The Woman Who Saw Silicon Valley's Soul—and Was Erased for It
Who Killed Paulina Borsook's Career?
A quarter-century ago, Paulina Borsook published Cyberselfish, a prophetic critique of Silicon Valley's libertarian ethos. Then she vanished from public life. WIRED's Tommy Craggs tracks down the 72-year-old writer to ask what happened—and finds a cautionary tale about what the tech world does to those who tell the truth about it.
During the dotcom boom, women in tech organizations were seen as ghostly adjuncts. I remember being on a panel at MacWorld in 2006 or 2007 and, just before we began, the man next to me on stage turned to another one of the several men on the panel and said loudly 'What's SHE doing here?' He had nothing against me personally. He just couldn't imagine that a woman would know anything that would be of interest to an audience.
- adventured
- oumua_don17
Apparently, there's also an illustrated childrens' book by another author Sandra Peterson based on cyberselfish by Paulina [1]
[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0HF8QPPLS
edit: update to mention the new book's author.
- throwaway81523
This is a pretty interesting article. Firefox shows the first paragraph for a second and then blanks it, but lynx -dump manages to get the text. There's an audio too but I ignored that.
- viceconsole
Firefox reader mode displays the full article perfectly.
- raffraffraff
God I hate this writing style. And the title. The reality is probably more bland.
In the 80s and 90s, tech was magic. Lots of computer magazines, cyberpunk novels. Tech fact and fiction sold in huge quantities. Mainstream tech publications depended on tech ad dollars, so editors preferred tech sycophants. There were doom-scarers but it was mostly a utopian thing. It's what got me into tech as a kid.
After the dot-com bubble burst, this imploded. Investment in tech dropped across the board, including advertising tech publications. I'd love to get a count of cyber/tech fiction novels published through the 80s,90s and early dot-com burst.