“On my headstone, it would say: I was always right. I never lied, and no one paid any attention to me.” — Paulina Borsook

A quarter of a century ago, the tech journalist Paulina Borsook published Cyberselfish, one of the earliest critiques of Silicon Valley’s libertarian culture. While the heretical book got widely reviewed, it not only didn’t sell but cursed her writing career, Borsook claiming she couldn’t get published again on any subject. Used copies of Cyberselfish could be had for a few dollars and she became just another forgotten tech dissenter.

Then, last year, Borsook was magically resurrected. The New York Times (re)discovered her as “the writer who dared criticize Silicon Valley” and the price of secondhand copies of Cyberselfish jumped to over a thousand dollars. The world caught up with her tech scepticism. Like an AI startup, Borsook is now hot. So hot, in fact, that the original Cyberselfish is now being republished not only in the US and UK, but also in France. So hot, that we now have a new word: “Borsookian,” to describe Silicon Valley libertarianism.

The funny thing is that nothing much has changed over the last quarter century since Borsook’s original book came out. Not tech’s libertarian hostility to government. Not the Silicon Valley boys-only club. And certainly not Paulina Borsook, who retains what the Grateful Dead lyricist and digital utopian John Perry Barlow half-lovingly called her “dyspeptic” manner. “On my headstone, it would say: I was always right,” Paulina Borsook confides with dyspeptic glee. “I never lied, and no one paid any attention to me.” How delicious to be so fully resurrected. What fun for the heretic to help transform the original orthodoxy into the new heresy.

Five Takeaways

• Back from the Dead. Used copies drifted from $4 toward $1,000, a stranger’s LinkedIn post went viral, and the Times came calling. Tin House reissues Cyberselfish September 15 — changing not a word.

• Why Are They So Mad? “No sector of society has benefited more and suffered less from the government than Silicon Valley.” Kevin Kelly is not Sam Altman — except in the faith that everything tech wants is fine.

• That Damn Book. Reviewed worldwide, then unpublishable for twenty-five years — no one could explain why. Elder care, eviction, Airbnb hosting. “I have PTSD from twenty-five years of never being able to be published again.”

• AI Is the Inevitable Result of Cyberselfishness. “Was anybody asking for this?” A financial play in borrowed robes. And Anthropic’s calls for regulation? “Lipstick on a pig. I’ll believe it when I see it.”

• The Blue of Tahoe. Her answer to Sergey Brin: what keeps Tahoe so very blue except government regulation? The Crucible test, Burning Man as Brave New World’s violent passion surrogate — and always be closing.

About Keen On America

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen.

Website: https://keenon.tv/ Substack: https://keenon.substack.com/ YouTube: https://youtube.com/@KeenOnShow

Buy Cyberselfish: cyberselfish.com

Chapters:

00:00:31 Introduction: the return of a Silicon Valley legend
00:02:20 The headstone joke: always right, never heard
00:02:48 $4 to $1,000: how a dead book came back
00:04:48 “The Writer Who Dared Criticize Silicon Valley”
00:06:34 Why “libertarian”: drunk on Ayn Rand
00:07:49 The Wired years: a freelancer in the nest
00:09:04 Kevin Kelly is not Sam Altman — except
00:11:26 Markoff, Turner, and the counterculture thesis
00:13:27 Point counterpoint: John Perry Barlow
00:15:30 But weren’t they having fun? The merry-prankster defense
00:19:44 Never a believer: utility, not worship
00:20:58 The Colt 45 and the TBI ghost
00:22:49 That Damn Book: the curse explained
00:25:33 A zillion ideas that turned to vapor
00:26:56 The lost years: elder care, eviction, Airbnb superhost
00:28:08 What she’s learned: the financial play
00:30:35 Slater, Carson, and dead British novelists
00:32:20 AI as the inevitable result of cyberselfishness
00:34:16 Anthropic and the lipstick on the pig
00:35:46 Peter Neumann: we will not see his like again
00:36:52 Is San Francisco ruined? The Crucible test
00:38:35 Burning Man as violent passion surrogate
00:41:33 What is freedom? Sergey and the blue of Tahoe
00:43:06 A California writer
00:43:48 “You were right. Everybody else was wrong.”