“`html
On that day, Paulina Borsook, aged 72, allowed herself a brief moment of excitement as she grappled with the question of what had derailed her life. “I don’t know what to think,” she voiced as we drove to lunch. I had picked her up from her home near Oakland, California, a basement she referred to as “Ice Station Zebra” due to its coldness, colour scheme, and isolation, or so she had described it. Borsook was reluctant to let me in, wary of the tendency many journalists had to assign symbolic meanings to decor. Having penned numerous such narratives during her heyday at WIRED and similar publications, she knew the game all too well. Later, she elaborated in an email: “This place I ended up in does not represent me at all. I lost everything when I couldn’t afford the storage unit, and this is the best place I could find that accommodates my disabilities. So I feel like it REALLY doesn’t represent me, neither my taste nor my preferences. Shame and disgust.”
The Enigma of Paulina Borsook
What had happened to Paulina Borsook? This haunting question pursued her, even on a day when she received promising news about new offers. In truth, this query had plagued her for a quarter of a century. In 2000, after years chronicling Silicon Valley, she published a book titled Cyberselfish, which critiqued the era’s technological utopianism, revealing a lifeless, misogynistic social malevolence. The subtitle referred to the “terribly libertarian culture of high technology.” She was astute at a time when the tech industry had become rather foolish, and her wit was particularly sharp against Silicon Valley’s self-satisfaction. Cyberselfish garnered positive reviews, albeit occasionally perplexed, selling around 5,000 hardcover copies and another 2,000 in paperback—a respectable figure for a mid-tier book. It was neither a bestseller nor a failure.
Then… silence. Publishers ceased to respond to her calls. No grants materialised, no contracts for a second book, no regular appearances on MSNBC. Borsook found herself without work and began to wonder if she had been blacklisted. Her already fragile health deteriorated further. She lived in other people’s homes and faced financial ruin, a process she likened to a fire consuming everything to the ground. She managed to survive through a GoFundMe campaign and the support of a few friends. Consequently, she began to refer to her book as TDB (That Damn Book).
A Journey of Resurgence
When Borsook and I first met in December of last year, she was deep into what she termed “this thing of resurrection.” Everything had unfolded so quickly, almost without her noticing: a social media post here, another there. Renowned tech critics, like Gil Durán from The Nerd Reich, unearthed her book, arguing that even during the euphoric days of the dot-com bubble, some individuals foresaw the impending issues. “Instead of focusing on the men who missed the train (and still don’t seem to get it), let’s highlight the work of Paulina Borsook, who saw everything clearly and tried to warn us 25 years ago,” Durán wrote in a widely shared post on Bluesky, responding to an essay by Steven Levy published in WIRED in 2025. Borsook was dubbed a prophet, undervalued in her time but distinctly relevant in ours. She had written about “men poisoned by testosterone, with inferiority complexes and too much free time” long before the manosphere emerged. She had championed luddites as “the first protesters against professional devaluation” at a time when ‘luddite’ was an insult. Cyberselfish became a minor phenomenon without Borsook needing to utter a word about it. The New York Times featured her in a profile, calling her “the writer who dared to criticise Silicon Valley.” As a friend once told her, “The universe hasn’t finished with you yet.”
Now, publishers were eager to bring her work back into circulation. On that December day, five of them submitted offers to her agent. (In the end, Borsook chose Tin House, which published a new edition of Cyberselfish in mid-September, with a foreword by Durán). The offers represented recognition after years of being forgotten. Finally, things seemed to be looking up…
Reflections on the Past
“It broke my heart in many ways,” Borsook remarked at the restaurant while we waited to order. Her mind drifted back to 2001, once again questioning what had happened to her career. Was it something she had written? Could it have been a real blacklist? Or was it something as tragically common as sexism? “I really hate to bring that up, but I have to ask myself,” she said. She simply could not comprehend it, even after all these years. In a way, the recent positive turn of events left her even more bewildered. As she expressed more than once, “I no longer know how to think of myself.”
I found her captivating within hours, a phenomenon often observed among those who orbit Borsook. When I dropped her off that afternoon, I jokingly promised to find the person who had ruined her career. But first, I must tell you about Dick Pick. That is, quite literally, his name. Richard A. Pick. He was known as Dick. It was the 1960s. Back then, one could walk around with such a name, and no one would think it absurd, even if he was, as he apparently was, a notorious womaniser.
The Evolution of Technology Understanding
Dick Pick was a software developer for a military contractor during the Vietnam War. Legend has it that the Army needed a way to track spare parts for Lockheed’s Cheyenne attack helicopter. Together with his partner, Don Nelson, he devised a database operating system they called “Generalised Information Retrieval System,” or GIRLS. (Did you think tech bros were a new phenomenon?). As many technological innovations funded by defence expenditure do, GIRLS soon found commercial applications. Eventually, it was renamed PICK, and it was under this name that the operating system reached Paulina Borsook, who was employed by a small software company in Marin County.
Before becoming one of the keenest observers of the media landscape in early Silicon Valley, Borsook learned how to “understand” technology. This occurred in the early 1980s, in front of one of those so-called minicomputers, which were indeed large enough to get buried in. The company was called Construction Information Systems, and Borsook worked in technical writing, documenting software functionality in the simplest language possible. In that role, she learned two important lessons. The first was that technology is “infrastructure, not magic,” as she argued in a 2015 essay. The second lesson was that the computer is a way to see into another human being’s mind. It is, inevitably, social. “Learning about PICK,” she wrote, “taught me that software was a human artifact; that is, I began to think like the creators of PICK… the dyer’s hand, the sensitivity of design, the cognitive blind spots. All evident and all human artifacts. Technology is idiosyncratic, just like the humans who conceive it, and those who create it are simply people.”
The witty articles for Salon and Suck, the deeper profiles for WIRED, every biting word of Cyberselfish, everything Borsook would later write as a journalist covering the industry seemed to stem from a simple imperative drawn from her experience with that minicomputer: never lose sight of the human behind the machine, the Dicks, so to speak, behind the system.
The Impact of Adversity
On one occasion, she described her writer’s voice as one of “tormented humanism,” and that is precisely what it was. She was horrified by those in the industry determined to discard humanity. “The most virulent form of philosophical techno-libertarianism is a kind of pre-political autism, terrifying and psychologically fragile,” she commented in a particularly biting passage of Cyberselfish. “It is an inability to reconcile the demands of being an individual with those of participating in society… these techno-libertarians make a personality defect a philosophy.”
Her political ideology generally leaned left, although, like many political commentators of her time, she seemed to appreciate her own differences. She was unashamed to say she agreed with libertarians on their premises. Above all, she also wanted “to be left alone,” as she wrote in Cyberselfish. However, what Borsook brought to her journalism was an understanding of Silicon Valley as a social creation. Part of this can be attributed to her upbringing in Pasadena during the heyday of the space age. She recalled the “vaguely New Deal mentality” of the engineers and scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech, all beneficiaries of solid state investment in war machinery. In such a place, it was hard to confuse the public’s role in the development of new