Of greed, technolibertarianism and geek omnipotence Paulina Borsook talks with Thomas Scoville about her new book, "Cyberselfish."
- - - - - - - - - - - - By Thomas Scoville
May 4, 2000 | By now we're heard it so many times that even the most rabid technology boosters are weary of it: The geek wizards of the New Economy, aided by microelectronics, deregulation and free markets, have boot-strapped productivity through the roof and irrevocably improved life on earth. All hail the captains of digital industry, for they have done what government could never do: With nothing but pluck, vision and venture capital, they have conjured a better world out of thin air -- on time, and under budget. If only government could be run like a cyber-business, we should all dreamily imagine.
As Paulina Borsook might reply, "yeah -- right." But then, she's making a fine career out of challenging, rebutting, baiting and vexing the conspicuously libertarian technology community. Last year's essay, "How the Internet Ruined San Francisco," touched off a vintage Borsookian conflagration, unleashing a hell-storm of flaming responses across the Web from angry and aggrieved Northern California computer elites.
That was just the warm-up, it now appears. Borsook, who has been closely observing technology's elites for two decades, has broadened her investigation with a volume of even more scathing ontological critiques. In her new book "Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech," Borsook sounds a round challenge to the techie conceit of total autonomy. She asserts -- among other highly flammable propositions -- that decades of government funding for basic research, aerospace electronics, housing and higher education are conspicuously absent from the standard story of privatized technology heroics. She sees the prevailing libertarian ethos of Silicon Valley and the technology sector as merely a strain of geeky, adolescent narcissism masquerading -- and dignifying itself -- as politics.
It seems like you're contending that technolibertarianism is a rhetorical projection of control-oriented, non-communitarian, arrested-adolescent urges of the preponderantly male geek technocracy. You document a collective, industry-wide failure to grow up and participate in society, as well as a culture that celebrates a massive underdevelopment of its humanity. Did I get that right?
Well, yes, I suppose. Though I should say this book was written over several years, and the culture has changed a bit over that time. One of the very recent changes has been that the übergeek libertarian culture I wrote about has been mated with MBA culture, which brings its own prejudices and religious beliefs to the party.
That's an interesting melding: the masters-of-the-universe MBA culture colliding with awkward geek, "I don't have the world's best social skills" culture. But they love each other's rhetoric and ideology and there's a strange sort of symbiosis going on. Geeks and MBAs intrigue each other for complementary reasons: MBAs like being associated with the geek shibboleths of inventiveness and revolution; Geeks are attracted to the MBAs' promise of making things real through the glamour of money. And both of them like money because it's something that can be counted.
So now, when we talk about high-tech culture, a lot of what we're talking about is really business-speculation culture, and a transplanted Midtown Manhattan advertising culture, or Wall Street financial culture. So, though we may use the words "high tech" these days to refer to this group, they're not all the same kind of person -- but they are finding lots of common ground.
Absolutely. I noticed that at some point in the mid-'90s, we got major culture-creep, when programmers and systems administrators all became covert stock traders on the Web.
Yes. It's horrifying. [laughs] Because -- and I'm not anti-technology or anti-geek -- what is really best about these people is what I call their "curious child" quality -- scientists have it -- that kind of noodling around with code, and zoning out for 36 hours at a time working on something. That's where the really good creative work can happen. But if you have one corner of your monitor that's constantly watching the stock market, or you're thinking about what sort of play you can come up with to impress the institutional investors, well, that's not how really serious technology work gets done. That, to me, is kind of sad and scary, and -- not to sound patronizing -- but kind of a loss of their innocence in a way that I don't think is good.
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http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/05/04/borsook/index1.html