CYBERSELFISH

Reviewed 7/19/2011

Cyberselfish, by Paulina Borsook

Access to this book courtesy of the
San Jose, CA Public Library
cyberselfish 1
A Critical Romp through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High-Tech
Paulina Borsook
New York: PublicAffairs, 2000

Rating:

5.0

High

ISBN-13 978-1-891620-78-2
ISBN-10 1-891620-78-9 276pp. HC $24.00

Errata

Page 2: "...Santa Cruz is taking on a new identity, that of a bedroom community for one of the greatest and growing concentrations of new money, technologyworkers, and corporations that the United States—and the world—has ever seen."
  Missing space: S/B "technology workers".
Page 4: "But I came to realize that their values, politics and orientation to the world were very very different from those of the benign guys in my childhood who, yes, actually had carried slide rules and worn pocket protectors, as no one in hightech actually does now."
  Missing space: S/B "high tech".
Page 25: "...and presumes tahe government must be anxious because it can't figure out how to regulate software..."
  Typo: S/B "the".
Page 25: "What concludes this lovely screed in gun-talk implying that it's only the concern that Microserfs not get sheot at by evil, sexually inadequate government agents..."
  Typo: S/B "shot at".
Page 31: "Concepts such as the importance of technological change in driving economic growth has been central to the work of Robert Solow..."
  Number error: S/B "have been".
Page 38: "...fashion designers are going to suddenly start creating haut couture for, and feature models disporting..."
  Spelling: S/B "haute couture".
Page 60: "In buying his chilliastic we-can-be-together/up-against-the-wall-mother rap..."
  Spelling: S/B "chiliastic".
Page 64: "...how much do you believe in which version of the Whorf hypothesis: how much does language shape thought? How much does thought shape language?"
  Terminology: This is formally called the "Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis", although her version is common online.
Pages 75-6: "In the 60s, a necesarry part of the critical political stance..."
  Spelling: S/B "necessary".
Page 101: The second footnote marker is used twice in the text at the bottom of the page.
  S/B used once.
Page 104: "... Xanadu [whacked-out pioneering noble experiment that failed]..."
  Xanadu is never described. The reference is to Project Xanadu, founded by Ted Nelson in 1960. It was the first attempt to build a hypertext linking system. It and its creator Ted Nelson are both going strong, though neither is indexed in this book.
Page 106: "It can't be that surprising, given the sinister gleam (like the black metallic skin of a nuclear submarine, half visible at surface level, steaming out to sea under the Golden Gate Bridge) of cypherpunkery, that Walter Wriston, the former Citibank CEO, appeared..."
  Metaphor: Incomprehensible. It makes me want to take a thinly veiled swipe at the sacred cows entrenched in naval circles.
Page 116: "I had been both happy and sick at heart to satisfy Beth's request because I had begun to feel about Wired, the Froissart Chronicles of the digital age, like Nora in A Doll's House."
  How many readers of this book know that A Doll's House is a play by Ibsen, much less appreciate the relevance of what Nora felt in that play? Both Nora and the Froissart Chronicles are obscure.
Page 120: "Which was what everyone in the beau monde, or who wistfully wanted to observe the beau monde, should to be concerned with."
  Extra word: S/B "should be".
Page 121: "Wired was name-dropped in television ads for IBM and appeared as a prop in the James Bond movie Golden Eye."
  Extra space: S/B "Goldeneye".
Page 133: "Barlow intimated that the great work of being on the net was going to lead to the omega point of creation, the high point of eolution we've been heading toward for centuries, ou quelque chose comme ça in the key of Teilhard de Chardin."
  The French phrase is not translated. (And it probably S/B "Omega Point".)
Page 134: "The SJSU data collectors strived to sample widely..."
  Verb tense: Past simple S/B "strove". See Reverse Conjugator
Page 139: "He said didn't think about whether Esther was female or male, so why was I bothering?"
  Missing word: S/B "said he didn't think".
Page 143: "Gilder's bordering-on-homophilic hero worship of high tech coffee achievers..."
  The relevance of "coffee" here escapes me. I surmise it was meant to be a hyphenated string: S/B "coffee-fueled" or something similar. And, as almost everywhere in the book, "high tech" should be hyphenated.
Page 134: "The SJSU data collectors strived..."
  Verb tense: S/B "strove".
Page 151: "(The speech is also anti-Darwinian, anti-environmentalist, and decrying of secular humanism. But that's not within our purview."
  Sure it is.
Page 169: "He did get one eventually no. Scratch that."
  Sentence ends at wrong point: S/B "eventually. No, scratch that."
Page 174FN: "Silicon Valley is defined as Santa Clara County (San Jose north to Palo Alto), north through San Mateo County as far as San Mateo itself, the section of the lower East Bay that's in Alameda County (Fremont, Newark) and over the coastal range to Santa Cruz County."
  This definition is fuzzy. Does it include Santa Cruz County or not? If not, it omits plenty of high-tech firms from Silicon Valley's heyday: Borland International, SCO (the Santa Cruz Operation) and Seagate, to name but three. Then there's Autodesk in Marin, EFI in Pleasanton, Sybase in ?, Pacific Bell in San Ramon...
Page 182: "The 'it's new money' stinginess explained more in terms of geek culture is that those who have been so heads-down with coding or consumed by the drive to make money haven't gotten around to thinking about what ought to be done with the money that they have made, aside from making more money."
  This sentence is imparsible.
Page 195FN: "Who are these nongovernmental orgnizations to question gifts reigning down from above?"
  Word choice: S/B "raining". (Unless this is some sort of irony.)
Page 199: "And the is only among the most conspicuous..."
  Typo: S/B "he".
Page 210: "...say they don't have the capacity take up the increasing slack..."
  Missing word: S/B "the capacity to take up"
Page 212: "A concept close in semantic field..."
  Missing word: S/B "close in the semantic".
Page 222: "Discussion of political processes are striking in their absence."
  Number errors: S/B "is striking in its".
Page 237: "Those whose livelihood consists of making such judgments..."
  No number error, but: S/B "livelihoods consist of".
Page 241: "In reading those who cheered on Max More (philosopher founder of Extropy) while he and I engaged in a 'Brain Tennis' debate..."
  Is that his real name? I couldn't Google it up. And as the name of a spokesman for a group of people who want more of everything, it seems too contrived.
Page 249: "The New Age ethos holds that you create your own reality and that whatever happens to you is of your own choosing and that if bad stuff happens, it's kharmically correct and entirely your own fault."
  The way Ms. Borsook means it, according to all sources, it S/B "karmically" — although I never saw it made into an adverb that way. With the "h", kharma is either a female WWE star named Kia Michelle Stevens or a maker of high-end audio and video gear.
Page 255: "... which a problem that regulations regarding interstate commerce can solve."
  Missing word: S/B "which is a problem".
Page 260: From a quoted e-mail: "... but i believe the unfettered end of pure capitalism is something like dickens and as bad as unfettered socialism."
  Capitalization: S/B "something like Dickens" (as in Charles Dickens). Of course Borsook was right to reproduce this e-mail as it exists, devoid of any capital letters. But in this case the capital is required for clarity, since "dickens" is common slang for trouble or an unpleasant outcome.
Pages 269-276: Index omissions
 

The index is spotty. The author mentions many books and magazines; but most of them are not indexed. She has a good deal to say about Forbes magazine, but it is not indexed. Neither are several other industry magazines, including Red Herring and Fast Company. However, Playboy and Rolling Stone appear in the index.

Some of the books not indexed are Paul Goodman's Growing Up Absurd (96), Robert Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (98), David Beers's Blue Sky Dream (223), Stanley Bing's Lloyd: What Happened (242), and Silicon Valley Fever by Everett Rogers and Judith Larsen (259). Of that last book, the author says it is "considered something of a reference text for understanding high tech."

I believe the author has done a complete and correct job of indexing people. And in the text she always gives a full citation: author, title, publisher, year. Therefore, knowing an author's name, you could use the index to find his book. But this is thin justification for not indexing the titles, especially since some of them are listed.

1 I've tried here to reproduce the format used on the title page of the book. The avant-garde font and the italicizing of "selfish" are not apparent on the cover.
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