<nettime> Review of "Cyberselfish" from First Monday

["cisler" <cisler@pobox.com>]

http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue5_8/reviews/index.html

Paulina Borsook
Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High
Tech.

New York: Public Affairs Books, 2000.
cloth, 256 p., ISBN 1-891-62078-9, US$24.00.

Public Affairs Books: http://www.publicaffairsbooks.com/

Earlier this year Dutch media activists organized a conference entitled
"Tulipomania" in Amsterdam. It was meant to be a critique of the so-called
"new economy" which CEOs, such as John Chambers of Cisco, say is a matter
of survival for any business (or perhaps any country) that wants to be
around in 2010. There were economists, venture capitalists, anarchists,
activists, artists, cultural critics, and community organizers taking part
in this event. During the planning I suggested to the secret cabal of
organizers that Paulina Borsook would be a good addition to the program.
Borsook had written a number of pieces for Wired, knew the industry, and
had strong views on the kind of society that was emerging in this Mecca of
high tech entrepreneurship where she and I live - if you count Santa Cruz
as an extension of Silicon Valley. She has written extensively on a
variety of technical topics in her long career that started out with a
degree in psycholinguistics from University of California, Berkeley, and
like "most liberal arts flakes" (including me) wound up working with
computers. 

Borsook was unable to attend the "Tulipomania" conference because she was
on a book tour for Cyberselfish, so I tried to fill in and present a
personal view of the problems in Silicon Valley - which regions hoping to
duplicate the growth and wealth might not realize. In short, income
disparity, dwindling middle class, expensive housing, and growing traffic
problems were just a few of the issues I covered. When I returned home I
found a copy of the book waiting for me. Her thesis is that a philosophy
and belief system is causing some of the problems. 

I took her book with me on a trip around the world that included Ecuador,
Mexico, Japan, Hong Kong, South Africa, and Boston as places far from
Silicon Valley but certainly touched by the technology, the ideas, and
investments, and the aura of this part of the United States. These places
have enormous problems of their own, some of which may be solved with the
help of information technology, but many of the problems are about
government and governance: how groups of people make decisions and act to
benefit (theoretically) a whole country. Unless they have migrated back
home, you don't find many technolibertarians in other high-tech areas of
the world. 

Borsook says that Silicon Valley's high-tech community is a "hotbed of
libertarian political activism" which is characterized by a distrust of
government, a love of laissez-faire free-market economics, social
Darwinism, a lack of philanthropy (in spite of all the new wealth), and
sort of rebel on the frontier mentality that cannot empathize with the
needs of others (or even their point of view). 

Borsook writes well, with a revealing amount of detail about the cultural
and intellectual descriptors that define her targets. It is very much a
book about the San Francisco Bay Area and the influential and mostly male
sector of high tech society. So many of the references are particular to
heavy Internet users that it seems her editor sent the text back with
suggestions for footnotes (or better yet, a glossary) so that readers
might not get lost. This includes items such as "The Borg", "open source",
"self-organization", "beta" testing, and "EFF." The editors seemed to have
missed quite a few typos. I found three in the first 25 pages. They also
might have reined in Borsook's frequent use of long hyphenated phrases
such as the following:  "But most programmers I know are of the
just-give-me-a-few-more-hours/days/ line-of-code-and-I'll-get-it-right/
we'll-fix-that-in-the-next-release/ no-problem-I-can-make-it-perfect
clan;" 

The chapters cover the various technolibertarian sects and movements. She
spends more than 40 pages on the Bionomics conferences she attended from
1993 to 1996.  This belief system was one responsible for the rapid
diffusion of technolibertarian beliefs throughout nerd-dom. Bionomics
compares ideal capitalism to a rain forest which flourishes most when left
alone. Economic activity is evolutionary, rather than like a machine which
can be tuned and tinkered with for maximum performance. It also tends to
treat those who do not succeed in a narrow realm of technological
competence and financial reward as defective. As befits an area where
technology projects begin with a t-shirt design, Borsook mentions one that
says, "In this era of digital Darwinism, some of us are ones. You're a
zero." She goes after a number of personalities and celebrities including
Kevin Kelly, John Perry Barlow, and especially George Gilder, the Reagan
policy guy who has made fast networks (fiber to the Big Guy in the Sky)
into a part of the Christian cosmology (TeraBeam me to the heaven, o
Lord). Her characterizations are wickedly pointed, and perhaps this is
because of her love-hate relationship with Wired, for which all those men
wrote and still write. 

I went to the coming out party for Wired, oh so many Internet years ago. I
was surprised that everyone (except Kevin Kelly) wore black, and they
weren't Amish, Hasidic, or undertakers. I even wrote a couple of short
pieces but then became disenchanted with their style, content, and
point-of-view. Only after reading Borsook did I fully understand why I
felt so uncomfortable thumbing through an issue after 1995. Borsook
describes how the libertarian politics of Wired came from the guidance of
its founders, especially Louis Rosetto. I was a fan of Rosetto's failed
Electric Word that predated Wired, but I found the lack of any critical
stance about technology to be one of the shortcomings of Wired. Borsook
analyzes many of the issues in the first two years to explain the tunneled
vision Wired had of what it was successfully selling to the public. 

Borsook has a wonderful phrase for Wired and its imitators which now,
under new management, it is imitating: business porn. I can never look at
another copy of ASAP, Fast Company, or Business 2.0 without thinking of
this term - whether it's a fair charaterization or not. Her most personal
wounds seem to be over the old boys clubishness of Wired and its ignorance
of the role of women in the high tech revolution or just the data
processing blast furnaces of IT departments around the nation. She says of
the women at Wired, "We were feeling something like the woman who enters
into a passionate relationship with a charismatic man, only to discover
with horror that our concerns were not his concerns and that who we were
and what we had to say weren't valued." 

Another chapter targets the cypherpunks, cryptography, and digital cash.
As an attendee of the early Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conferences
where crypto devotees (both three-letter-agency guys and their opponents
in cyberspace)  gathered, I think she paints an accurate picture, but like
the Bionomics story, this seems a bit old. It is not that we should not
look back and search for the vectors and hot spots which caused a disease
to spread, but this would have seemed fresher had it appeared in mid-1998
instead of two years later. Perhaps the queue for the printer at Public
Affairs Press slowed down the publication.  Or perhaps it is because I
myself tired of CFP after a few of the conferences and that I had already
read some of Borsook's rants online in places such as David Hudson's now
discontinued Rewired (www.rewired.com). 

I did enjoy the chapter on cybergenerous, part of which had been published
in the new San Jose Mercury News style supplement, S.V., earlier this
year.  "Cybergenerous" refers to the philanthropic efforts of high tech
companies and individuals. As a former director of one such program, Apple
Library of Tomorrow, at Apple Computer from 1988 to 1997, I was interested
in her criticisms of the kinds of donations that are most common in
Silicon Valley:  software that cost little to reproduce but affording the
donating company (Microsoft, Apple, Adobe) massive tax writeoffs for full
value of the product, and of course hardware. 

Here's one example of the company driven aid programs from my own
experience:  Sun Microsystems wanted to donate a Sun server to my son's
elementary school in San Jose in 1995, but the school district did not
even have a full time LAN manager, let alone a Unix expert. The Sun donors
also wanted the school to scrap its dedicated 56 kb line and upgrade to a
T1 (1.56 Mb/sec) if they were going to plunk a big powerful box in the
school office. This would have been an enormous expense at that time.
Luckily, the school did not get the box and all the attendant problems.
Borsook correctly details how most tech donors think their tools will
solve most of the problems that society encounters, but that more
intractable social problems are ignored. Just look at the reaction of the
G8 leaders who met in Japan recently. They endorsed a program from the
World Economic Forum which proposed "closing the digital divide" instead
of a timely reduction in debt. 

Borsook makes a few comments about the colossus to the North, Bill Gates.
She describes the problems of United Way, an umbrella charity here in
Santa Clara County which, because of mismanagement was broke a while ago.
A local new wealth guy, Steve Kirsh of Infoseek, put up some money to bail
out the charity and then Bill Gates made a huge donation. The idea that
Gates would make the local rich look miserly prompted others to cough up
the rest. She does not mention the massive campaign of giving that the
Gates Foundation has undertaken in programs like library connectivity but
also research into the unprofitable diseases that affect the world's poor.
Whatever you may think of Gates or his company, his foundation is
undertaking some significant projects unrelated to computers and networks
as well as many that are. 

She does admit that some companies are donating stock options to charities
and organizations like the Community Foundation of Silicon Valley, but
mostly she describes the low rate of giving by the tech classes of the
area, and she chronicles the failure of a great idea that looked
promising, the Lightworks Technology Foundation, which wanted to "provide
an efficient tax-deductible means for corporations and individuals to set
up endowments and provide technology-related grants." She criticizes many
of the philanthropic efforts as only giving in-kind goods or funding for
technology projects, but the Noyce Foundation, which she says is not doing
much yet, does fund basic education programs in area schools, and these
have no technology component - at least in the school where my wife
teaches. She also does not seem to realize that giving away money may be
harder to do well for some of these people than it was to earn it. They
really do care about the performance of their donations, and while some
want a good ROI in clear cut measurements, others just don't want to screw
up and look stupid. She is right that a lot of non-profits are busy
fulfilling some need that used to be met by local, state, or federal
government. However, unless the director is a high profile NGO superstar
like Daniel Ben-Horin of CompuMentor (which was nicknamed Rent-a-Nerd when
it started on The WELL years ago), those causes won't attract much
funding, especially from the new rich in the Valley. 

Borsook has been keeping a very busy schedule. Her Web site provides a
list of the dozens of interviews and lectures she has been giving, as well
as excerpts of her book, some of the hilarious comments by readers ("Go to
China, you Socialist!"), and pointers to the favorable and unfavorable
reviews. I certainly recommend the book, but if you consider yourself a
libertarian you will be annoyed at her scrutiny and her conclusions.
Others will find much to ponder:  how high tech values influence greater
society, the role of government in an era of low voter turnout and
distrust, and how the flowering of other Silicon Valleys may change the
character of your own region or country.. - Steve Cisler. 

URLs of interest
www.balie.nl/tulipomania/ : "Tulipomania" conference, a critique of the new
economy.

www.sjsu.edu/depts/anthropology/svcp/ : The Silicon Valley Cultures Project at
San Jose State University.

www.rewired.com/97/1203.html : David Hudson's encounter with the author.

www.motherjones.com/mother_jones/JA96/borsook.html : "Cyberselfish", the 1996
article from Mother Jones Magazine.

www.cyberselfish.com/ : The book promotion site.

www.transaction.net/people/paulina.html : Borsook's home page.



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