“Some of those who believe tech lost its way are finding explanations in a book published a quarter century ago,” according to David Streitfeld’s full-page profile of Cyberselfish author Paulina Borsook in The New York Times (“A Book That Criticized Silicon Valley Gets Dusted Off,” November 30). To those who recall the turn-of-the-millennium Internet, Borsook’s is the exemplar of what Star Wars sage Obi-Wan Kenobi called “a name I’ve not heard in a long time.”

The 2000 tome warned readers for whom “it’s easy to sit at your computer and imagine yourself the Han Solo captain of your destiny” that “the era of the solo programmer making an impact is mostly long over” (the year that one created the formative video game Counter-Strike, as noted in a Times retrospective on  December 1).  Earthbound free spirits would have to settle for something sounding more like a real-life version of a Family Ties rerun, the spirit of the Sixties generation confined to “more comfort with a broader range of psychoactive substance use” alongside Eighties enthusiasms entrenched: “Deregulate this! Phooey on government!”

For all their reliance on corporate welfare, according to Borsook, “technolibertarians typically can’t be bothered to engage in conventional political maneuvers.”  The 2001 paperback edition envisioned such an ideology dominating the computer industry “long after high tech has retreated to being just one industrial sector among many.”

If the year 2025’s nationalist, protectionist industrial policy differs markedly from the road ahead suggested in Cyberselfish, perhaps it wasn’t all that perceptive about the twentieth century. Crediting heavy state funding with virtually all economic progress and social stability, and conflating the government with social cooperation, it’s hundreds of pages with all the depth of the bumper sticker proclaiming “IF YOU HATE SOCIALISM GET OFF MY PUBLIC ROAD.” (Although Borsook insists that she’d never “know how to tell other people how to live their lives,” let alone run them off the road of public life.) Murray Rothbard rates a mention in Cyberselfish as exemplifying libertarianism at its most uncompromising, but he looked to the history of the American economy not as a model for a “cruelly meritocratic world-to-come” but for evidence that its productive potential had been persistently prevented.

It wasn’t even the first published book to highlight the underbelly of the dot-com boom (Streitfeld mentions Clifford Stoll’s Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway, which as that its subtitle suggests, saw the Net more as a road to nowhere than to dystopia). Bill Lessard and Steve Baldwin’s NetSlaves: True Tales of Working the Web was dubbed “the ultimate corrective to Internet IPO mania” by Entertainment Weekly the same year that Douglas Rushkoff rued in Coercion: Why We Listen to What “They” Say that he could have ever “really believed the Internet could put an end to coercion”: 1999.

It may seem impossible to put an end to coercion on the Internet in 2026 and beyond, let alone use it to free the offline world.  Disentangling the World Wide Web from political logrolling is a good place to start.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY