The first thing to know about Cyberselfish, the chillingly prescient 2000 book about Silicon Valley that its author, Paulina Borsook, says “ruined my life” and caused a 25-year-long “curse” to befall her, is that it’s very, very funny. Cyberselfish, which Borsook cannot stand to name and instead calls “TDB” (short for “that damn book”), is a classic, fish-out-of-water tale of a journalist investigating a strange land. Except, in her case, as a California native, it’s the work of a fish regarding an invasive species that suddenly befouled the tank she’d been swimming in her whole life.
Her observations from the murky milieu of the dawning tech world are as hilarious as they are depressing; early in the book, for instance, Borsook recounts what happened after she wrote a satirical guide for the website Suck.com on dating men in tech. (Do profess Ayn Rand fandom, “don’t tell him about your best friend, the urban planner, who uses HUD money to develop low-income housing.”) After the piece was published, emails cascaded into her inbox.
“Guys were positive that I had been writing about them,” Borsook wrote in Cyberselfish. “Or about someone they knew (I hadn’t written about anyone in particular). Guys wanted to meet me for coffee, as I was obviously their dream girl (it was a joke, guys, and no, thank you). At last! A woman who understands me! No, more modestly, I was just someone who had been paying attention.”
Cyberselfish “contains a warning that was largely ignored.”
Borsook, an author and poet, began working in Silicon Valley in 1981, first as a technical writer for software companies. As she freelanced for various tech outlets and from her perch as a contributing writer to Wired in its earliest years, she began to piece together, as she put it in Cyberselfish, “a picture of an emergent social and political subculture, one that can seem dangerously naive and, at its worst, downright scary.”
Today, just a glance around will confirm that said subculture is no longer “emergent,” but horribly, frighteningly, society-destroyingly dominant. Fittingly, Cyberselfish will be reissued on September 15 by Tin House, an imprint of the independent publisher Zando. The three-decade plus history of the book traces back through a piece she wrote for this very magazine where she began to lay out its thesis. That essay, also titled “Cyberselfish,” ran in our July/August 1996 issue below a crystal clear subhed: “Silicon Valley, one of the country’s biggest recipients of government largesse, would like to bite the hand that feeds it.”
“No sector of society has benefited more and suffered less from the government than these guys,” Borsook, now 72, told me on a recent video call, reflecting on the central question that animated the essay. “So why are they so hostile to it?”
On the strength of that Mother Jones piece, Borsook was able to get a book deal—and that, she will tell you candidly, is when her troubles began. The manuscript was meant for Wired’s publishing imprint, but the deal fell through. The work was rejected by a second publisher after they’d bought it and paid her advance. “They killed the book,” Borsook says. “They said it didn’t have sufficient literary quality and wanted all their money back.” She was forced to repay them with money from Public Affairs, the publisher that eventually brought it to market. “I ended up being $65,000 in debt,” she says.
While Cyberselfish made a splash upon its release and earned critical acclaim, its stridency and withering thesis also proved hard for some to swallow. It got a nuanced and tough review at Salon by a former Wired editor, Brad Wieners, who argued that some of its critiques of tech, and of the magazine where they both had worked, were outdated. “Borsook has us spend too much time coloring in a map of yesterday that does not correspond to today’s territory,” he wrote. Even a friend of Borsook’s, Elizabeth Weise, noted in her own review for Time that the book could be exhausting. “She is a ranter, (many friends suggested that Cyberselfish should just be called ‘Rant’),” Weise wrote, “who talks a mile a minute in sentences so encrusted with obscure cultural references that it’s often necessary to interrupt and ask for footnotes.”
Her critics could not dispute her brilliance. But as Borsook sees it, the book was both the height of her public profile and also the end of her professional life. “I cannot complain about the media arc,” she says. But, she adds, “It didn’t turn into anything and then I was never able to get anything published ever again, on tech or not-tech. A magazine article or a book. It was like some curse had been laid down on me. It was the weirdest damn thing.”
Financially, things got even worse. Eventually, she was evicted and lost almost everything she owned when she could no longer make payments on her storage unit. For several years, she only got by through free rent as a live-in host at an Airbnb owned by friends. Borsook has a permanent moderate traumatic brain injury from being shot, as she has put it, “accidentally on purpose” in the head as a teenager by a friend. While doing research for My Life as a Ghost, a 2013 performance and art installation about the incident, clinicians told Borsook, who had always believed her injury was mild, that it was better classified as moderate. “It was sort of a shock,” she explained to me by email, “and one of those moments telling me how much I didn’t want to identity as/admit to being disabled.”
Borsook also has severe chemical and scent sensitivities which date to childhood, but that she says doctors told her were probably worsened by the TBI. These factors make it difficult to find a suitable place to live, especially in housing-strapped Santa Cruz, where she’s long been based, or to work traditional office jobs; today, one of the things keeping her afloat is an ongoing GoFundMe a friend launched in 2024.
“I felt ashamed for most of the last 25 years,” she says. The book, she came to believe, “was bad and I was ashamed. That’s how I walked around.”
But decades later, after this cascade of misfortunes and a deeply internalized if unearned sense of chagrin, something changed. Through a series of events—which Borsook hastens to point out she had nothing to do with—the curse was at least partly lifted. In the last year, Cyberselfish received a new and respectful round of attention, helped along by the advocacy of fellow journalist and Nerd Reich author Gil Duran, who was disturbed and angry by Borsook’s erasure from tech history. In September 2025, he wrote a viral Bluesky post about what he termed a “mush-brained” Wired essay about selfishness in Silicon Valley that entirely ignored Borsook. The next month, Duran interviewed Borsook on his podcast.
The book’s new moment also has a lot to do with, frankly, how spooky some of the predictions are, many years on. Borsook saw clearly how the tech world’s contempt for government could turn into a desire to destroy it, something that’s come true with the destruction wrought by DOGE. She clocked how debilitating selfishness and blindness to privilege could turn into hatred for one’s neighbor, especially poor people on the streets of San Francisco and Palo Alto that the new tech glitterati had to walk by on their way to work. She also saw an obvious and worrisome gender essentialism emerging, specifically how awkwardness with women and a lack of success romantically was morphing into what Borsook called, in our conversation, “creepy socio-biological stupidity” and rank sexism.
Now that Borsook’s worst and most apocalyptic visions have come true tenfold, people are ready to listen. She was featured in the New York Times last year, and a new profile by her old employer Wired, with whom, she writes in Cyberselfish, she often had a fraught working relationship, is in the works. (Her time at Wired, she has written, began happily, but was marked by a dawning realization that the magazine’s leadership was, as she saw it, sexist, not in their treatment of her, but “in their values and treatment of others.”) Last month, she sat for an interview on CNN, where she was hailed as the journalist “who saw today’s tech titans coming.”
“Totally Rip van Winkle all the time here,” Borsook told me recently by email. “Just confusing, as you can imagine.”
In a foreword to the republished version, Duran writes that the 2000 book was “work of prophecy,” adding, “Like most products of that cursed genre, it contains a warning that was largely ignored at the time of its publication. The disastrous results of this oversight fill today’s headlines and pose an existential threat to freedom and democracy.”
But Duran points out that despite this new round of respect and recognition, Borsook is still not in a stable place financially. “Paulina is looking at years of struggle,” he says. “She’s elderly and frail. It’s great this has brought some attention to her, but we all know that books aren’t going to take care of your financial problems. I hope we can continue to build and find ways to honor her work by making sure that she doesn’t have to suffer. Maybe one of these podcast millionaires can break off the dividends for the journalist who got it right.”
Borsook does see another slim silver lining in what’s happened to her lately: “The reputational renaissance I’ve had, you usually get posthumously,” she says dryly. “At least I’m still alive.”
The genesis for Cyberselfish was a kind of queasy fascination, “mongoose-to-cobra style,” as Borsook put it in the book, with Silicon Valley’s emerging cultural dynamics. It was a place full of “technolibertarians” (a word she popularized) who considered any and all government regulation to be oppressive, but at the same time happily took government funding—and lots of it. They went to Burning Man, they loved shooting guns, and they were likely to use some variant of the word “pagan” to describe their spiritual beliefs. They were often men who were very unskilled in dealing with women, and they were, as Borsook wrote, not deeply rooted in the places where they physically made their homes.
“Silicon Valley companies and executives and workers may identify themselves not with where they actually live and work and go to movies and send their kids to school but, more saliently, as members of a high tech archipelago,” the book explained. They were also—and here we feel the ground shake ominously, a slight shifting under our feet that presages a future, devastating earthquake—not very involved or very interested in politics: local, state, or federal.
The new Silicon Valley ruling class was so disconnected from government, in fact, that they didn’t seem to have a great understanding of why it existed at all, or how it might benefit them. Cyberselfish recounted a telling conversation Borsook had while spending a week at the “plushy Lake Tahoe getaway of a Silicon Valley guy who’s made it.”
“He complained,” Borsook wrote, “about how the local Tahoe building code wouldn’t let him alter the silhouette of his megachalet. I nodded sympathetically, yet pointed out that in Los Angeles, where there were no such planning guidelines until recently, plutocrats often tore down existing structures and rebuilt monstrosities that take up the entire lot, blocking their neighbors’ views.” In response, Borsook’s friend looked at her in puzzlement; the consequences of deregulation were quite literally something he never considered.
“He had never heard of the tragedy of the commons, where one sheep too many consuming more than its share of common resources destroys the whole,” Borsook wrote, “nor had he thought much about what participating in a community means.”
One of the unique strengths of Cyberselfish is that Borsook wasn’t just living and working among the emerging tech elite, but trying to date within it too. As Borsook experienced in spades, people often show themselves, unintentionally, in very revealing ways in romantic contexts. The book recounts a startling and depressing first date with a guy with a bungalow in Palo Alto and the world at his feet. It was a beautiful spring afternoon in the late ‘80s, and he picked her up in his BMW. She told him about living in Manhattan during the stock market crash of 1987 and seeing a young Black man panhandling with a sign that read “I need money to go home to North Carolina to get some food.” Borsook had been struck by this, a perfect distillation of how “hard and heartless” she’d found New York. In response, her date looked over from the steering wheel and sniped, “A long way to go for groceries, don’t you think?”
“I was stunned,” Borsook wrote in the book. “This from a guy who’d been a scholarship boy himself, who’d traveled all over the world in rough and not cruise-line conditions. His reaction was my first encounter with the strange lack of philos in high tech.”
“My mother used to give me no end of grief,” Borsook told me, over how she was unable to find a boyfriend even in such a male-dominated culture. “I used to say, ‘I can’t find anyone I relate to.’”
Borsook is not the person to talk to if you are looking to feel better about today’s tech bigwigs. She has a visceral disgust for Elon Musk and calls Peter Thiel “the Antichrist, as far as I’m concerned.”
Some of the technolibertarians of early Silicon Valley were laced with cyberpunk ideas like a disdain for national borders, an interest in freedom in all its forms, and a love for drugs. “Many people agreed with decriminalizing psychedelics or had unusual dealings in their intimate lives,” Borsook recalls. (The book uses the term “nerverts” to talk about computer nerds who engaged in then-more-uncommon sexual practices like polyamory and BDSM.) But as such instincts combined with a love of the free market and reflexive disdain for government regulation, it cohered into something approaching a religious belief. Today the leadership class of modern-day Silicon Valley is simply dominated by cultural and religious conservatism.
DOGE under Musk created conditions that even Borsook couldn’t have dreamed of, along with what she calls “the appalling collusion of Trump with the big tech companies.” She’s particularly struck by the irony of DOGE stripping away funding and protection for national parks. “They live in California with all this great natural beauty,” she says, impatiently. “How do you think that got preserved?”
“I don’t celebrate Steve Jobs, but he’d be rolling in his grave,” she adds. She’s also disturbed by how transphobic the titans of the tech world have become, pointing out that trans people have always been present in Silicon Valley: “It’s really weird. They’re all obsessed with a stupid, kind of retrograde idea of gender and masculinity.”
Borsook is also worried by the tech world’s messianic vision in of AI, their conviction that it will solve every problem. “We’re living in the effects of the casino economy,” she says. “Until that changes, how are we going to change Silicon Valley? If there’s a big crash in AI, that may give us a real corrective. Because it’s all made of papier-mache and spit.” But in her reflexive drive to understand how people use tech, she is interested in how many ordinary people are using AI chatbots to confide in, as an alternative to therapy or human confidantes. She’s reminded of the ELIZA experiment in the 1960s, which simulated conversation with a psychotherapist using tools like pattern-matching.
“Some people are so much more comfortable with [AI]. But why would I rather talk to this than a friend, or a boyfriend, or a therapist?” Borsook asks. “AI bores me.”
It’s common with prophets to ask them to predict the future, or show us the way to a better tomorrow. In the closing moments of my conversation with Borsook, I can’t resist the impulse to do so. When I tell her that I’m struggling with a certain, say, overwhelming sense of pessimism and despair lately, she doesn’t disagree. “I tend to be a Debbie Downer,” she says, with a laugh. Because she’s a writer and not a tech activist, “I tend not to be prescriptive on how I think about the world.”
“There’s so much fear right now around making a living,” Borsook adds, including among people in the industry. “How do you channel the fear into something productive? I don’t have an answer for you, but I think there are a lot of people who could find common cause who wouldn’t have in the past.” In the end, and despite what the isolationists of the tech and politics world might have to tell us, and whether we like it or not, she adds, “We’re all in this together.”