‘Cyberselfish’ author takes aim at techno-libertarianism as her book returns from the dead

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It’s hard for books about technology to age well. They always risk becoming outdated as companies rise and fall, and as one hot new product is replaced by the next. But last year, “Nerd Reich” author Gil Durán declared that it was time to revive the career of Paulina Borsook, who he said “saw it all very clearly and tried to warn us 25 years ago.”

关于科技的书籍很难经得起时间的考验。随着公司的兴衰更替，以及新产品不断取代旧产品，这些书总是面临过时的风险。但去年，《Nerd Reich》的作者吉尔·杜兰（Gil Durán）宣称，是时候重振宝琳娜·博索克（Paulina Borsook）的职业生涯了，他说她“在25年前就看得非常清楚，并试图警告我们”。

Later that fall, The New York Times reported that Borsook’s “Cyberselfish” — first published in 2000 — was finding new fans who want to understand why the tech industry “lost its way.” Now, long after going out of print, “Cyberselfish” is returning in a new edition from Tin House.

那年秋天晚些时候，《纽约时报》报道称，博索克于2000年首次出版的《网络自私》（Cyberselfish）正在吸引新的读者，他们想了解科技行业为何“迷失了方向”。如今，在绝版多年后，《网络自私》将由Tin House出版社推出新版。

Borsook told me in a Zoom interview that the book is meant to be “almost a travelogue” of her attempts to understand what she calls the techno-libertarian influence on Silicon Valley culture. “That’s a 12-year-old view of the world,” Borsook said, describing it as “a kind of basket of beliefs” that’s “violently anti-regulation,” despite the fact that “no sector of society had benefited more and suffered less from the government than these guys.”

博索克在Zoom采访中告诉我，这本书旨在成为她试图理解所谓“科技自由意志主义”对硅谷文化影响的“旅行日志”。博索克说：“那是一种12岁孩子的世界观。”她将其描述为“一种信念集合”，虽然“没有任何社会部门比这些人从政府那里受益更多、受损更少”，但这种信念却“极其反监管”。

In her telling, “even after the dot-com crash, that attitude was just there, percolating around, contaminating the aquifers. It was uncorrected, and it just spread out more and more.” Borsook has yet to publish a second book, and she said that after “Cyberselfish” was first released, “no one was interested in anything I might have to say about anything, tech or not tech, forever after.”

在她的叙述中，“即使在互联网泡沫破裂后，那种态度依然存在，四处渗透，污染着地下水。它没有得到纠正，反而扩散得越来越广。”博索克尚未出版第二本书，她说在《网络自私》首次发行后，“此后永远没有人对我可能要说的任何事情感兴趣，无论是科技还是非科技话题。”

But last year, she began to notice that prices for used copies were beginning to creep up, and she was starting to see “very out-of-the-blue, I-did-not-know-these-people posts on social media about how important this book was,” as well as inquiries from “European academics,” eventually leading to more press coverage and the new Tin House edition, with a new introduction by Durán.

但去年，她开始注意到二手书的价格开始上涨，并开始在社交媒体上看到“非常突如其来的、我不认识的人发布的关于这本书有多重要的帖子”，以及来自“欧洲学者”的咨询，最终促成了更多的媒体报道和Tin House的新版本，其中包含了杜兰撰写的新序言。

Keep reading for our full conversation, edited for length and clarity, in which Borsook discusses AI, how Silicon Valley has transformed in the past 25 years, and what advice she has for young people seeking a career in tech.

请继续阅读我们经过删减和整理的完整对话，博索克在对话中讨论了人工智能、硅谷在过去25年里的转型，以及她对寻求科技职业发展的年轻人有何建议。

Do you want to talk a little bit about how your interest in techno-libertarianism started, and how you decided that there was a book in this? Everything with me is always inadvertent. I started knocking around tech circles, however we define it, in the early-middle ‘80s, in the Bay Area. And then I would say, starting around maybe the early ‘90s, I would hear these — to me — very weird, offhand remarks that some people would make that I couldn’t make any sense out of.

你想谈谈你对科技自由意志主义的兴趣是如何开始的，以及你是如何决定将其写成一本书的吗？我的一切总是无意中发生的。我在80年代初到中期开始在湾区的科技圈里打转，无论我们如何定义它。然后我想说，大约从90年代初开始，我会听到一些人随口说出一些在我看来非常奇怪、我无法理解的话。

It’s not my nature to argue with people. It’s my nature to listen, and so I didn’t have the term for it except libertarian. But it seemed very screwy because initially, I grew up in Pasadena, which was [the home of the] Caltech-JPL space program, and so the parents of the kids I knew were another STEM culture. When I first got into Silicon Valley, I thought, “Oh, this is just another STEM culture like I’m familiar with.”

我天生不喜欢与人争论。我天生喜欢倾听，所以我除了“自由意志主义”之外，没有别的词来形容它。但这看起来非常古怪，因为我是在帕萨迪纳长大的，那里是加州理工学院-喷气推进实验室（Caltech-JPL）太空项目的所在地，所以我认识的孩子的父母属于另一种STEM文化。当我第一次进入硅谷时，我想：“哦，这只是我熟悉的另一种STEM文化。”

And those guys [at Caltech and JPL] had a very clear sense of what the government can do for you, were not into enlightened self-interest. It was a different personality type, and they certainly didn’t self-anoint with how glorious and grand and magisterial they were, even though they were doing great things. I was just listening, I guess, and being confused. Even then, I knew no sector of society had benefited more and suffered less from the government than these guys. So why are they acting like this?

那些（在加州理工和喷气推进实验室的）人非常清楚政府能为你做什么，他们并不热衷于开明的利己主义。那是另一种人格类型，他们当然不会自诩为多么辉煌、伟大和威严，尽管他们确实在做伟大的事情。我想我只是在倾听，并感到困惑。即使在当时，我也知道没有哪个社会部门比这些人从政府那里受益更多、受损更少。那么他们为什么要表现成这样呢？

So, backstory: My agent picked me up right after my MFA in Columbia, and he said to me, “You know, it’s really hard to get fiction published. Do you have a nonfiction book in you?” And I said, “Well, there’s this weird subculture that I’ve been observing that I don’t understand, and any time I don’t understand something, I want to explore it.”

背景故事是这样的：我的经纪人在我哥伦比亚大学获得艺术硕士学位后签下了我，他对我说：“你知道，出版小说真的很难。你有什么非虚构类书籍的构思吗？”我说：“嗯，我一直在观察一个我不理解的奇怪亚文化，每当我不理解某件事时，我就想去探索它。”

That got me down the rabbit hole of looking at this stuff and writing about it, and I consider it really almost a travelogue, in the sense of “Black Lamb and Gray Falcon” or that kind of stuff, almost more than, “This is a polemic.” It’s more like: snapshot, snapshot, snapshot. I just fell into it, and also I’m sufficiently narcissistic that I felt I was uniquely qualified to write about this, and no one else was paying any attention, and that was very important to me.

这让我陷入了研究和撰写这些内容的兔子洞，我真的认为它几乎是一本旅行日志，就像《黑羊与灰鹰》（Black Lamb and Gray Falcon）那类作品，而不完全是“这是一篇论战文章”。它更像是：快照，快照，快照。我只是陷入了其中，而且我足够自恋，以至于我觉得自己有独特的资格来写这个，而其他人都没有关注，这对我很重要。

I haven’t done a backread of all the other books written about the tech industry before “Cyberselfish.” My sense is that you do recognize, say, reading Steven Levy’s work that there is this alternative philosophy, libertarian streak running through Silicon Valley. But no one really pulled it out and put it under the microscope in that way. That’s really true. And then most of the writing — certainly in the ’90s, but maybe later — was very celebratory. It wasn’t, “Wait a minute, what’s going on here?”

在《网络自私》之前，我没有重读过所有关于科技行业的其他书籍。我的感觉是，当你阅读史蒂文·列维（Steven Levy）的作品时，你会意识到硅谷确实存在这种另类的哲学和自由意志主义倾向。但没有人真正把它拿出来，以那种方式放在显微镜下观察。这确实是真的。而且当时大多数的写作——当然是在90年代，也许后来也是——都是非常赞美的。而不是，“等一下，这里发生了什么？”

I heard [New York Times reporter] John Markoff give a talk about six months ago, and he said something I really liked. He said, “Silicon Valley is a multicultural place.” By which he didn’t mean your country of origin. What he meant is there’s all these different kinds of cultures in there, and he was always more focused on these countercultural [elements,] that kind of thing. I’m never saying that wasn’t there. I’m just saying there was this other thing that I was more interested in. So they’re running in parallel. I don’t even think they’re in conflict.

大约六个月前，我听了（《纽约时报》记者）约翰·马尔科夫（John Markoff）的一次演讲，他说了一些我非常喜欢的话。他说：“硅谷是一个多元文化的地方。”他指的不是你的原籍国。他的意思是那里有各种各样的文化，他一直更关注这些反主流文化的元素。我从来没有说那不存在。我只是说还有另一件事我更感兴趣。所以它们是平行运行的。我甚至认为它们并不冲突。

It sounds like you don’t see the techno-libertarian side of it emerging from the counterculture, but rather [as] distinct cultures within Silicon Valley. One of the distinctions I made in — I call it TDB, that damn book — is that distinction I made between Ravers and Gilders, and the Gilders being the social conservatives. I named them after George Gilder, who was this repellent thought leader of the early ’90s, very conservative, very reactionary, very backward-looking. And then the Ravers, in homage to John Perry Barlow, drugs and sex and rock and roll, “we’re going to Burning Man,” much more culturally liberal.

听起来你并不认为科技自由意志主义的一面是从反主流文化中产生的，而是将其视为硅谷内部截然不同的文化。我在——我称之为TDB，那本该死的书——中所做的区分之一，就是我在“狂欢者”（Ravers）和“吉尔德派”（Gilders）之间所做的区分，吉尔德派是社会保守派。我以乔治·吉尔德（George Gilder）的名字命名他们，他是90年代初令人反感的思想领袖，非常保守，非常反动，非常守旧。而“狂欢者”则是为了向约翰·佩里·巴洛（John Perry Barlow）致敬，涉及毒品、性和摇滚乐，“我们要去火人节”，在文化上要自由得多。