Paulina Borsook Saw Tech Fascism Coming

More than 25 years ago, Paulina Borsook observed a toxic strain of libertarian-inflected ideology rising up out of Silicon Valley. In 2000, she published Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech, a searing and prophetic takedown of the immature, selfish ,and Ayn Rand-inspired culture of tech.

Few wanted to hear criticism of the tech overlords at the time, and the book wasn’t a big hit. Today, Borsook’s work is experiencing a resurgence as new generations—in the era of Elon Musk and Peter Thiel—discover that she was right. Click here to watch my interview with Borsook on YouTube. (Or click the box below.)

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Nerd Reich Podcast: Gil Duran Interviews Paulina Borsook

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Gil Duran: Tech fascism is here and it's growing. Elon Musk is using X as a propaganda machine for far-right movements worldwide. Peter Thiel openly speaks of his disdain for democracy. And tech billionaires are building surveillance and military machinery for an authoritarian state, all to bolster the fascist regime of Donald Trump. Tech fascism didn't emerge quietly. It grew openly in plain sight. So why did tech critics in journalism fail to warn us about it? For one thing, they were too busy licking the boots of tech billionaire CEOs. But there were a few exceptions, like today's guest, Paulina Borsook. Back in the 1990s, most tech journalists were worshipping Silicon Valley, but Borsook did the opposite.

Writing for Wired Magazine and other publications, Borsook warned of a new toxic techno-libertarian political strain, one informed by the absolutist worldview of Ayn Rand, a new wave that sought to create a world as controllable and predictable as a computer. One with no room for the messy reality of human needs. In 2001, Borsook published Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian World of High Tech. The book skewered high tech culture with a scathing analysis and it revealed the childish political beliefs and toxic masculinity at its core. She predicted that if these tech figures ever took an interest in politics, it would be bad news for the world. Spoiler alert, that's exactly what happened.

Years before tech figures like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel would rise to challenge democracy, Paulina Borsook saw it coming. But the media gatekeepers, they weren't interested in any bad news about their access to power and their advertising dollars. Her book wasn't a best seller at the time and her writing career took a dive. Today, however, Borsook's work is back in the spotlight because she was right. A new generation is discovering her sharp and prophetic work. One that set a standard for what tech coverage can and should be. Nearly a quarter century ago, she was ignored when she tried to warn the world. But maybe today, it's not too late to finally listen. Here's our conversation.

Gil Duran: Hey Paulina, thanks for joining me today.

Paulina Borsook: Hey, Gil, my new best friend.

Gil Duran: So you were an early critic of Silicon Valley in the 1990s when many other journalists were sucking up to tech and helping to build this cult of worship around tech CEOs and founders. You took a very different approach and you tore into them with a scathing critique in your essays and in your book, Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech.

You described a culture of anti-social, anti-government men with massive egos and superiority complexes, and you warned that this could pose a problem for the rest of us one day. And unfortunately, you turned out to be right. And we're going to get into that. But the reason we're doing the podcast today is because we were able to connect recently.

I read about about you and Cyberselfish in the book by David Golumbia (Cyberlibertarianism) and other people brought me to your attention. So all of a sudden, as I wrote my own book on these guys, your name kept popping up and we finally connected.

And then a couple of weeks ago, I was very frustrated by something I read in Wired where an old editor was saying, “I didn't understand what this was.” And he kind of still doesn't.

And I was so upset by that, that I did a BlueSky thread where I talked about your work, your book, and how you saw this all coming and how it was there for people to see if they were looking for it. And it went much to my surprise, quite viral and resulted in some pretty good contributions to your GoFundMe since it's hard out there being a freelance writer, especially one who takes on power and challenges the wealthy. So here we are, your book is sort of way ahead of its time and unlike in some cases is finally maybe about to get its due. So we're going to get into the details of this, but let's start a bit earlier.

How did you become a writer and how did you fall into the world of tech?

Paulina Borsook: I was shot in the head when I was 14 and I had moderate permanent traumatic brain injury and there are just all kinds of things I can't do. I could never have been a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer, anything. My brain does not work. So a friend of mine was working at a small software company in Marin County and he said, well, why you come here and see if you could maybe do some documentation.

And all of a sudden I could do this. And I cannot tell you the joy it gave me to feel like there is something I can do. I can have a life. I can have a career. And so I got involved with technology in that sense in early 1980s. And my feeling was, this is interesting. It's not worth fetishizing. It's just like infrastructure. It's water, it's electricity, it's, you know, it just is what it is. So I was always aware of the human hand in all this. And I started working for a magazine called Data Communications Magazine. It's about as interesting as you think. Bits, bytes, speeds, feeds, all that stuff. But it put me at the beginning of all this stuff. You know, I always say I went to the press conference Bill Gates had in 1984 introducing Windows. I went to the first conference on the coming commercialization of the internet.

When I was running around Silicon Valley, reporting on this or writing about that or going to that conference, I was always looking at the people. What were they saying? How did they think? Why did they make that strange remark? I think that was part of it led me to pay attention to the strange undertone I was noticing everywhere because I was paying attention to the people. I have an MFA from Columbia. I write fiction and poetry. I was always interested in character and people. That's what I was looking at, not just what did the latest Wonder Widget do. I have a very anti-authoritarian personality, so I don't belong to the Tracy Kidder School of Journalism of heroizing people. I try to pay attention. I try to be fair, but I don't automatically assume that they have a slightly golden aura about them. I never feel that way. I don't feel like they're necessarily evil, but I just think they're just people and I want to pay attention to who they are and what they say. Another piece of this is I did come from a good sort of New Deal family and belonged to the ACLU in high school.

So I always had a certain kind of political orientation. I'm not necessarily an activist, but I could never tune out that part of life. You know, if politics is how power affects people, I was always trying to pay attention to that. I ended up being an early writer for Wired and they used to joke about, can't have you in every issue, it can't be the Paulina Borsook magazine. And I ended up doing a lot of profiles of people because again, you know, I try to understand them as characters. And I think that lends you very well to paying attention to what these guys were doing and saying and thinking, which made no sense to me at all. I mean, it had its own internal logic, but it wasn't logical.

Because as I've always said, no sector of society has benefited more and suffered less from the government than Silicon Valley. They've got such a chip on their shoulder. They're so angry. They feel so badly done by. And they have no sense of how much the government funded all that research, did everything to make their lives possible and comfortable. Yet they're violently anti-government.

Gil Duran: Speaking of people and anti-government attitudes, in Cyberselfish you mentioned seeing a singles ad in the 90s that read, “Ayn Rand enthusiast is seeking libertarian oriented female for great conversation and romance. I am very attractive and bright high-tech entrepreneur.”

So there were early signs of this immature libertarian fantasy in the tech world. What were the other signs that made you tune into these characters and what was going on?

Paulina Borsook: Well, just to go with Ayn Rand, I often feel a lot of them read it like in middle school, but they never outgrew that phase. I grew up in Pasadena, which meant I was around the old Caltech JPL space program, kind of engineering culture. Those guys were very aware of what the government did. They had a sense of social contract. They were really different than this community of people, yet superficially they seem very similar. Like for example, their attitude about philanthropy was so weird.

It's like, you know, I talk about it in the book, like if a cat loves you, it gives you a dead rat, whether you want a dead rat or not. If there's philanthropy, it's like we will throw technology at it and that's all we're interested in. I became fascinated with the cypherpunks because these were extreme anarcho-capitalist, violently anti-government, code will free us, let's encrypt everything subculture at the time.

And I was fascinated by them because if nothing else, unlike a lot of other people in Silicon Valley, they were tossing around ideas. They may have been crackpot ideas to me, but they were fascinating. It was just this scary moment where I assumed being in the Bay Area that everyone else was sort of like a good liberal kid like I was. And then I began to realize better not make that assumption. They seem so paranoid and fearful like, you know, the jack-booted government thugs were going to come and, I don't know, do what to you.

Early cypherpunks were more worried about what government was going to do. Later, people were more aware of what the corporations were going to do. But that was a late-dawning realization. Yeah, but when I saw that personal ad, I went, my gosh, this is perfect. You know, he's outspokenly said what I think a lot of those guys think. I'm a slightly important high-tech exec and I'm libertarian and of course you want to get with this alpha male because you know I'm an alpha male. I thought it was pretty silly. I mean, I hate to say it, but at the time I didn't find it so scary. At the time I found it kind of laughable.

Gil Duran: In the book, you described virulent techno-libertarianism as scary and psychologically brittle, and you wrote a paragraph that is probably the best explanation of tech-libertarianism or fascism ever written:

“It bespeaks a lack of human connection and a discomfort with the core of what many of us consider it means to be human. It's an inability to reconcile the demands of being individual with the demands of participating in society, which coincides beautifully with the preference for and a 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.”

 A description we are all very familiar with now in the era of people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel. Tell us how you came to this stunningly accurate conclusion, in particular the connection between being in control of one's computer and seeking to create a world that is structured in the same way.

Paulina Borsook: Many years ago in the 80s and 90s, there was a group called Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. And these are people working in Silicon Valley, but they had a sense of the larger world, that they're big issues we need to think about, privacy, surveillance, what's impacting the environment. That was a certain kind of person that used to be in Silicon Valley.

Those people began to retire and die off, and they were replaced by this other kind of person. Another thing that crept in, I feel like with the Netscape IPO and all the money that began to be made in Silicon Valley is they really bought the Milton Friedman thing of stockholder theory of value. So anything that affects tech price, stock price is bad. So therefore, the way they're all kowtowing to Trump now, I don't even know how much of them really like what Trump is doing or believe what he's doing. They just don't want to mess with their shareholder thing. That's it. They're just being amoral, I would say, rather than immoral.

And a lot of the language of Silicon Valley, you can blame Wired for lot of this techno-optimism and personal empowerment and, you know, we're new and cool and creative and you're old and dead and in the way. Once money started really pouring in, they were being lauded as like the smartest, coolest, most amazing, wonderful people that ever existed. And so who would have the strength of character to question that? Nobody, I would say, generally, people are scratching you behind the ears and telling you that the way you are, however limited it is, is perfect and perfect for this moment. I know that's a psychological explanation, but that's really how I read it.

Gil Duran: One thing that's amazing to me is that after you were writing this book, you wouldn't have known it at the time. Most of us wouldn't have. Mencius Moldbug, a computer programmer and blogger whose real name is Curtis Yarvin, who has become a big thinker on the tech fascist right starts two projects, one project to create a new operating system for the politics of the United States structured after monarchy or corporate dictatorship catches the attention of Peter Thiel and gets expressed through things like Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, or I like to call it destruction of government by Elon. At the same time, lesser known to non-technical people is he was trying to create this new internet to remake the internet from scratch with something he called Urbit, digital feudalism.

So it'd be an internet that worked like a monarchy, like a digital feudalism where people could buy huge swaths of it. And so it'd be this anti-internet internet. So in that way, this metaphor of Curtis Yarvin, both trying to remake the internet as digital feudalism, which is literally what he called it, and trying to remake the world as high-tech feudalism. So this quote you have about how they want the world to be controllable and fixable, like a computer is almost perfectly expressed through Curtis Yarvin and his philosophy.

Paulina Borsook: I would say one thing I think is worth mentioning is that I love the old ARPANET culture. I love those guys. They were a bunch of sweet, smart, information sharing geeks, really wanted to do right and do good. They weren't in it for the money. They were into making the best possible infrastructure.

And at the time, it was entirely made for information sharing. The opposite of what you're describing here, it was egalitarian. It was self-policing. It was a whole bunch of stuff. But when I was watching the coming commercialization, I was thinking, their technical protocols are impeccable, but this has not been designed for commercial use and for other people who are not so sweetie pie lamb chop academics. I can't put it any other way. Digital feudalism is not going to create something like that. It just can't.

Gil Duran: Well, that brings us to our next question. One of the glaring contradictions of tech libertarianism, or I think has morphed into tech fascism, is that so many of these guys hate government and seek to dismantle it, yet most of their fortunes are built upon public infrastructure and government contracts and subsidies. As you said earlier, so many of these men come from extreme privilege, and yet they are extremely angry for some reason. Almost as if they're angry that they don't get to arise from some Randian miasma of self-made heroism, but actually had a lot of privileges and were smart enough to make use of them. The existence of government in the public good almost undermines their own personal myth. And you argued in the book that Silicon Valley's elite wanted, quote, the infrastructure of the welfare state without the responsibility of a citizen. How do you explain this contradiction? What's going on? These people who have benefited the most from society being so angry and wanting to destroy it.

Paulina Borsook: Part of it I think is that they still don't see what government did. When I met Marissa Mayer, you know, early Google person, and she'd moved to California whenever she moved to California, you go to Stanford, but it was after Prop 13 had taken place. And I remember California at a time before Prop 13, when the government really worked in California and we had the best public schools in the world and everything worked beautifully. And once you had anti-tax, proto-libertarians, Prop 13 kicking in, California went to hell. So we had this young woman who arrived in California when everything was kind of falling apart and taxes were jerry-rigged to support schools, it was a mess.

And her lived experience is government is incompetent, inefficient, it doesn't do any good. So part of it is I think their experience of government is they haven't had it. And the other thing I used to say, though it's obviously blessed too now, is like they really benefited from rule of law, protections for intellectual property, the water worked, the power worked, all of these kind of invisible things that government enforces, regulates, subsidizes, pays for. They just didn't see it. And how do you make people see what they don't want to see? I have no answer to that question.

Gil Duran: One of your central themes is that high tech culture is emotionally stunted, unable to, as you put it, reconcile the demands of being individual with the demands of participating in society. And in recent years, we've seen people like Elon Musk and others openly declare war on empathy. Many in tech are dreaming of a post-human or trans-human world where everything is eaten by AI and which maybe we no longer even live on this planet. It was a real lack of humanity, of connection to humanity on the part of a lot of these billionaires. What do you think is the root cause of this lack of humanity? Is it the technology? Is it the money? Is it something else?

Paulina Borsook: I get into very risky territory here, but you're kind of asking me a question of like, you know, how many of these people are on the spectrum? And one of the definitions of being on the spectrum is that you can be sweet, you can be considerate, you can be a bunch of things, but you may not be very good at imagining what other people feel, not reading emotional cues very well. And I have wondered about that a lot. There's another piece of this question is, if you also have been weaned on what do they call them, first person shooter games, other entities in that are just wallpaper or things to shoot down. You're not really thinking about the larger consequences of anything. You just want to win that round of the game.

Gil Duran: And that was something we've talked about because in the book you'd use the word autism to describe some of these guys.

Paulina Borsook: I'm not supposed to say that anymore.

Gil Dura: We know a lot more about autism now than we did then. And neurodivergence, we've become a lot more aware of it. We understand that it's many different things. It's not just one thing. A lot of these guys too, do try to claim to be on the spectrum. It's almost become sort of a badge of honor for some of them to attribute their behavior to neurodivergence.

And I'm not saying that none of them are neurodivergent, but I think the thing we're identifying here that's bad, that's anti-human, can't necessarily be explained by that as much as it could also be explained by sociopathic effects of great wealth and power.

Paulina Borsook: We have this chicken and egg problem, is our culture overall is kind of, we see a loss of social contract. We see people spending all their time in front of screens. They've lost their ability to connect with others. You know, voluntary association has gone down. People have fewer friends.

And then the pandemic happens. What do they call it? A positive feedback loop with a negative outcome. The thing is, there is a book by Philip Slater, who was an amazing guy, who everyone's forgotten. He was a sociologist. He wrote a book called Wealth Addiction that was published in like 1981, and he described a lot of these same characteristics of too much is never enough. These people are really impaired as human beings. No matter how much they have, they can't stop grasping.

And it was in 1981, and this is before Silicon Valley was anything other than this kind of parochial place that maybe people had heard it in tell. And you know, and it's not like the robber barons were nice guys either, you know, the 19th century robber barons, they weren't full of fellow feeling and compassion and the impact of their behaviors on anyone else. I mean, this is a well-established, unfortunately, human trait. I mean, one of the things I always say is that as a species, we're too smart, we're too aggressive, and we're too good at exploring our ecological niches. And this is some of what we're seeing here that's kind of a pattern that's repeated itself through history, the tech flavor of that. The heroization of these people I never understood, but of course, that's not my nature.

I did interact with people in Silicon Valley that I thought were great, but they also struck me as being lovely human beings and they also invented real stuff. They weren't just participating in financialization, violating people's privacy. You know, they created stuff that was real and did cool stuff. So I don't want anyone to think I'm totally anti-tech.

Gil Duran: No, we're surrounded by tech. We're also creatures of tech. It just doesn't mean we have to destroy the world and democracy and equality and fairness and justice of the law. And that's where those guys tend to take it. But, you know, I think there's another very obvious culprit for this behavior that also has an effect on their brains, but can't be attributed to anything neurological necessarily. And this substance that may be causing a lot of the world's problems throughout history is called testosterone.

Today we have this thing called the “Manosphere,” these toxic douchebags with large audiences who preach misogyny and paranoid right-wing politics, often while hawking gold and fake health supplements. And in Cyberselfish, you described paranoid anti-government rantings and a tech libertarian culture in which the Gestalt is a testosterone poisoned guys with chips on their shoulders and too much time on their hands.

Paulina Borsook: I wish it weren't true, and it still is. I think it's worth pointing out, and I was talking to a friend of mine about this, is that the tech culture I knew of in the 80s and 90s, which is the older one, and it was before all this crazy money came in and a whole bunch of other stuff, was much less sexist than what we see now. There are more women working in it. It was this women hostel. It started changing for the worst in the 90s. And we could speculate as to why. I certainly think grafting on the Wall Street bro culture sure didn't help. You can call it hustle culture. You could call it, what is it called? 996 culture now of spending all your time at work. And that's all you care about.

That doesn't lend itself to anyone who has any caretaking responsibilities, whether it's for kids, for a disabled family member, for an elder. It really cuts hard against women participating in tech. And it really favors a young guy who has nothing else in his life and that's it. Cause you know, I knew plenty of people working tech in the eighties and nineties and it wasn't like that. It was a job. It was a good job. And occasionally you'd have to do a very intense three-week sprint, but it wasn't what we're describing here.

So you get people arriving here and all the, you know, they started coding when they were eight and that's all they know. That's all they've ever done. And their understanding of anything is what they've done from watching to me really cheesy superhero movies. It's like, there's no outside frame of reference for them, I feel, except for recycled Ayn Rand. I mean, the Ayn Rand thing in a terrible way amuses me because, you know, when I used to run into it, it really seemed like, yeah, that's the phase he's going through. He feels like a badly done by, too smart guy that the girl's not like, and he's an eighth grader. We will hope and pray for him that he outgrows this. The writing of Ayn Rand is so howlingly bad. That's the other thing. You'd hope that they would get, develop better taste. And as I like to point out, Ayn Rand ended up going on social security, which is something that most people don't know.

Gil Duran: You know, a lot of the early characters of tech libertarianism. For example, there was John Perry Barlow, who wrote some of the lyrics for the Grateful Dead. I think songs like Cassidy, Mexicali Blues. And he also wrote something called the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace in 1996. And I'm going to read the first part of that here:

“Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of steel and flesh, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of the mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. We have elected no government, nor are we likely to have one. So I address you with no greater authority than that which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us, nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.”

Paulina Borsook: Barlow, you want to wind me up and get me going, talk to me about Barlow. He and I were often sort of set up as like a point, counterpoint, you know, we're going to argue different points of view. And he was so full of such nonsense. I remember him saying stuff like, well, you know, members of Congress just had email addresses, we'd have true democracy. And I was like, are you crazy? Or he said email is fundamentally female because it's about communication. He was so full of these nonsense, right? People looked at Barlow and found him very glamorous. I didn't, but people did. And so he sort of had this outside effect on thinking. And even in that Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace, I felt like saying, who is taking care of the electrical grid that is powering this internet that you're writing about? There were so many things where they never connected the dots about how did the infrastructure, both civic and physical, create all this stuff. So Barlow, yes, was particularly annoying to me. And he would do stuff and shake his head at me and say, you're dyspeptic.

And I go, yeah, I am dyspeptic. I will proudly own that. But I would dare you to say that my facts are wrong. He ended up broke and living with John Gilmore, you know, early Sun employee and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. And I felt like saying, well, John Barlow, how's that give it all away for free and it all come back to you thing working for you now, but he's dead. So I can't have that conversation with him.

Gil Duran: Who are some of the other characters? You mentioned John Gilmore. Who are some other people we should be aware of from those times?

Paulina Borsook: So Wired Magazine, you know, Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalf. The glorious thing they did was to say technology is culture. And there'd never been a publication that did that, understood that. And that was a wonderful thing. And it was part of why it was a good home for me for several years. But they were total true believers in this libertarian, we hate the government, we know stuff and you're old and stupid in the way, regulation is bad. They were really pushing that agenda and people love Wired, as well they should. It was a beautiful artifact. It was wonderful publication. I was proud to have been associated with it the first couple of years. And they really set the tone, I felt, of the discourse, how people thought about things, you know, in the 90s.

Gil Duran: In Cyberselfish, you divided tech libertarians into the Ravers and the Gilders. And the Ravers were kind of the tech libertarian types who go to Burning Man and have some countercultural characteristics. And the Gilders were more of the suit money obsessed types, the conservatives. Give us a little more sense of how you decided to categorize them between the ravers and the guilders and who was George Gilder?

Paulina Borsook: Gosh, George Gilder. He was an influential thought leader and he was one of these people that heroized people in high tech and he'd write profiles of entrepreneurs. And the language which he used to describe them was bordering on homophilic, just so worshipful of these guys.

And it was always guys. And he was definitely a cultural conservative as we would define the term. And people loved him. He had a newsletter. I was fascinated by him in terrible kind of way. But then I saw this other subculture, which is kind of more Barlow-like, you know, we have fun using recreational drugs and, you know, we're very playful in our sexuality and we don't care what you do, just have a good time. I mean, that was a different strain of this, but they agreed about how much they hated government, the importance of making as much money as you can.

“You guys aren't cool enough to understand this. I think both have this thing of, can't possibly understand this. We're the only smart people in the room. Like, you belong in the ash heap of history because, you know, you've been left behind and you have old, outdated, stupid ideas about everything and why should we listen to anything you have to say about anything?” They have that attitude in common, but their lifestyle choices and their orientation was sort of different.

Gil Duran: I think that makes sense to a lot of people, especially in the Bay Area. We all know some people we think are countercultural, but then you get a little bit of their politics and you find out something very different. And I'd say they still do this kind of thing. I find debating some of these guys that they're, oh, well, you haven't read all the fascist philosophers, so you can't possibly debate. They always have something you don't quite understand or aren't a part of that defends them from any serious critique, at least in their own mind.

Paulina Borsook: But if you recommend them, you ought to read X and Y and Z or A and B and C. They give you a blank look. Like, you can't know about something that I don't know about that would be of any value. It's a kind of, a funny way, given how smart they see themselves, a lack of intellectual curiosity.

Gil Duran: Many of these guys consider it inefficient to read anything that does not confirm their pre-existing biases. That seems to me to be what they're doing.

Paulina Borsook: I like “inefficient.” That's a good adjective.

Gil Duran: That's how they would think of it, right? Why would I read something that doesn't confirm what I already think? And one example of this, you know, Curtis Yarvin thinks he's a real genius, but we were going back and forth on email and he bragged to me that California used to be great in the seventies and look what happened to it. And I was like, that was before Prop 13. You're literally arguing against your own position. And it was clear to me that he had no idea that that's what he was saying. That's just a part of the story. He doesn't know or care about it. He's formed his entire worldview based on bullshit, which is why he would never survive in the academy that he hates, because in the academy you have peer review. In the academy people get to attack your ideas. In the academy people can say, you're not considering this other side of things. And it seems to me lot of what they do is just protect themselves with a sort of diaper of innocence, where they get to kind of keep everyone else out and stay in their own mess.

Paulina Borsook: But I think there's a larger thing here. You know, Gil, I've been involved with this magazine called In|Formation: Everyday Computers Are Making Us Easier to Use. And we're really happy it's sold out. One of the people that sent email to the magazine because one of the contributors works at Meta, said, you're just a bunch of tech bros and you're just apologizing for Meta. Did you actually read what this guy wrote? He didn't have to read anything. He just knew he was right. You know what? I want to say something. I think the fact that the magazine sold out says that I think people are hungry to hear a counter narrative. I want to give us a tiny amount of hope that maybe people want to hear something else than what these guys are pushing.

Gil Duran: I there's definitely a demand for sharp criticism of Silicon Valley. There's just not a supply yet. We're going to get to that question. So Cyberselfish wasn't a bestseller, but now a new generation of people are discovering it and they're realizing that you were way ahead of the curve. How did the book affect your life? What's it like now to have people recognizing and appreciating your work?

Paulina Borsook: I don't know why writing that book was such a professional death sentence for me. I didn't write it with the idea of I'm a whistleblower and I will now get death threats. I didn't think that would happen. It affected my life terribly. It threw me $65,000 in debt. I could never get published anywhere, not a book, not an article, whether it was on technology or something else. It really was like the book had placed a curse on me. And I felt really bad about it. Like, was it a bad book?

 You know, should I not have written it? Why has it had this terrible penumbra of thwartedness in my life for 25 years. But I began to notice about six months ago, the prices for the books on the used book platform began to go up. And I began to notice that academics and media people, particularly from Europe, are seeking me out.

And I went, hmm, that's kind of interesting. And now, thanks to you, Gil, the book is sold out all over the world. You cannot get it anywhere. Trying to get it reprinted, that will probably happen. And so many people have told me, you don't need to change a word. I mean, obviously there are dated references in it, and of course that's true. But I think if you're a writer or any kind of creative person, you want to feel, and this is narcissism, at least for me, you want to feel you've created something of lasting value. And having this validation come 25 years later goes, I did create something of lasting value, however we wanted to define it. When I wrote it, I did not think it was too ahead of the curve. I was describing what I was seeing then and I didn't understand why other people didn't see it. My interest in the people and the culture and their political point of view was of no interest to the other writers on technology. They just didn't care. And now it seems to have found its moment.

Gil Duran: So now it's time for some listener questions. We got some listener questions online. Why do you think other journalists could not see what you saw? What message do you have for them now? What message do you have for us to build a new kind of journalism that won't be fooled again?

Paulina Borsook: I want to say pay attention to who the people are, pay attention to what they're saying, not just the thing that they're showing off and unveiling. It's not the same as gotcha journalism. It's not the same as being hostile to your subjects. It's about listening and paying attention. One of the profiles I did for Wired, and I'm not going to say who it was, three people in 25 years have read that and said, God, you couldn't stand that person. I said, how did you figure that out? I thought I masked it really well, and the subject didn't know it. So I think you can do your job and pay attention and tell the truth.

Gil Duran: I think an important part of it too is to go back to the roots of journalism. Journalism is supposed to challenge power, not serve power. At some point, the incentives got perverse and people could get more clicks and more money and more attention by sucking up to powerful people and getting access rather than by taking them on very critically. So you kind of do need journalists to view themselves as outsiders rather than insiders. And the cancer we have in American journalism today is access journalism, which is ass-kiss journalism, and you can multiply it times 10 when it comes to tech.

And so I think that we have to have journalists to be their job as not to get rich or to be friends with tech billionaires, but to take these guys on and to protect the fundamental good things about society and democracy from those people. And I think it's just a very different mentality. Next question. When you see something other people don't, how should you go about developing your ideas? Where do you draw the line between crackpot theory and a research worthy hunt?

Paulina Borsook: One hunch is something to follow up on. One hunch is not something to write about necessarily. That's the way. Multiple sources, which is kind of a journalism thing. You don't just rely on what one person says. You rely on what people say. And also, I have the curse of being really intuitive, and so it's bad. If you do pattern recognition, you can't explain it to people, and it's very frustrating. But my feeling was always, huh, that's interesting. Do I find other examples of that, whatever that is? If you are into crackpot stuff, you can probably find other crackpots to validate you, but at some point, reality testing, we hope, kicks in.

Gil Duran: And the final question, in hindsight, Cyberselfish turned out to be as prophetic as it was insightful. Looking back at what you wrote, does anything about where we are or how we got here shock or surprise you?

Paulina Borsook: I thought there would be more correctives, you know, that culture of computer freedom and privacy, the way the Bay Area has traditionally been what a friend of mine calls a blue church as opposed to red. I thought those corrective forces would be in play. I didn't realize how pervasive the Wall Street mentality, which is shareholder theory of value and I can do whatever I want and it's fine. I didn't realize there weren't going to be correctives to that. That is one of the things that surprises me.

Gil Duran: Your book was written 25 years ago or longer than that and people didn't listen. I started raising the alarm on this only a couple of years ago and I can tell you people still aren't wanting to listen, right? You won't read about any of this stuff in the San Francisco Chronicle, for instance. They seem to be completely unaware of tech politics in 2025, even when you can open some national publications now that are paying attention.

So thank you so much for being ahead of the curve. So we talked a lot about dead rats in this episode. So I want to bring up my little friend, Bernie, who's our little hooded fancy rat, a rat rescue from a place called Ratty Ratz in the Bay Area that rescues rats. Bernie was abandoned on a street in Alameda. He had a big tumor, but we got him some surgery and now he's a wonderful little boy and he runs free and he was asleep. So I'll let him go now, but Paulina Borsook, thanks for being on the Nerd Reich today. And we look forward to having Cyberselfish get reissued.

Paulina Borsook: I enjoyed your rap and wish me luck with finding a publisher. And Gil, look forward to seeing you and imbibing more alcohol together.

Gil Duran: Let's get palomas at Doña sometime soon.

Announcer: The Nerd Reich Podcast is produced and edited by me, R.R. Robbins. It's written and hosted by Gil Duran. You should sign up for the newsletter at thenerdreich.com. Go ahead, I'll wait.

Actually I won't, I have to do the rest of these credits. Leave a review on Apple Music, or on Spotify if you listen to it there. Or just leave a comment on this YouTube video. It helps with other people finding it. Algorithms, am I right? Today's final words are from the writer of the 90s, David Foster Wallace: “The problem with irony is not that it isn't truthful, but that it tyrannizes us.”

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