Book about Silicon Valley “Cyberselfish”: They are against the state to which they owe their wealth

Later she just called it “TGB,” short for “That Goddamned Book.” So that goddamn book that ended her career as a journalist. “Cyberselfish,” released in 2000, did not bring Paulina Borsook any luck. It was predictable that she would not make any friends in the high-tech world with her “critical foray into the terribly libertarian culture of the high-tech world.”

In her book, Borsook satirized the worldview of the young Internet start-up founders in Silicon Valley in the late 1990s, who at that time were turning the Internet into a marketplace. She clairvoyantly worked out the ideology that was hidden behind the facade of the cool computer geeks who changed the world out of their garage in shorts and oversized T-shirts during the week and danced in the desert at the Burning Man festival on the weekend.

Beyond their unconventional appearance, many of the tech entrepreneurs represented an ideology in which the market and competition are seen as superior forms of social order. Their personal success is the result of their intelligence and initiative, not their social privilege or the billions of dollars that the US Department of Defense has invested over decades in the development of new computer and network technology.

Paulina Borsook: "Cyberselfish. A Critical Romp through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech". Zero Books, London 2026. 300 pages, approx. 22 euros

In such a climate, not only the exploitation of employees thrived, but also sexist discrimination against women. Borsook used the term “technolibertarianism” to describe this attitude: a combination of egoism and market belief with a deep contempt for the state.

As a long-time computer journalist, Borsook knew that most of Silicon Valley's technical innovations had only been made possible through government investment - including the Internet, which was created as an academic research network.

In an essay for the left-wing magazine Mother Jones, which served as the starting point for her book, she writes: "Just as the big 19th-century lumber, livestock and mining companies enriched themselves from public goods, today technolibertarians make their profits from resources created by the public. And they apparently lack the insight, decency and attitude to give something back to society - at least anything other than electronics."

Today, this description brings to mind tech entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, who made a good part of his fortune with the help of the state - from the use of his SpaceX satellites by NASA and the Pentagon to emissions certificates and subsidies for his companies in California, Texas or Brandenburg. At the same time, like his mastermind Peter Thiel, he penetratingly portrays the state as inefficient and overreaching.

The orgy of destruction that Musk carried out as head of the government efficiency initiative Doge was, absurdly, also directed against basic research, which later often produces technologies with which private companies earn billions. Musk also seems to be proud of the fact that – unlike traditional US entrepreneurs – he concentrates his charity entirely on institutions he controls.

Musk and Thiel are just particularly pushy representatives of a reactionary rollback of the US tech industry in Donald Trump's second term in office. This became obvious when the former good people from Silicon Valley donated millions to Trump's inauguration and were rewarded with sitting in the front row.

As a result, Meta ended the hated external fact-checking program and canceled diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives; Google and Amazon have also abolished “outdated” inclusion programs. At X, Musk massively scaled back moderation, citing “freedom of expression”. He allowed right-wing radicals and weirdos like Tommy Robinson, Alex Jones, Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes to return. What was once Twitter became a stronghold for right-wing extremist propaganda, conspiracy myths and hate speech.

In this situation, the re-release of “Cyberselfish” makes it possible to return to the origins from which these backward and increasingly anti-democratic impulses emerged more than a quarter of a century ago. And to the question of how it was possible to give old-fashioned views a futuristic and innovative look. However, you have to know a little about the history of ideas about the Internet in order to be able to make connections to the present.

For example, about the fashion theory “Bionomics,” to which Borsook dedicates the first chapter because it had many followers in Silicon Valley at the end of the 1990s. Behind this was the idea of ​​the economy as an “evolutionary ecosystem” that only needs to be left to its own devices to produce the greatest results.

Borsook clearly analyzed that the free market is being normalized as a state of nature and political interventions are understood as unnatural disruptions to a supposedly self-regulating system.

Today, bionomics is largely forgotten. But such political ideas are still in circulation - among the representatives of paleocapitalism, who make no secret of the fact that they want a Darwinian law of the jungle for society.

The new Silicon Valley fashion philosophy of “Effective Accelerationism” (e/acc) also dreams of accelerating technological and economic development as uninhibitedly as possible. In his “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” from 2023, the tech investor Marc Andreessen speaks of a “techno-capital machine”: The market carries out a natural selection of ideas, the best prevail.

The second chapter about the “Cypherpunks” also has unmistakable references to the present. Borsook describes how an initially plausible concern - protecting privacy through cryptographic encryption - is escalating in parts of the scene into anarcho-capitalism, which wants to replace the government as completely as possible with technology and “smart contracts”.

Freedom is now only understood as freedom from interference and the collapse of existing social structures is sometimes imagined with relish. We also owe this scene to cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. They never fulfilled the utopian hopes that were placed in them. They have proven to be ideal instruments for money laundering and tax evasion and have made a few speculators obscenely rich - but have robbed others of their last shirt.

The chapter on Wired magazine is also worth reading because it reveals how the paper perpetuated such ideologies without ever explicitly declaring them part of its editorial program. However, it is also understandable that Wired gave Borsook no more orders after that.

For decades she hardly found any journalistic work elsewhere and had to make ends meet, among other things, as a caretaker for Airbnb apartments - ironic, because platform capitalism and its side effects such as a lack of apartments and exorbitant rents were excesses that she had warned against.

Of course, “Cyberselfish” wasn’t quite as unique as its advocates wanted to make the book. Before it there was the “network criticism” by Geert Lovink and Pit Schultz as well as the essay “The Californian Ideology” by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron from 1995, which is still well-received today and which summed up the ideological criticism of the dot-com economy much more succinctly. Unfortunately, “Cyberselfish” is written in a very sprawling way at times.

She is blessed with the late recognition that Borsook has received since the republication of her book. She has since been portrayed like a prophet by the New York Times, among others. Even Wired was decades late in investigating why she never received another commission after this book was published.