Cyberselfish Author Slams Techno-Libertarianism as Cult Classic Book Returns
TL;DR
- Paulina Borsook, author of the year-2000 cult classic Cyberselfish, says Silicon Valley's current techno-libertarian turn proves her warning about tech bro culture was prescient.
- In new interviews, Borsook dismisses today's Musk-Thiel-Andreessen ideology as a 12-year-old's view of the world — selfish, anti-government, and blind to who cleans the toilets.
- As AI and Big Tech consolidate power, she argues her book's critique of compassionate conservatism and cyberlibertarianism is more urgent than ever.
THE BOOK SILICON VALLEY TRIED TO FORGET
Paulina Borsook never wanted to be a prophet.
When the former Wired and Mother Jones writer published Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High-Tech in 2000, she was laughed out of the room in Palo Alto. Her argument — that the internet industry was being captured by a heartless, Ayn Rand-inflected libertarianism that hated government, hated regulation, and hated the poor — felt like heresy at the peak of dot-com optimism.
Twenty-six years later, Cyberselfish is finding new life.
The book is being rediscovered by a new generation of tech critics, researchers, and disillusioned founders as Silicon Valley shifts openly toward techno-libertarianism. From Elon Musk's DOGE crusade to Marc Andreessen's Techno-Optimist Manifesto to Curtis Yarvin's influence on the new right, the ideas Borsook skewered in the late 90s are now boardroom doctrine.
In recent interviews revisiting the book, Borsook says she feels both vindicated and horrified.
A 12-YEAR-OLD VIEW OF THE WORLD
Borsook's sharpest line from her comeback tour has already gone viral in tech circles: today's techno-libertarian ideology is a 12-year-old's view of the world.
What she means, she explains, is an adolescent fantasy of total independence — no taxes, no rules, no obligations to anyone else — that only works if you ignore how the real world actually functions.
In Cyberselfish, she famously wrote about high-tech libertarians who wanted seasteading colonies, private currencies, and the end of public schools, while conveniently forgetting who builds the roads, cleans the toilets, cares for the sick, and educates the workforce that makes their stock options possible.
That critique hits even harder in 2026, she argues, as billionaires advocate for network states, charter cities, and AI-run governance while slashing the federal agencies that funded the internet and AI research in the first place.
INSIDE TECH BRO CULTURE BEFORE IT HAD A NAME
Long before the term tech bro existed, Borsook documented it.
As one of the few women writing inside early Wired culture, she reported from inside libertarian conferences, cypherpunk meetups, and Reason magazine parties where overwhelmingly male, overwhelmingly white engineers argued that poverty was a choice, government was theft, and empathy was irrational.
She called it compassionate conservatism's evil twin — what she dubbed cyberselfishness: using the rhetoric of freedom and innovation to justify staggering selfishness.
Borsook says the gender dynamics she flagged then explain a lot now. The current wave of pronatalism, anti-DEI crusades, and effective accelerationism, she argues, comes from the same place: a belief that brilliant founders should be unbound by democratic or social constraints.
WHY AI AND BIG TECH MAKE HER WARNING MORE URGENT
The stakes are no longer theoretical, Borsook warns.
When she wrote Cyberselfish, Big Tech meant Microsoft and early Yahoo. Today, a handful of AI and platform giants control search, social communication, cloud infrastructure, and increasingly the labor market itself.
She argues techno-libertarianism has evolved from a quirky subculture into a deliberate power grab: demand deregulation for AI, crypto, and autonomous systems, attack journalists and academics who study harms, and frame any oversight as killing innovation or being anti-progress.
The irony, she notes, is total dependence on the state they claim to despise — Big Tech relies on government contracts from the Pentagon, massive public subsidies for data centers and chips, publicly funded research breakthroughs, and H-1B immigration systems, all while lobbying to dismantle regulation.
WHAT SILICON VALLEY STILL GETS WRONG
Borsook is not nostalgic for early internet idealism, and she does not call for simply breaking up every company. Her message to today's critics is more nuanced.
She says Silicon Valley still confuses libertarianism with freedom, and still believes technology exempts it from history, politics, and responsibility. Real freedom, she argues, requires functioning public institutions, a safety net, and shared truth — exactly what cyberselfish ideology seeks to privatize or destroy.
Asked what readers should take from Cyberselfish in the AI era, Borsook is blunt: pay attention to who benefits and who is told to disappear. If your vision of the future has no teachers, nurses, moderators, regulators, or critics — just founders, investors, and machines — it's not liberation. It's just selfishness with better branding.
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