Paulina Borsook, a 72-year-old former technology journalist, is seeing her quarter-century-old critique of Silicon Valley return to print after a resurgence of attention online. Tin House published a new edition of her 2000 book Cyberselfish in mid-September, with a foreword by Gil Durán of The Nerd Reich. The reissue followed interest from five publishers that sent bids to her agent last December, a turn Borsook said has left her unsure how to think about herself.
Cyberselfish carried the subtitle The Terribly Libertarian Culture of High-Tech and sold roughly 5,000 hardcover copies and 2,000 in paperback. The book argued that the tech utopianism of the dotcom era masked a woman-hating social malevolence. It drew warm but sometimes puzzled reviews, and Borsook long wondered whether something she wrote, a blacklist or sexism had ended her career. She said she hates playing that card but has to wonder.
The revival began without her involvement. Durán wrote in a widely shared post on Bluesky that people should lift up Borsook's work instead of centering men who missed the boat, writing in response to a 2025 WIRED essay by Steven Levy. Readers recast her as a prophet, citing her writing on testosterone-poisoned men with chips on their shoulders, her treatment of the Luddites as early protesters of de-skilling, and her skepticism toward Sand Hill Road theorists flirting with eugenics. The New York Times profiled her as the writer who dared criticize Silicon Valley.
Borsook was one of WIRED's earliest contributors, at a time when the masthead included very few women. She later wrote for Salon and Suck, and described her voice as one of agonized humanism. In Cyberselfish she called the most virulent form of philosophical technolibertarianism a psychologically brittle, prepolitical autism, an inability to reconcile individual demands with participation in society. She wrote that such technolibertarians make a philosophy out of a personality defect.
Her outlook took shape in the early 1980s at a Marin County software company called Construction Information Systems, where she did technical writing on a minicomputer running the PICK operating system. In a 2015 essay she wrote that the job taught her technology is infrastructure, not magic, and that software is a human artifact. She wrote that she began to think the way PICK's creators thought, and that their design sensibility and cognitive blind spots were evident and human.
PICK traced to Dick Pick, a software developer for a military contractor during the Vietnam War. He and business partner Don Nelson built a database operating system for tracking spare parts for Lockheed's Cheyenne attack helicopter, naming it the Generalized Information Retrieval Language System, or GIRLS. The system later reached commercial use under the name PICK.
Borsook now lives near Oakland, California, in a basement unit she calls Ice Station Zebra because of its cold, color scheme and isolation. She told the reporter she lost everything she owned when she could not pay for storage, and that the unit was the best she could find that worked with her disabilities.
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