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by Marina
Malenic
Technology issues writer Paulina Borsook's Cyberselfish:
A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High-Tech
is an elaboration on the author's 1996 Mother Jones essay "Cyberselfish."
For anyone who's read both, the first thought that comes to mind is that
there is little for a writer of Borsook's caliber to say beyond the
confines of a five-page essay on any subject.
But unfortunately Cyberselfish, in its bloated
276-page form, was re-inflicted on the populace in the year 2000, when
all of Borsook's tired arguments for bigger and bigger government could
mercifully slip by unnoticed. Four years after the publication of her
essay, half of her ideas are obsolete, while the other half are a
broken-record defense of every variety of government spending and
regulation -- and calls for lots more where that came from.
Borsook's assessment of high-tech culture is sloppy
and oozes with gross generalities. She belittles what she sees as a
"technolibertarian" culture of "geeks" that can be
neatly divided into two categories: "ravers," or high-tech
hippies in the John Perry Barlow mold who tell government to "Leave
your laws off my body," in Borsook's elegant phraseology; and
"gilders," cleverly coined to describe the miniature George
Gilders running around in hightechlandia, presumably interested only in
making a quick million or two.
Such stereotypes are characteristic of Borsook's
work, as she would seemingly prefer to play wink-nudge games with her
readers rather than do a reporter's work of familiarizing herself with
the material she plans to explain. While she whines about the
quantitative, mathematical minds of the "geeks" who have no
sympathy for those who "lack the stamina... and psychological
make-up necessary for success in that world...", her own work in
the hardly quantitative world of journalism lacks any semblance of
structure or discipline. Her slipshod, cutesy prose reflects her lack of
standards:
Here I think of my sister: biology degree from
Stanford, plus a masters in public health, one of those
divorced-in-her-forties-with-two-teenagers-to-raise-while-trying-to-reenter-the-workforce
sad stories, who grasps after any kind of health education job she can
find.... [S]he has precisely the skillset (teaching, community
service, environmental consciousness) that has little...value in our
fabu hyperaccelerated crashboombang economy.
Like, you know what I mean?
The most blatant of her generalities is contained in
her title -- that everyone involved in high tech is a libertarian. Her
evidence for this assertion? Well, she grew up in Pasadena with kids
whose fathers worked at Caltech and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. And
she knows lots of computer scientists. Some of them are even her
friends. That's how she knows.
Borsook does make one astute observation, which she
can't completely be credited with, since others have made it before --
thus the slim possibility that Borsook may have read it somewhere. It is
that libertarianism, like any other unwavering, fanatical devotion, is a
religion of sorts. She recognizes that children in secular American
suburbia who, in their undeveloped yearning for authority and guidance,
in the guise of asserting their independence find the absolutist dogma
of Ayn Rand a seductive overture to libertarian thinking. And while the
introduction to Aristotelian logic is a valuable lesson, many new Rand
initiates do not learn another of the Greek philosopher's important
teachings. Namely, that man is a political, and therefore a social,
animal. Although intelligent adults include a free-market orientation
and respect for individual liberties in their personal political
platforms, most grow out of Ayn Rand well before leaving high school, so
Borsook's caricature once again misses the mark.
Indeed Borsook's amateurish labels move from
exaggeration to outright invention. When she insinuates that her "technolibertarians"
are Unabomber types, she ignores the fact that Theodore Kaczynski was an
extreme environmentalist and, moreover, a Luddite who held few if any
libertarian beliefs. Borsook's desire to paint everyone she perceives as
a "right-winger" into a certifiable lunatic actually exposes
her own Unabomber impulses. She explains in one passage that she is
actually a Luddite environmentalist, and goes on to make remarks
reminiscent of a notable manifesto called "Industrial Society and
its Future" -- published in the Washington Post and New
York Times in 1995 just before the FBI finally arrested Kaczynski.
On the less substantial side of things, another
distraction to the reader is the excessive number of typographical
errors in the book. Misspellings abound in the first few chapters, with
the potential for the reader to stumble over a typo on just about every
page. In a special postscript to the volume, Peter Osnos, publisher of
PublicAffairs, notes that "PublicAffairs is a new nonfiction
publishing house and a tribute to the standards, values, and flair of
three persons who have served as mentors to countless reporters,
writers, editors, and book people of all kinds, including me." He
then lists the three, I.F. Stone, Benjamin C. Bradlee (former editorial
leader of the Washington Post, whom Osnos credits with giving
"the Post the range and courage to pursue such historic
issues as Watergate...."), and Robert L. Bernstein (formerly of
Random House and founder of Human Rights Watch).
It seems Borsook should not get all the credit for Cyberselfish.
Without these three men, her caricature of people who work in the high
tech industry would not have been possible. Congratulations to all
involved in this enlightening enterprise.
Marina Malenic is assistant editor of The American
Spectator.
(Posted 5/24/00)
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