Paulina Borsook's "Cyberselfish" was published in 2000, sold modestly, went out of print, and spent two decades as a second-hand curiosity — at one point copies were going for three dollars, less than the cost of posting them. This month it returns from Tin House in a new edition, with an introduction by Gil Durán, author of "The Nerd Reich," and a short new preface by Borsook explaining how a dead book came back.
The revival was not a publisher's idea. Used prices began creeping up about eighteen months ago, Borsook told TechCrunch's Anthony Ha in an interview published on Sunday. European academics started writing to her. Strangers posted about the book. Durán, after Steven Levy published a Wired piece asking how the tech press got it so wrong, went on Bluesky and argued that Borsook had got it right and should be brought back into print. The acquiring editor's instruction was blunt: "Don't change a word."
The book's argument has aged into the mainstream. Borsook spent the late 1980s and 1990s in Bay Area tech circles listening to remarks she could not make sense of, and concluded that the industry's politics were not an accident of its business model but a culture of its own: "violently anti-regulation," built on a "bad borrowing from biology" in which markets, like organisms, should simply be left to evolve.
What made the observation sharp was the ingratitude. "No sector of society had benefited more and suffered less from the government than these guys," she says — the research, the contracts, the universities, the internet itself. She is careful not to make the state into a hero; she is old enough to remember Vietnam and Chile. The point is proportion.
She also divided the industry in a way that still reads as useful. "Ravers" were the Barlow side — Burning Man, drugs, cultural liberalism. "Gilders," named for George Gilder, were the reactionary, socially conservative wing. Twenty-six years later she thinks the split held: Christian nationalists and conservative Catholics in executive suites, Burners and effective altruists in the labs.
On continuity she is emphatic. The break, in her account, was the Netscape IPO, when "Silicon Valley was invaded by the finance bros" and a culture of "flip and flee" arrived. "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." Uber and Airbnb, in her reading, were "strictly financial plays" wearing the language of technological liberation.
Then there is AI. "It's perfect," she says of the industry's current posture. "'We don't need to be regulated. We're the most brilliant, genius, wonderful people in the world.' I see AI right now as a big Ponzi scheme." Her example of the disconnect is local and concrete: executives moving to the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe to escape California taxes while praising the lake's purity, which is a product of decades of environmental regulation.
The interview ends where a reader might expect a prescription and does not get one. Borsook says she has no good answer for engineering students who do not buy "this toxic stuff" and ask what they can do. AI absorbs the investment; government is broke; the nonprofit sector is not thriving; the two-person consultancy that funded its own growth is harder to find. What she offers instead is a warning against fatalism, and a hope that the people interested in what used to be called appropriate technology can find money somewhere.
The book's return is being read as vindication. Borsook is more careful than that — she notes that the industry is "amoral enough" to drop an alliance the moment it stops paying, which is a forecast rather than a compliment. Twenty-six years on, the value of "Cyberselfish" is not that it predicted anything. It is that it named the thing plainly, at a time when almost everyone covering technology was writing celebratory copy, and the name still fits.
