Cyberselfish : A Critical Romp through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech

This enormously controversial take on high tech culture "combines common sense with an old-fashioned humanism to make sense of the current high-tech gestalt. " -Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times. Paulina Borsook has been stirring up a ruckus in Silicon Valley since her days as a regular contributor to Wired magazine.

She ruffled feathers again with Cyberselfish, a spirited, funny, gimlet-eyed look at the worldview of the digerati-one she terms "violently lacking in compassion, ravingly anti-government, and tremendously opposed to regulation. " PublicAffairs' new trade paperback edition is updated throughout, and includes a new afterword by the author addressing the cat calls, jeers, and cries of "foul" from the world of high tech that greeted the hardcover.

In Cyberselfish Borsook journeys through and rants about high tech culture, profiling the worlds of ravers, gilders, cypherpunks, anarchocapitalists, and other Silicon Valley life forms; and exploring the theory and practice of what she dubs "technolibertarianism" in all its manifestations. Whether she is attending Bionomics conferences or hanging out with Wired staffers, reading personal ads or evaluating high-tech's sorry philanthropic record, Borsook is full of original observations, mordant wit, and furious passion that readers wake up to the social and political consequences of having computer geeks run the world.

Cyberselfish raises the hackles of high techies and clarifies what makes the rest of us so nervous about the brave new cyberworld.