Great News: ‘Cyberselfish’ Returns
Last year, I wrote a viral Bluesky thread about Paulina Borsook, who published a scathing and prescient takedown of Silicon Valley’s sociopathic politics back in 2000.
That thread led to a New York Times profile of Borsook and, within a few months, she landed a book deal to republish her masterpiece. Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech will hit bookshelves on September 15 with a new foreword by me.
My small role in reviving interest in Paulina’s work has been one of the most gratifying experiences of the past two years. I first ran across her name in David Golumbia’s Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology. I read her book and, as it turns out, we live a few miles apart. So, we met up.
Mainstream journalists are now grasping for ways to explain Silicon Valley’s far-right radicalization. Some pretend it’s a new development and try to blame it on taxes, regulations, or other trite political rationalizations. But Borsook’s work proves—definitively—that tech’s right-wing politics are nothing new. As she wrote in 2000, explaining the anti-government, anti-public attitudes percolating in tech:
It’s an inability to reconcile the demands of being an individual with the demands of participating in society, which coincides beautifully with a preference for, and glorification of, being the solo commander of one’s computer in lieu of any other economically viable behavior.
Computers are so much more rule-based, controllable, fixable, and comprehensible than any human will ever be. As many political schools of thought do, these techno-libertarians make a philosophy out of a personality defect.
Cyberselfish will be published in the USA, the UK & Commonwealth, France, Belgium, and Switzerland. Please join me in pre-ordering it! Click here for more information.
Book club, anyone?
Pre-order at this Bookshop link to help support independent bookstores and the Nerd Reich newsletter.
Here is my interview with Paulina from last year (our second-biggest interview, with 142,000 views on YouTube alone!)
