Gil DuránSep 24
1/ A longtime Wired editor just wrote a mush-brained essay about how he totally missed the political rot of Silicon Valley (& still doesn't get it). But in the late 1990s, a Wired journalist warned of a toxic ideology bubbling up from tech. Paulina Borsook has largely been erased. Let's change that
Show threadGil DuránSep 24
2/ In 2001, Borsook said tech "libertarianism" reflected an adolescent mindset, with a craving for unchecked independence & resistance to constraint. She warned that tech libertarians wanted an anti-human world that worked more like a computer. From "Cyberselfish," a book based on her 90s writing:
Show threadGil DuránSep 24
3/ Tech fascism in a nutshell: “Computers are so much more rule-based, controllable, fixable, and comprehensible than any human will ever be. As many political schools of thought do, these technolibertarians make a philosophy out of a personality defect.“ She wrote this in 2000!
Show threadGil DuránSep 24
4/ Borsook divided the tech ”libertarians” into two main types: the Ravers and the Gilders. The Ravers are the ones who go to Burning Man and project countercultural ideas. The Gilders are the Peter Thiel types, more overtly focused on money and power. But they are birds of a feather.
Show threadGil DuránSep 24
5/ Borsook warned that “cypherpunk” paranoia about government intrusion was leading them to create “a society where there is ever more surveillance and computer-retrievable information about people's private lives.” Sound familiar?
Show threaddon

@gilduran.com I'm specifically only commenting on this one post, the rest I pretty much agree with.
From a german perspective, it's not paranoia about government intrusion as there's more than one example in living memory here.

I hope the book gets reissued, I'm pretty sure it would be impossible to find a copy in Europe otherwise.

Oct 30 at 7:44amWeb