Cyberselfish

by Paulina Borsook

Book Overview

"Paulina Borsook has been stirring up a ruckus in Silicon Valley since her days as a regular contributor to Wired magazine." This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1891620789
• ISBN13: 9781891620782
• Release Date: May 2000
• Publisher: PublicAffairs
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 2.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.7" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Funny and true to heart.

Let me start off by saying I worked in the Valley. And I left the Valley just before the bust. I remember many a co-workers' rants against the evils of government, etc., so it got to be a cliche. In some instances their rants rang true. But one cannot deny that if it was not for government spending, many of the things we take for granted, including the net may not exist.After the bust in the valley, I recall several e-mails from so called libertarians complaining that the government was not doing enough to turn the economy around. So, yes, I agree with Ms Borsook that there is a large degree of selfishness in the Valley and I enjoyed and was amused by her book. I was also amused my the negative feed back. How do you say - it hurts to read the truth.

Silicon Valley? thanks, I'll pass on that one

I really liked this one. An extended rant against the narrow-minded plague of technology focussed libertarians that have overrun Silicon Valley's corridors of power. Every once in a while I am reminded of why I live in Michigan, and not having to cope quite so much with this is one reason why. (There are a few in every academic environment, though, and I painfully recall the days of trying to have any kind of reasonable discussion with Ayn Rand followers who somehow all seemed to have an amazing ability to type at rapid and ferocious speeds).

Provocative Broad-Side at the Dark Side of Cyberculture

In this absorbing and thoughtful book, the author takes on the new "Bobos in the promised land" of high technology, and finds their overall grasp on reality and worldview selfish, superficial, and self-absorbed. As is becoming more and more common for those living super-affluent lifestyles in our society, well-educated and technologically educated people are now enjoy lifestyles so pampered and isolated from the basic realities of life on Planet Earth that they actually believe their own unusual and privileged experiences to be the experience of everyone else walking the globe. This extremely wrong-headed notion leads to a string of dangerously myopic ideas of what the world is like and how to view others not so fortunate...Unfortunately, they have confused craven marketing and propagandizing with truth, and this is always a dangerous enterprise to engage in....This is an interesting, provocative, and worthwhile book. I highly recommend it.

Great Polemic Writing!

Some say "Rant" I say Polemic. Nothing wrong with a skillfully-written critique; and that is what Cyberselfish dishes out in rich detail. The cyber-Darwinians may scream like the stuck pigs they can be when living out their Robert A. Heinlein space-cowboy individualist libertarian fantasies, but this book is worth reading. Life is not a subroutine. It takes more than code to build a real community.And most of us who were using CP/M on Z80 chips in the pre-MS-DOS/Microsoft days recognized it for the kludged together piece of junk it was until IBM flooded the market and diverted the writing of new code to fixing the lousy MS-DOS and providing various utilities and shells. So Borsook got that claim right.-Chip Berlet

Inescapably relevant

I found out about this book when I was reading the posts on a discussion forum, where one person commented on the vociferousness of the libertarians, and someone else said in effect, "Yeah, Paulina Borsook has a book about that." So I decided to buy it.I still hadn't finished the book the other night when I went to a panel discussion put on by the High Tech Division of the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington, at which one of the cyber-wealthy speakers remarked, "Yeah, I've gotton to talk to quite a few Congressmen the past few months. (pause) They're dumb as rocks!"I guess my point is that the topics of politics, philanthropy, the Internet, and libertarianism are inescapably relevant to some people. I'm guessing that anyone reading this review fits that description and will like the book.One quote to illustrate both style and substance:"(Cyber-)libertarianism can also be reframed as the mind-set of adolescents, with their deep wish for total rampaging autonomy and desire for simple, call-to-arms passionate politics, where Good and Bad are clearly delineated--taking for granted that someone else does the laundry and stocks the refrigerator."I like the way Borsook scrutinizes some propositions (such as those of bionomics) which no longer get examined because they get spouted so often. At points, she tosses off some great writing, such as her take on FastCompany and other "business porn." But the book has an annoying number of typos--it's like the editing is from Microsoft and it's not even a late beta.Borsook does not offer a sweeping alternative to libertarianism. In fact, I suspect that if you locked her in a room with a bunch of conventional politicians, it wouldn't be two hours before she'd be on her cell phone, whispering, "Hello, Cato Institute? I need help. Can you get me outta here?" I have a sweeping alternative, which I call "Compassionate Libertarianism." Look for that essay on my web site. But, first, give me a few days to write it.