that was real innovation. I—what I see now is something else, but you'll know your Shakespeare, borrowing the robes of the tech culture of another era.

00:15:30 Andrew Keen: Paulina, shouldn't we, though—I'm not sure if the word is respect, but shouldn't we be nostalgic and in a way awed by the spirit of this, techno culture, whether it's Kevin Kelly or Perry Barlow, or, many of the others. There was a Ken Kesey-like spirit. They were all merry pranksters. I take your point on Barlow, but I'm not sure he took himself particularly seriously. So—well, I think that—isn't there an attractive quality here? I mean, I take a lot of your points on Cyberselfish. You're right, of course. You were prescient. You were the tech prophet and all the rest of it. But these guys were having a lot of fun.

00:16:28 Paulina Borsook: That's fine for them. Go ahead and have fun. You know? I'm not anti-fun, and I certainly—some other stuff I totally agreed with, which is the sort of, you know, drugs and sex and rock and roll and, you know, get your laws off my body and all that kind of stuff. But, you know, the fact that they were having fun, that is a separate issue from what I thought was going on with the culture. And then also I hate to bring it up because it makes me sound humorless and shrill, but, you know, they were not good on the women issues. They just really, really weren't. And, I couldn't ignore that as a card-carrying Berkeley feminist. But, you know, I don't need to trash everything of, you know, from then. And the book isn't trashing everything from then, and I made a lot of friends in that culture. So, you know, don't put me in the box of saying that, you know, I'm real—I'm attacking all those people. I'm just saying I thought I couldn't buy into their entire program. You know, I'm just not a techno-utopian. You know, I am by nature sort of a Debbie Downer kind of person. So—

00:17:34 Andrew Keen: The subtitle of the book is "A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High-Tech." There's a kind of Hunter Thompson-esque element there. Are you competing in this critical romp? Can there be critical romps for critics of tech as well as the Brands and the Markoffs and the—I mean, what of this world?

00:18:02 Paulina Borsook: Why not? I mean, you know, can I have fun, you know, sort of sticking out my tongue? And—I don't know. It's not my nature to be dour, so I think you can say sort of snotty, snarky, meaningful things, but, you know, have a light touch, and that's what was going on in there. And some of it is that I was really—you know, the older Silicon Valley culture, I had great respect for, you know, and, you know, the, you know, the Gordon Moores and all those kind of people who really—or the Hewletts and Packards, all those guys. I mean, I thought that stuff was just fine. There was things going on in that nineties culture that I didn't think were so fine. But are you saying that no one is allowed to criticize—these people because they were having fun and they created this interesting—we used to call it, you know, that whole South Park, not the TV show, but that whole multimedia gulch thing in San Francisco. You know, the whole South Park thing. Yeah. A lot of people having fun and finding creative outlets for their skills. And I would never say otherwise, but that doesn't mean you can't see some stuff that's not so pretty about it. And one of the things that I really struggle with because, you know, I'm an eco-hippie is that I was really conscious then of the environmental impact of all this. You know, the manufacturing, the contamination of some of the best farmland in the world with the semiconductor processing that what was keeping the grid up and functioning, those were all government things, and that was just sort of being hand waved away. And you're right. I tend not to be in the future, we will all have our own private gyrocopter. I'm just not one of those kind of people. So, the appeal to kind of secular religion just doesn't fly with me.

00:19:44 Andrew Keen: Were you ever a believer? Often, these critiques of tech are particularly powerful when, the writer or thinker once believed their—

00:19:58 Paulina Borsook: No. No.

00:19:59 Andrew Keen: No. You were never a believer.

00:20:01 Paulina Borsook: What I valued about it is, purely kind of about utility, which is I cannot type. I have terrible writer's block. And when I got introduced to what we call word processing, but you know what I mean, I was ecstatic because it meant that I could have a career as a writer. I could backspace and delete. I was really happy with that, but that doesn't mean I was a believer in this other ideology. I don't see what one has to do with the other. And because, you know, I'm chronically ill and often have been housebound, I was really grateful when I got online, what was it, 1984 when it was BBSs and stuff like that. You know, if you're housebound and isolated, being able to communicate with people all over the world was great. So but that's not buying a package of beliefs. It's not settling into having a religious belief. It's like, yes. I appreciate this. I can do something useful with it. I'm glad of it, but that's not the same as worshiping it. Does that distinction make sense?

00:20:58 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And the Times piece, I don't wanna get perhaps too personal, but in the Times piece, it notes that when you were 14, a friend shot you with a Colt 45, and I'm quoting the Times piece here. It was a horrendous accident that left you with a traumatic brain injury. Is this part of the narrative, Paulina? It's become a—does that story fit in, or is it entirely separate from Cyberselfish?

00:21:30 Paulina Borsook: It's hard to tell. I look at it another way, which is I was very limited in what I could do with my life and, you know, making a living and whatever because of that head injury. And I'm really grateful that the technologies I mentioned, you know, writing and communicating and stuff, were very possible for me. A lot of people have kind of latched onto the TBI: that explains why you have this outsider perspective, and that explains this and that. I don't know. I'm stuck in the middle of it. I was 14 years old. I didn't know what I would have been like as an adult without it. It just—I'm really aware of the professional paths that were cut off for me because my brain just does not work right, and being grateful for the supportive technologies that started to exist for me in the middle—when I was in my middle-late twenties. So you can do with it what you will. I don't—people find that narrative really compelling, and they wanna say that everything I am comes to that. I don't think so. I think it's just—I'm a package deal. I would put it that way. The one thing I would say is that being what I call the TBI ghost, which is a complicated thing, but, you know, sort of you're not entirely present in your body. I think maybe that contributed to my having an outsider perspective on things, but I think I was always wired to be like that anyway, and that just made it more so.

00:22:49 Andrew Keen: So the book came out the end of the nineties. You said it was a curse. Why?

00:22:55 Paulina Borsook: It was so maddening because I had a really good media arc, and it was well and widely reviewed all over the world. You know, can't complain. Did a lot of stuff. People liked it, whatever. But it didn't sell, and my career just tanked after that. I could never get published again on anything, whether tech, not tech, a magazine article, a book, anything. And, it was really like my career came to a crashing halt after that book came out, which is why I called it that damn book. It's like—no one ever has been able to give me an explanation of why that happens. Some people think, oh, well, you were—it was a blacklist or someone said, well, it's because you're a woman. Women aren't allowed to be authoritative. I don't know. It was just weird, and no one could explain it to me. And I don't understand it either because it shouldn't have happened. I mean, given the, what can you call it, legitimacy that the book had, I don't know what else to call it in the mediasphere. It was very odd. Like, I was a finalist for four different fellowships. None of them came through. Why? It's—I don't know. So that's why it feels like it's cursed. And that's why all of a sudden for it to be celebrated and people thinking, oh, this is really cool. I'm going, thank you very much. But I have PTSD from twenty five years of never being able to be published again. So I'm grateful, but I'm puzzled, which is maybe not the answer you're looking for.

00:24:20 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I mean, are you suggesting that there was some sort of conspiracy against you, that people didn't like this? Or—I mean, publishers always want a successful book. So—

00:24:29 Paulina Borsook: Right. But there are many books that come out that probably sold no worse than TDB that the author got another chance to write another book. I had a bunch of ideas for books, and they never went anywhere. I don't wanna go into the litany of woe is me of what didn't happen, but it was weird. And when I would run into people who knew me from my [unclear] days of that era, and I'd say, I can't get published again, and they look at me puzzled and go, that doesn't make any sense. I'd say, I know it doesn't make any sense. I can't explain it, and then I would burst into tears. So there's no real explanation for it, except that just like there's no real explanation for it coming back from the dead, for which I'm very grateful, but I had nothing to do with it. I mean, there was a time period last summer where the going rate for the original book was, like, a thousand dollars, and I would have, like, graduate students all over the world saying, I can't afford it. Can you get it to me? And I'd say, I'm sorry. It's out of print. I can't do anything about this. So, I guess people have found something of value in it. You know?

00:25:33 Andrew Keen: What did you wanna write? What would you have—what sorts of projects, were you trying to sell? Was it about tech? Was it Cyberselfish?

00:25:43 Paulina Borsook: No. Most of it was not about tech.

00:25:44 Andrew Keen: The next chapter of Cyberselfish? What—

00:25:47 Paulina Borsook: No. No. I sort of—this may sound vain, but I sort of felt like I said what I wanted to say. Now if someone had come to me after—when the media arc was done and say, this was great. We'd like you to write it, follow on to this book. I would have agreed to it, but that's not what my thinking was going. I was thinking about everything from, I was involved in this interesting environmental issue in the Bay Area, and it was a fascinating story. That would have made a good book, but I couldn't get anyone interested. I was thinking of doing what I call the enlightened cynic's guide to elder care. I—Andrew, you know me. I've got tons of idea fluency. There's a zillion ideas I had for a zillion projects, and it's, oh, Wired for Sex. That was another one that tagged. You know, I had a zillion ideas for a zillion things, and all of them mysteriously just didn't go anywhere or get anywhere or just kind of sublimed, you know, that term from chemistry, you know, just turned into vapor. So, after a while, I just sort of gave up. I'm sick of beating my head against the wall and, you know, which makes this whole resuscitation even more mysterious and blessed. It's the religious language again, but I don't know what else to call it.

00:26:56 Andrew Keen: So what have you been doing the last twenty five years?

00:26:59 Paulina Borsook: Aside from moping? I had a nasty elder care situation for about seven years. And, you know—again, I was involved with this environmental issue. I helped a friend put on a concert series in Berkeley. You know, I ended up being a—you know, My Life as a Ghost, that art project, which is sort of about the TBI and the mind-body problem and what is the meaning of a soul, you know, in itself. You know, it's not like I've been doing nothing. It's just, you know, they weren't fungible. And then I got evicted, had to put everything in storage, lost everything I owned. And then I ended up—some friends had this beautiful property in the Santa Cruz Mountains, and I ended up being an Airbnb superhost. So I managed the property and did a good job with my guests, and that's what I did for six years. And but then there was a fight among the trustees, and the property had to be sold. So I've just been kind of bouncing around. And meanwhile, this, you know, thing has developed that I had nothing to do with. And so I've just been dealing with that in the last year. It's like, wow. You wanna talk to me? Okay. That's great.

00:28:08 Andrew Keen: What have you learned then in the last twenty five years? What? I mean, you—as the Times suggested, you were one of the very earliest and perhaps most prescient critics of Silicon Valley. You were a tech prophet. So much of what you said now seems self-evident, and more and more books have been written in that vein. There's even a new word I came across, in the New York Times, Borsookian.

00:28:38 Paulina Borsook: Yes.

00:28:38 Andrew Keen: So—but what have you learned, Paulina, that you didn't know when you wrote Cyberselfish?

00:28:48 Paulina Borsook: What was disappointing to me, and I don't know if you put this in the category of learning, is that, you know, there was definitely in Silicon Valley this sort of what I call being a good liberal kid, Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. I mean, there were a lot of people that were looking at a lot of different aspects of this. I wasn't the only one at all. And I just was kind of dismayed how that all seemed to have gone away. And I also didn't like it myself. I can't tell you how often I would read something or someone have a book out, and I'd sort of squeak and go, but I wrote about that twenty five years ago. I mean, the details of it don't matter. And, again, as I said, a lot of what tech has become, it's been about the financial play, which is not that interesting to me. I mean, it exists. It matters, but it's not—that's not what it's about. I mean, Airbnb and Uber are financial plays. So I don't know. That's probably not the answer you're looking for, but, you know, what have I learned? One thing that's different now is that I don't know if you know this in my background, but, you know, in the eighties and nineties, I was either writing for the technical trades or sometimes I do corporate hack work for the various corporations. And so I felt I had a boots on the ground, very hands on understanding of what was going on in tech. That kind of all went away. So a lot of my understanding of tech is secondhand. It's what I read. But I don't ever come across something or go, wow. That's really cool, and I never thought of that. I keep sticking by technology as a human artifact. I mostly see it as infrastructure. I don't see it as worthy of being worshiped. And, you know, I'm much more impressed with, you know, modern dentistry and modern, sanitation of drinking water and, you know, things like that.

00:30:35 Andrew Keen: Over the last twenty five years since Cyberselfish came out, there have been lots of other books critical of tech. Jaron Lanier, another Berkeley guy comes to mind. A couple of women are very distinguished. They've been on the show many times. Sherry Turkle—

00:30:49 Paulina Borsook: Sure.

00:30:50 Andrew Keen: Shoshana Zuboff, of course, who wrote Surveillance Capitalism. Sherry has a new book coming out, actually, next month. She's gonna be on the show, in a few weeks. Are there books that you particularly—I'm not sure how many of them you read, but are there books that you would like to include within your Cyberselfish tradition?

00:31:17 Paulina Borsook: I didn't know.

00:31:18 Andrew Keen: In other words, are there critics that you admire? Or did you say it all, Paulina? Is there nothing left to say after Cyberselfish?

00:31:26 Paulina Borsook: I think it's more of—excuse me. I think about people like—he's now dead—this sociologist Philip Slater who wrote a book called The Pursuit of Loneliness, which I thought kind of said a lot about how we are living as we are. You know, I tend to sort of go outside my domain to look at the references, or I always bring up Rachel Carson in Silent Spring. You know, you read that and you understand everything about the environment, about pesticides, and birds. I mean, I tend to go to those corners, and I don't know if you know this about me, but I tend to read a lot of dead British novelists. So, I don't read so much in what is people consider my area. I mean, I salute all the people doing all the good work, you know, Gil for sure. I thought surveillance capitalism was wonderful. I mean, you know—great. I'm glad they're doing it, but it's not—I have this other thing that I do.

00:32:20 Andrew Keen: Where are we now, Paulina, with AI? Given your environmental concerns, there's a huge public backlash both on the left and the right against data centers. Is this almost the inevitable outcome of cyberselfishness?

00:32:38 Paulina Borsook: I think that AI is the inevitable result of cyberselfishness possibly because it's about, you know, it's about the financial play. You know? Was anybody asking for this? Not really. I mean, what—yeah. That's kind of how I'm thinking about it. And, also, I'm really glad that people are beginning to pay attention to the environmental impact of this. One thing that I think about AI, which I don't think other people brought up so much, is that I've always been fascinated by, I think I've always mentioned the Mother Jones piece, but that, you know, the ELIZA program in the sixties, you know, was, like, kinda this very rudimentary Rogerian therapist, and that people would prefer to talk to that about their problems than to talk—talk with their partner or a friend or go to a therapist, whatever. I am fascinated by the fact that many people prefer to deal with the machine than with other humans. And, you know, Silicon Valley has been promoting that. Like, you know, let's offload everything onto the machine, but there are obviously a lot of people that would prefer that. You know, your AI boyfriend or your—I don't get it. And, quickly, when people know all the things that are wrong with AI, that it gets things wrong, the outrageous piracy, the labor violations that have gone into this, the environmental impact. And also to me, I keep on coming back to it. It gets so much stuff wrong that people wanna rely on this. That to me is fascinating in a terrible kind of way, and I wish I understood that better because I don't get it.

00:34:16 Andrew Keen: Although some AI companies, Anthropic in particular comes to mind, have actually embraced government. They've called on government to become more involved in regulating AI. Some people have been very critical of that. Of course, the hardcore libertarians, on the right, but also some people who simply believe that Anthropic is calling for more government regulation, in order to protect their own—

00:34:39 Paulina Borsook: Isn't that just sort of the lipstick on a pig issue?

00:34:42 Andrew Keen: —positioning. But should we admire a company like Anthropic, and even sometimes Sam Altman at OpenAI, although he seems to change his mind every day, about these tech companies that are calling for self-regulation for the government to become more involved in regulating AI?

00:35:02 Paulina Borsook: I wanna say I'll believe it when I see it. And given that there's so much, collusion between the current administration and crypto and the big, you know, the hyperscaler companies. I don't even know what regulation would look like, if it would have any meaning. I don't think any of these people wanna do anything that would affect the—affect the stock price. So I get your point, but I'm just saying, I don't know if it accounts for much.

00:35:28 Andrew Keen: So we shouldn't trust them whether or not they're calling for government regulation. Are there tech people who seem more responsible than others, Paulina, or are they all as selfish as each other?

00:35:46 Paulina Borsook: It's hard for me to evoke one that—I think—I mean, it's—you know, I bring up as an example because it really drove me crazy. Are you familiar with a guy who died a couple years ago—a couple months ago called Peter Neumann? I don't know if he—

00:36:00 Andrew Keen: Yes.

00:36:01 Paulina Borsook: Yes. And I—he was such a beautiful, glorious human being, and he was such a brilliant computer scientist. And he was so good in the world, and he was really concerned about the negative impacts of technology on people. And just out of the bottom of his heart, he gave, like, $4 million at the San Francisco Symphony to give an endowment to the chorus. And I thought, we will not see his like again, and he is so different in orientation, capacity, and what he created than this current crop of people are, you know, which is I don't care what fancy language they dress it up as. I don't see it as anything other than the stock play and enriching themselves, and they don't care what they extract from whom. So to answer your question, maybe there's someone that—I can't—no one comes to mind.

00:36:52 Andrew Keen: As I said, you wrote a, another prescient piece on "How the Internet Ruined San Francisco" back in, 1999.

00:37:01 Paulina Borsook: Yeah.

00:37:01 Andrew Keen: Salon. I'm doing a public event with Jonathan Weber, who has a new book out on San Francisco. Is San Francisco totally ruined? You're in the East Bay, so I'm not sure how much time you spend here. As you know, I live here. So it's hard for me to make a judgment. I'm inside the bubble.

00:37:20 Paulina Borsook: I—from what I read, it seems that way. Actually, Jonathan and I are doing an event at Shaping San Francisco in a month. It's hard for me to see how everyone's complaining about what, you know, the AI people are doing to San Francisco. I mean, one of the things I'm shocked by is that—like, you know what The Crucible is. You know what that is?

00:37:42 Andrew Keen: Explain.

00:37:43 Paulina Borsook: Okay. The Crucible is this wonderful entity that's in the East Bay. It's very famous. It teaches metalworking, shop craft, and a lot of the art sculpture, cars, whatever of Burning Man came from The Crucible. The Crucible is a beloved Bay Area institution. It's been around for, I don't know, how many decades. The Crucible isn't getting any money from this tech boom, which shocked me because there's such a, overlap between The Crucible and burners. Right? And, you know, every week, I'm reading about another San Francisco art nonprofit dying. And these guys—I mean, the fact that people will say, well, we don't owe anything to anybody because we pay taxes, which they try very much not to do. So, you know, I'm sure Jonathan Weber and I are totally agreeing. As I say, he's got the facts, and I've got the feels about this whole scene.

00:38:35 Andrew Keen: Did you ever go to Burning Man, Paulina?

00:38:38 Paulina Borsook: What would you—what do you think?

00:38:40 Andrew Keen: I'm teasing you.

00:38:40 Paulina Borsook: I can't—

00:38:42 Andrew Keen: see you there in the mud.

00:38:43 Paulina Borsook: No. And, also, I'm a raving introvert, and big groups of people make me wanna go running off into the horizon. And, also, I'm old enough that I remember what the sixties was like, and that gave me my feel of that kind of Dionysian hanging out with everybody kind of thing. It's fine if you're 15 years old. I'm not sure. What I see Burning Man as being—do you remember your Brave New World and there was the violent passion surrogate? It's like, in a very Cartesian world, there had to be a place for disorder. And so Brave New World, there was a space to do that. That's what I see Burning Man as being. We'll go there and get our ya-yas out, and then we come back to our life that is mostly, to me, about creating nonsense and ruining a lot of things that we hold dear.

00:39:32 Andrew Keen: So, Paulina, you've been proved right. The publishing industry was wrong. Cyberselfish, got most of the critique of tech right, as you say. You've had all sorts of pieces written about you. You've been on Christiane Amanpour, many others. You said the book cursed you in the sense it didn't enable you to do any more writing. I mean, I guess it's nice this book is out, but you wrote it twenty five years ago. Do you see it as a kickstart for more writing? Would you like to write something else now? You've already written Cyberselfish.

00:40:12 Paulina Borsook: Sure. But I feel like the revival of Cyberselfish is a gift from the universe. So all my energy right now is going into promoting it and having it find its place. And, you know, I'd love it to be in public libraries and in universities, so to get a new generation of people reading it. That's where my focus is. I have no problem with idea fluency. There's a zillion things I can write about, but right now, I'm very, like—like in Glengarry Glen Ross, always be closing. I really wanna promote Cyberselfish right now. I mean, I have a Patreon page where I kind of babble on about this.

00:40:43 Andrew Keen: I can't believe you're quoting Glengarry Glen Ross.

00:40:46 Paulina Borsook: It's perfect. Closing.

00:40:47 Andrew Keen: I'm teasing you. It's perfect. What's amazing is you got a French edition as well, though I think the book will go down very well in France.

00:40:53 Paulina Borsook: I hope so. The—I didn't know this, but the French publisher who I like very much, he came up with that title because Cyberselfish doesn't translate into French. Evidently, that's a quote from Rousseau, and it's they will force us to be free. And I thought, yeah, that's a good title. I mean, that gets at the sense of it even if it's not Cyberselfish. So, yeah, I have a million ideas, but I'm very much, you know, wanna deal with what's in front of my snout right now. And, you know, and I wanna see where it goes and what comes my way. And I'm still kind of reeling that this has all happened. So—

00:41:28 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And, of course, the libertarians, you're not flavor of the month in the libertarian—

00:41:32 Paulina Borsook: Oh, I never am.

00:41:33 Andrew Keen: Reason magazine, had a piece about, how libertarianism continued to be misunderstood. Libertarians, of course, fetishize freedom. What is freedom for you, Paulina, finally? Is that word even useful?

00:41:50 Paulina Borsook: You know, it's a word that's become so abused as I don't even know what it means to anybody anymore. I mean, you know, is it freedom from? Is it freedom to do? You know, I tend to—you know, as I always say, I was a card-carrying member of the ACLU in high school. So, you know, I'm a big believer in, you know, civil rights, you know, the Bill of Rights and stuff like that. So but I'm really a big believer in regulation. And, you know, I wrote this piece for MarketWatch a couple months ago where, you know, Sergey was having a hissy fit and going, oh, California becoming, like, the former Soviet Union where I used to live, and I have to move. And I was like, Sergey, what do you think keeps the water of Tahoe so very blue except for government regulation and environmental scientists? You know, I'm sure you have a lovely private chef who buys organic. Who do you think regulates the use of the term organic? In other words, you know, I always have thought the dynamic between regulation and freedom was a healthy one. I don't think—obviously, I don't think it should be one or the other. And so I can't be caught up, what does freedom mean to me? It's like, it's a bunch of things. Or it's an abused term. What should we talk about instead?

00:43:06 Andrew Keen: Do you think you'd have written this book if you'd lived in Washington, DC, amongst the bureaucrats?

00:43:12 Paulina Borsook: No. I'm such a California writer, and I was writing about what was in front of me and what I was seeing and trying to puzzle out why is this technology culture different from the one I grew up with. But, you know, I had a lot of friends who worked in technology, so it wasn't anti-technology. Even though I think the term Luddite is misused because I think the Luddites were great, but people don't know what they really did. So, no, I was not living—it couldn't have been. I'm such a California writer, and I [unclear]. And I was writing about what I saw, and I also felt that no one else is really catching this at the time. I just felt a need to document it, you know, for whatever reason.

00:43:48 Andrew Keen: Well, you caught it early, and now we're catching up with you. Paulina Borsook's Cyberselfish came out twenty five years ago. It's been reissued. It'll be out in a couple of weeks. I think out in the US, it'll be out maybe later in the year in the UK and then the French edition. I'm sure there'll be other translations too. Lots happened in the last twenty six years. Lots of photos of you on your website back in 2000 and then in 2026. And I think, we should congratulate you, Paulina, for your insistence and the fact that you stuck to your guns. And, as everybody knows now, you were right. Everybody else was wrong. So congratulations. And—

00:44:42 Paulina Borsook: Thank you, Andrew.

00:44:43 Andrew Keen: I hope we'll get some new work from you in the future as well. And when you've written new stuff, you'll have to come back on the show.

00:44:49 Paulina Borsook: I can't think that far ahead, but I appreciate the offer. Great to see you again.