Exposing A Selfish Tech Culture

Exposing a 'selfish' tech culture Paulina Borsook dashes through Valley thinking
[FIRST Edition]
USA TODAY - McLean, Va.
Subjects: High tech industries; Writers; Books-titles -- Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High-Tech
Author: Weise, Elizabeth
Date: Apr 11, 2000
Start Page: 03.D
Section: LIFE
Document Text
e-world: Living with technology; eworld@usatoday.com

Reading Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High-Tech (Public Affairs, $24) is like sitting down to a long dinner at a quiet restaurant with author Paulina Borsook herself. You'll come away incensed, exhausted, fascinated and in serious need of a dictionary.

Paulina was one of the first people I became friends with after making the dislocating jump from Seattle to San Francisco back in 1993. She had been writing for technology trade magazines since the early '80s and seemingly knew everything about everyone.

Her Rolodex was golden, her memory prodigious, her appetite for information ferocious. One had only to mention a topic in the world of high tech, and she'd start spouting histories, names, phone numbers and e-mail addresses for the most important people involved. She was my one-woman grad course in the world of cyberspace.

At the time, she was writing for a new magazine you may have heard of since then, Wired. The stories she had to tell about the personalities and predilections of the tech world's Powers That Be were fascinating. An early Wired piece that put her on the techno- map was a short story titled "Love Over the Wires." It was one of the first to chronicle an online romance and was recently reprinted in an anthology, The Ex-Files: New Stories About Old Flames (Context Books, $14).

Since that time, she has written for pretty much all of the culturally important outlets that have grown up around high tech. A recent Salon piece, "How the Internet Ruined San Francisco," resulted in front-page articles in several major daily newspapers.

Cyberselfish is a book about the religions of Silicon Valley, if you understand religion to mean a set of commonly held beliefs. It's a very free-market, anti-regulation mind-set. It has a deep belief in the capacity of individuals but tends to ignore the social and political matrix that molded them.

This is "libertarian with a small l," as many in the Valley put it. (Libertarian with a big L would be the Libertarian Party, which advocates as little government and as much individual liberty as possible.)

Technolibertarians, as Paulina dubs them, are something else again. They come in several flavors, primarily the "ravers" and the "gilders."

Ravers are neo-hippies who believe that "through the wonders of the Net we will all communicate and love one another and sing whatever the cyberspace version of 'Kumbaya' is, without the repressive parental influence of nasty old governments to interfere in this freelovefest." Gilders (think former Reagan speechwriter George Gilder) are socially conservative, "in love with the spirit of enterprise and the spirituality of the microchip."

This might sound dry. It's not. Imagine Ulysses (Joyce, not Homer) written as one extended, jazzlike riff on the woes and wrongs of the culture of technology. I predict a slew of Borsook imitators as soon as Cyberselfish hits the bookstores May 12. Not only because reading it is such a roller-coaster ride, but because one can't help but begin to think -- and write -- in the author's breakneck new-idea-a- minute, hyphenated/slashed/run-on intellectual style.

See, I'm doing it myself.

Paulina, 46, lives in Santa Cruz, where she laments the invasion of Silicon Valley into what was an intellectually stimulating, crunchy-granola fiefdom unto itself. She is a ranter (many friends suggested that Cyberselfish should just be called "Rant") 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 to make sure you haven't misunderstood.

Her geek credentials go way back. She studied psycholinguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, then got a master's in fine arts at Columbia. She describes herself as a "left-leaning libertarian. I find that the older I get, the more uneasy I become with government entitlements, but the more I believe in regulations."

At a breakout discussion at last week's Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference in Toronto, a crowd of 20 or so techies stayed up past midnight to debate and discuss why the "default culture" of technology was libertarian.

Some disputed the notion that technolibertarianism is as prevalent as she describes, arguing that from the programmers to the Web designers to the venture capitalists, the entire panoply of human belief systems is readily visible.

But the majority agreed that there's something different about the particular subculture that's grown up around high tech. Often as not, when you scratch a techie, you'll find someone who believes that the government shouldn't be allowed to regulate much of anything and thinks the playing field is quite level enough, thank you, and all those people down at the lower end who've missed the boat entirely have only themselves to blame.

An example of this is the clamor in the Valley for more visas for high-tech workers, which Paulina calls "educational imperialism." "Basically they don't want to pay for education anymore, because they don't believe in taxes. So we export the cost of education to Taiwan or India," she says.

Why this particular philosophical strain should so strongly take root among the computer intelligentsia is a question no one, not even Paulina, has answered. She provides instead an inner look at who believes what and how that affects the world of high tech we're all coming to inhabit.

E-mail eweise@usatoday.com

For more information

* www.cyberselfish.com

* www.transaction.net/people/paulina.html

Excerpt

The most virulent form of philosophical technolibertarianism is a kind of scary, psychologically brittle, prepolitical autism. It bespeaks a lack of human connection and a discomfort with the core of what many of us con-sider it means to be human. It's an inability to reconcile the demands of being individual with the demands of participating in society, which coincides beautifully with a preference for, and glorification of, being the solo commander of one's computer in lieu of any other economically viable behavior. Computers are so much more rule-based, controllable, fixable, and comprehensible than any human will ever be.

-- From Cyberselfish

Illustration

PHOTO, B/W, Brad Mangin for USA TODAY; Caption: Sweet land of technolibertarians: In Cyberselfish, Borsook records the beliefs of wired culture.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.

Abstract (Document Summary)

Reading Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High-Tech (Public Affairs, $24) is like sitting down to a long dinner at a quiet restaurant with author Paulina Borsook herself. You'll come away incensed, exhausted, fascinated and in serious need of a dictionary.

Paulina was one of the first people I became friends with after making the dislocating jump from Seattle to San Francisco back in 1993. She had been writing for technology trade magazines since the early '80s and seemingly knew everything about everyone.

At the time, she was writing for a new magazine you may have heard of since then, Wired. The stories she had to tell about the personalities and predilections of the tech world's Powers That Be were fascinating. An early Wired piece that put her on the techno- map was a short story titled "Love Over the Wires." It was one of the first to chronicle an online romance and was recently reprinted in an anthology, The Ex-Files: New Stories About Old Flames (Context Books, $14).