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

“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. The resurrection required no publicist: used copies of Cyberselfish drifted from $4 toward $1,000; graduate students begged her for copies she couldn’t supply; a stranger she’s never met posted on LinkedIn that she’d gotten everything right and been forgotten — and it went viral. That led to Gil Duran, whose furious Bluesky post (after a Wired mea-culpa writer interviewed him about her for forty-five minutes and cited neither of them) alerted The New York Times, whose November feature — “The Writer Who Dared Criticize Silicon Valley” — brought her agent’s immortal email: “we always knew you were right.” Tin House is reissuing the book on September 15 with a Duran foreword and her new afterword, changing not a word. Younger readers, she’s told, like that it doesn’t read like a TED Talk. Her headstone joke covers the whole arc: always right, never lied, no one paid attention.

•       Why Are They So Mad? The book’s core observation remains undefeated: “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?” “Libertarian” was simply her shorthand for a subculture violently anti-government, totally anti-regulation, and drunk on Ayn Rand — or, in the book’s reframe, the mind-set of adolescents craving total rampaging autonomy while someone else does the laundry. She wrote it from inside: a Wired freelancer under Louis Rossetto (who handed new writers The New Journalism), perpetually paired point-counterpoint against John Perry Barlow, whose Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace made her snort and whose “dyspeptic” label she wears as a compliment. Kevin Kelly, she insists, is not Sam Altman — they almost never agreed, but she doesn’t demonize — “except that they have a belief in everything that tech wants to do is fine.” The book, she says now, is a Guide for the Perplexed: the metaphors and framing to decode eve