‘Cyberselfish’ author takes aim at techno-libertarianism as her book returns from the dead

“That’s a 12-year-old view of the world.”

It’s hard for books about technology to age well. They always risk becoming outdated as companies rise and fall, and as one hot new product is replaced by the next. But last year, “Nerd Reich” author Gil Durán declared that it was time to revive the career of Paulina Borsook, who he said “saw it all very clearly and tried to warn us 25 years ago.” Later that fall, The New York Times reported that Borsook’s “Cyberselfish” — first published in 2000 — was finding new fans who want to understand why the tech industry “lost its way.” Now, long after going out of print, “Cyberselfish” is returning in a new edition from Tin House.

Borsook told me in a Zoom interview that the book is meant to be “almost a travelogue” of her attempts to understand what she calls the techno-libertarian influence on Silicon Valley culture. “That’s a 12-year-old view of the world,” Borsook said, describing it as “a kind of basket of beliefs” that’s “violently anti-regulation,” despite the fact that “no sector of society had benefited more and suffered less from the government than these guys.” In her telling, “even after the dot-com crash, that attitude was just there, percolating around, contaminating the aquifers. It was uncorrected, and it just spread out more and more.” Borsook has yet