Libertarianism

Brian Doherty | 12.4.2025 2:00 PM

Paulina Borsook was an early writer for Wired magazine in the 1990s who became alarmed by what she saw as the encroachment of sinister libertarian ideas in the culture of a tech business world which, she correctly noted in her 2000 book Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High-Tech, had "the big bucks, and cultural juice, that will be affecting us all as we head into the next millennium."

An unimpeachable observation in 2000, but far from a visionary or unusual one, to finger Big Tech as highly influential on America's future. The New York Times recently reported on what its journalist believes is a wide revival of interest in her ideas.

Some proof of the Times' thesis of a widespread new interest in her work is that physical used copies are unusually hard to find for a mass market book only 25 years old. Borsook recently said on the Nerd Reich podcast that this revived interest denuded the used book market for Cyberselfish. Indeed, it's not findable as such on AbeBooks or Amazon as this is written.

Cyberselfish is, though, readable for free online. Such widespread and nearly costless cultural access is one of the many (barely acknowledged by tech gripers, perhaps because of their very ubiquity) advantages for the average American of the fruits of Silicon Valley and Big Tech, if not for a writer wanting royalties.

Borsook has some arguably legitimate complaints about Big Tech of today, though in that podcast and the Times article, they are not particularly fresh or far-seeing. She worries, as the Times quotes her, that thanks to tech's cultural influence, "empathy has now become a distasteful personal failing," and "surveillance capitalism has become the default shrugged-off business practice," and "the environmental impacts of A.I. are waved away."

She also has some overarching complaints that might not seem particularly hideous to those without a natural-born leftism. She finds overly large accumulations of wealth among tech titans distasteful and........

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