Who Killed Paulina Borsook’s Career?
Who Killed Paulina Borsook’s Career?
谁扼杀了宝琳娜·博索克（Paulina Borsook）的职业生涯？
The offers had come in earlier that day. Paulina Borsook, 72, allowed herself a flash of excitement before returning to the question of what had ruined her life. “I don’t know what to make of it,” she said as we drove to lunch. I’d picked Borsook up outside her home near Oakland, California, a basement unit that she calls “Ice Station Zebra” on account of the cold and the color scheme and the isolation. At least that’s how I was encouraged to picture it. Borsook didn’t want me to come inside, lest I pull the old magazine hack’s scam of investing the decor with symbolic significance. She wrote enough stories of this kind in her heyday, back when she was landing bylines in WIRED and the like, to know how the game gets played. Later, she explained over email: “this place i ended up in reflects me not at all. i lost all i owned when i couldnt pay for storage and this place is the best i could find that worked with my disabilities. so i feel it REALLY doesnt reflect me/my taste/my preferences. shame and aversion.”
那天早些时候，邀约已经纷至沓来。72岁的宝琳娜·博索克（Paulina Borsook）在重回那个困扰她一生的问题之前，让自己短暂地兴奋了一下。“我不知道该怎么看待这一切，”我们在开车去吃午饭时，她说道。我在加州奥克兰附近接到了她，那是一间地下室公寓，她称之为“斑马冰站”（Ice Station Zebra），因为那里寒冷、配色单调且与世隔绝。至少，她是这样引导我构想的。博索克不想让我进去，以免我像老派杂志写手那样，把装修风格赋予某种象征意义。在她的全盛时期，当她还在《连线》（WIRED）等杂志发表文章时，她写过太多这类报道，深谙其中的套路。后来，她在邮件中解释道：“我现在住的地方一点也不像我。我因为付不起仓储费失去了所有财产，而这里是我能找到的、适合我残疾状况的最好住处。所以我真的觉得它完全不能代表我、我的品味或我的偏好。只有羞耻和厌恶。”
What had happened to Paulina Borsook? The question was haunting her, even on a day when she’d gotten such good news. It’s haunted her for a quarter-century now. In 2000, after years writing about Silicon Valley, she published a book, Cyberselfish, that discerned within the tech utopianism of the era a dead-eyed, woman-hating social malevolence—what the subtitle called the “Terribly Libertarian Culture of High-Tech.” It was smart at a moment when the whole of the tech industry had gone dumb, and it was funny where Silicon Valley was at its most self-serious. Cyberselfish got warm, if occasionally baffled, reviews. It sold something like 5,000 copies in hardcover and another 2,000 in paperback, a respectable mid-list number, no blockbuster but not a dog, either.
宝琳娜·博索克到底经历了什么？这个问题一直萦绕在她心头，即使在收到好消息的这一天也不例外。这个问题已经困扰了她四分之一个世纪。2000年，在撰写了多年关于硅谷的报道后，她出版了《网络自私》（Cyberselfish）一书。书中敏锐地洞察到当时科技乌托邦主义背后，隐藏着一种冷漠、厌女的社会恶意——正如副标题所言，那是“高科技领域极其自由意志主义的文化”。在整个科技行业变得盲目狂热的时刻，这本书显得非常睿智；在硅谷最自以为是的时刻，它又显得十分幽默。《网络自私》获得了热烈但偶尔也感到困惑的评价。它卖出了大约5000本精装版和2000本平装版，这是一个体面的中等销量，虽非畅销巨作，但也绝非失败之作。
And then … nothing. Editors stopped taking her calls. No fellowships materialized, no second book deal, no regular MSNBC spots for the dotcom Cassandra of the boom times. Borsook couldn’t get work. She began to wonder if she had been blacklisted. Her health, always wobbly, only worsened. She was living in other people’s houses. She went broke, a process she likened to a fire in which everything burns to the ground, and was getting by on a GoFundMe and support from friends. She’d taken to calling the book TDB. That damn book.
然后……一切戛然而止。编辑们不再接她的电话。没有奖学金，没有第二本书的合同，这位互联网繁荣时期的“卡珊德拉”（预言灾难却无人相信的人）也没能再在MSNBC上获得固定席位。博索克找不到工作。她开始怀疑自己是否被列入了黑名单。她本就脆弱的健康状况进一步恶化。她寄人篱下，陷入破产。她将这一过程比作一场将一切烧为灰烬的大火，只能靠GoFundMe众筹和朋友们的资助度日。她开始把那本书称为TDB——那本该死的书（That Damn Book）。
Paulina Borsook was one of WIRED’s earliest contributors—at a time when there were vanishingly few women on the masthead. Photograph: María del Río
宝琳娜·博索克是《连线》杂志最早的撰稿人之一——在那个杂志编辑部几乎看不到女性的时代。摄影：María del Río
When Borsook and I first met, in December of last year, she was fully in the midst of what she terms “this resuscitation thing.” It had happened so quickly and altogether without her knowledge: a social media post here, another one over there, celebrated tech critics like Gil Durán of The Nerd Reich exhuming her book and waving it around as proof that, even in the go-go days of the dotcom bubble, some people saw where things were headed. “Instead of centering men who missed the boat (and still don’t seem to get it), let’s lift up the work of Paulina Borsook, who saw it all very clearly and tried to warn us 25 years ago,” Durán wrote in a widely shared post on Bluesky—in response to a 2025 WIRED essay by Steven Levy. Borsook was christened a prophet, unappreciated in her time but uniquely fitted to ours. Hadn’t she written of “testosterone-poisoned guys with chips on their shoulders and too much time on their hands” years before the manosphere? Hadn’t she recuperated the Luddites as “early protesters of de-skilling” back when “Luddite” was an epithet? Hadn’t she raised her eyebrows at the theorists of Sand Hill Road playing footsie with eugenics? Cyberselfish became a minor phenomenon without Borsook so much as saying a word about it. The New York Times profiled her, calling her “The Writer Who Dared Criticize Silicon Valley.” It’s like what a friend once told her: The universe isn’t done with you yet.
去年12月我和博索克初次见面时，她正处于她所说的“复苏阶段”。这一切发生得如此之快，且完全出乎她的意料：社交媒体上这里一条帖子，那里一条帖子，像《书呆子帝国》（The Nerd Reich）的吉尔·杜兰（Gil Durán）这样著名的科技评论家，挖掘出她的书并将其作为证据，证明即使在互联网泡沫的狂热时期，也有人看清了事态的发展方向。“与其关注那些错失良机（且至今似乎仍未醒悟）的男性，不如推崇宝琳娜·博索克的作品，她25年前就看清了一切并试图警告我们，”杜兰在Bluesky上的一篇广为流传的帖子中写道，这是对史蒂文·列维（Steven Levy）2025年《连线》文章的回应。博索克被誉为先知，虽在当时未受赏识，却与我们的时代完美契合。难道她不是在“大男子主义圈”（manosphere）出现前多年，就写下了那些“被睾酮毒害、怀恨在心且无所事事的家伙”吗？难道她不是在“卢德分子”还是贬义词时，就将其重新定义为“去技能化的早期抗议者”吗？难道她不是对沙丘路（Sand Hill Road）那些与优生学眉来眼去的理论家们表示过质疑吗？《网络自私》成了一种小范围的现象，而博索克甚至没为此说过一句话。《纽约时报》为她撰写了人物专访，称她为“敢于批评硅谷的作家”。这就像一位朋友曾经对她说的：宇宙还没有放弃你。
Publishers were now keen to get the book back in circulation. That day in December, five of them had sent their bids to her agent. (Eventually, Borsook would settle on Tin House, which published a new edition of Cyberselfish in mid-September, with a foreword by Durán.) The offers were validation, after all those years in the wilderness. Things were finally looking—“It really kind of broke my heart in so many ways,” Borsook was saying now at the restaurant, as we waited to order. Her mind was back in 2001, wondering again what had happened to her career. Was it something she’d written? Could it have been an actual blacklist? Was it something as depressingly commonplace as sexism? “I really hate playing that card,” she said, “but I do have to wonder.” She just couldn’t figure it, even still, all these years later. In a way, the happy turn of events in the past few months had left her even more discombobulated. As she told me more than once, “I don’t know how to think about myself anymore.” She’d won me over in a matter of hours—a common enough phenomenon, I would learn, among people who find themselves in Borsook’s orbit. When I dropped her off that afternoon, I promised—only half in jest—to find the guy who killed her career.
出版商们现在急于让这本书重新流通。去年12月的那天，有五家出版商向她的经纪人提交了报价。（最终，博索克选择了Tin House，该公司于9月中旬出版了《网络自私》的新版本，并由杜兰作序。）这些邀约是对她多年流离失所的一种肯定。事情终于有了起色——“这在很多方面真的让我心碎，”博索克在餐厅等待点餐时说道。她的思绪回到了2001年，再次思考她的职业生涯到底发生了什么。是因为她写了什么吗？真的存在黑名单吗？还是像性别歧视那样令人沮丧的普遍现象？“我真的很讨厌打那张牌，”她说，“但我不得不怀疑。”即使过了这么多年，她依然无法想通。在某种程度上，过去几个月发生的这些好事反而让她更加困惑。正如她不止一次对我说的：“我不知道该如何看待自己了。”她在短短几个小时内就赢得了我的好感——后来我了解到，这在进入博索克生活圈的人中是很常见的现象。那天下午送她回家时，我半开玩笑地承诺，一定要找出那个扼杀她职业生涯的人。
Ok, but first I have to tell you about Dick Pick. Literally his name. Richard A. Pick. Went by Dick. It was the 1960s, and back then you could walk around with a name like that and no one would think to laugh, even if you were, as Dick Pick apparently was, something of a serial flirt.
好吧，但首先我得跟你讲讲迪克·皮克（Dick Pick）。这真的是他的名字。理查德·A·皮克（Richard A. Pick）。大家都叫他迪克（Dick）。那是20世纪60年代，当时你可以顶着这样一个名字到处走，没人会觉得好笑，即使你像迪克·皮克显然那样，是个惯于调情的人。
Dick Pick was a software developer for a military contractor during the Vietnam War. The story goes that the Army needed a way to track spare parts for Lockheed’s Cheyenne attack helicopter. Alongside his business partner, Don Nelson, he came up with a database operating system that they called—and here you have to imagine two of the shit-eatingest grins you’ve ever seen—the Generalized Information Retrieval Language System: GIRLS. (What, you thought tech bros were a new phenomenon?) Like a lot of tech innovation underwritten by defense spen
迪克·皮克是越战期间一家军事承包商的软件开发人员。故事是这样的：陆军需要一种方法来追踪洛克希德公司夏延（Cheyenne）攻击直升机的备件。他和商业伙伴唐·尼尔森（Don Nelson）一起开发了一个数据库操作系统，他们将其命名为——在这里你得想象出两张你见过最欠揍的坏笑脸——“通用信息检索语言系统”（Generalized Information Retrieval Language System），简称：GIRLS（女孩们）。（怎么，你以为“科技兄弟”是新现象吗？）就像许多由国防开支资助的科技创新一样……