Tech critic Paulina Borsook profiled in New York Times
Make sure to read this: The New York Times has profiled Paulina Borsook, the tech critic who warned of Silicon Valley’s dark side thirty years ago. (I interviewed her last month on the Nerd Reich podcast.)
Writes David Streitfeld of the NYT:
Paulina Borsook’s “Cyberselfish” saw the seeds of disaster in the late-1990s dot-com boom, which, she argued, transformed a community that was previously sober, civic-minded and egalitarian into something toxic.
Silicon Valley, Ms. Borsook wrote, hated governments, rules and regulations. It believed if you were rich, you were smart. It thought people could be, and indeed should be, programmed just like a computer. “Techno-libertarianism,” as she labeled it, had no time for the messy realities of being human.
“If empathy has now become a distasteful personal failing; if surveillance capitalism has become the default shrugged-off business practice; if the environmental impacts of A.I. are waved away: then we are alas living in the tech-driven culture I saw headed our way 30 years ago,” Borsook told Streitfeld. “It’s terrible that I was right.”
Click here for a gift link to read “The Writer Who Dared Criticize Silicon Valley."
Unfortunately, Cyberselfish foretold the future but also hurt Borsook’s writing career. Nobody wanted to hear bad news about tech back then, and her opportunities dried up. Today, as her work is being rediscovered, she is disabled and survives with help from a GoFundMe set up by friends.
If you can, please help support her work by contributing to the fund!
Below is our conversation on the podcast, which has received over 128,000 views since October.
Listen to The Nerd Reich podcast on Apple Podcasts
