#neoluddites — Public Fediverse posts

"Nitish Pahwa: What do you think is driving the surge of new interest in Cyberselfish?

Paulina Borsook: I always say, “I don’t know.” These kinds of reputational revivals, you hear them happening with novels or movies, but you don’t often hear it with nonfiction. I wondered if that’s because my book is not written journalistically. The facts are correct, but it was written in a literary and polemical way.

There was this guy, David Golumbia, who’s dead now, but he wrote Cyberlibertarianism a couple years ago. People told me he mentioned That Damned Book [Borsook’s nickname for Cyberselfish] in it, and that sparked some interest in academic circles. Then I found out that TDB was an underground thing people were talking about for years, and prices on used book platforms went way up from what they used to be. And I’d run into people who would tell me, “I read that in 2009.” How do I square that with how little attention was paid the first time?

TDB was well and widely reviewed at the time, but I think it didn’t register because the culture hadn’t caught up to it. It was this goofy, oddball thing. There really wasn’t a technology culture section in the bookstore. I was always going to bookstores and finding the book placed in the business section, next to some sort of Programming for Dummies volume."

https://slate.com/technology/2026/09/cyberselfish-come-back-paulina-borsook-silicon-valley.html

#TechnoLibertarianism #Neoluddites #Neoluddism #SiliconValley #CalifornianIdeology #BigTech