Who Killed Paulina Borsook’s Career?

The offers had come in earlier that day. Paulina Borsook, 72, allowed herself a flash of excitement before returning to the question of what had ruined her life.

“I don’t know what to make of it,” she said as we drove to lunch. I’d picked Borsook up outside her home near Oakland, California, a basement unit that she calls “Ice Station Zebra” on account of the cold and the color scheme and the isolation. At least that’s how I was encouraged to picture it. Borsook didn’t want me to come inside, lest I pull the old magazine hack’s scam of investing the decor with symbolic significance. She wrote enough stories of this kind in her heyday, back when she was landing bylines in WIRED and the like, to know how the game gets played. Later, she explained over email: “this place i ended up in reflects me not at all. i lost all i owned when i couldnt pay for storage and this place is the best i could find that worked with my disabilities. so i feel it REALLY doesnt reflect me/my taste/my preferences. shame and aversion.”

What had happened to Paulina Borsook? The question was haunting her, even on a day when she’d gotten such good news. It’s haunted her for a quarter-century now. In 2000, after years writing about Silicon Valley, she published a book, Cyberselfish, that discerned within the tech utopianism of the era a dead-eyed, woman-hating social malevolence—what the subtitle called the “Terribly Libertarian Culture of High-Tech.” It was smart at a moment when the whole of the tech industry had gone dumb, and it was funny where Silicon Valley was at its most self-serious. Cyberselfish got warm, if occasionally baffled, reviews. It sold something like 5,000 copies in hardcover and another 2,000 in paperback, a respectable mid-list number, no blockbuster but not a dog, either.

And then … nothing. Editors stopped taking her calls. No fellowships materialized, no second book deal, no regular MSNBC spots for the dotcom Cassandra of the boom times. Borsook couldn’t get work. She began to wonder if she had been blacklisted. Her health, always wobbly, only worsened. She was living in other people’s houses. She went broke, a process she likened to a fire in which everything burns to the ground, and was getting by on a GoFundMe and support from friends. She’d taken to calling the book TDB. That damn book.

Paulina Borsook was one of WIRED’s earliest contributors—at a time when there were vanishingly few women on the masthead.

When Borsook and I first met, in December of last year, she was fully in the midst of what she terms “this resuscitation thing.” It had happened so quickly and altogether without her knowledge: a social media post here, another one over there, celebrated tech critics like Gil Durán of The Nerd Reich exhuming her book and waving it around as proof that, even in the go-go days of the dotcom bubble, some people saw where things were headed. “Instead of centering men who missed the boat (and still don’t seem to get it), let’s lift up the work of Paulina Borsook, who saw it all very clearly and tried to warn us 25 years ago,” Durán wrote in a widely shared post on Bluesky—in response to a 2025 WIRED essay by Steven Levy. Borsook was christened a prophet, unappreciated in her time but uniquely fitted to ours. Hadn’t she written of “testosterone-poisoned guys with chips on their shoulders and too much time on their hands” years before the manosphere? Hadn’t she recuperated the Luddites as “early protesters of de-skilling” back when “Luddite” was an epithet? Hadn’t she raised her eyebrows at the theorists of Sand Hill Road playing footsie with eugenics? Cyberselfish became a minor phenomenon without Borsook so much as saying a word about it. The New York Times profiled her, calling her “The Writer Who Dared Criticize Silicon Valley.” It’s like what a friend once told her: The universe isn’t done with you yet.

Publishers were now keen to get the book back in circulation. That day in December, five of them had sent their bids to her agent. (Eventually, Borsook would settle on Tin House, which published a new edition of Cyberselfish in mid-September, with a foreword by Durán.) The offers were validation, after all those years in the wilderness. Things were finally looking—

“It really kind of broke my heart in so many ways,” Borsook was saying now at the restaurant, as we waited to order. Her mind was back in 2001, wondering again what had happened to her career. Was it something she’d written? Could it have been an actual blacklist? Was it something as depressingly commonplace as sexism? “I really hate playing that card,” she said, “but I do have to wonder.” She just couldn’t figure it, even still, all these years later. In a way, the happy turn of events in the past few months had left her even more discombobulated. As she told me more than once, “I don’t know how to think about myself anymore.” She’d won me over in a matter of hours—a common enough phenomenon, I would learn, among people who find themselves in Borsook’s orbit. When I dropped her off that afternoon, I promised—only half in jest—to find the guy who killed her career.

Ok, but first I have to tell you about Dick Pick. Literally his name. Richard A. Pick. Went by Dick. It was the 1960s, and back then you could walk around with a name like that and no one would think to laugh, even if you were, as Dick Pick apparently was, something of a serial flirt.

Dick Pick was a software developer for a military contractor during the Vietnam War. The story goes that the Army needed a way to track spare parts for Lockheed’s Cheyenne attack helicopter. Alongside his business partner, Don Nelson, he came up with a database operating system that they called—and here you have to imagine two of the shit-eatingest grins you’ve ever seen—the Generalized Information Retrieval Language System: GIRLS. (What, you thought tech bros were a new phenomenon?) Like a lot of tech innovation underwritten by defense spending, GIRLS was soon put to commercial use. Eventually it came to be known as PICK, and it was with this latter name that the operating system found itself under the fingertips of one Paulina Borsook, an employee at a small software company in Marin County.

Before she became one of the sharpest media observers of early Silicon Valley, Borsook first learned how to see tech. That happened in the early 1980s, in front of one of those so-called minicomputers that were in fact big enough to be buried in. The company was called Construction Information Systems, and Borsook was doing some technical writing, documenting in the plainest language she could muster how the software worked.

She learned two important things at that job. The first is that tech is “infrastructure, not magic,” she wrote in a 2015 essay. The second is that the computer is a way of seeing into the mind of another human. It is, ineluctably, social. “Learning about PICK,” she wrote, “taught me that software was a human artifact; that is, I began to be able to think the way the creators of PICK thought … The dyer’s hand, the design sensibility, the cognitive blind spots: all evident and all human artifacts. Technology is idiosyncratic like the humans who devise it and the people who make it are just people.”

Everything Borsook would later write as a journalist covering the industry—the frisky pieces for Salon and Suck, the weightier profiles for WIRED, every barbed word of Cyberselfish—seemed to flow from a simple imperative drawn from her experience at that minicomputer: never lose sight of the human in the machine, the Dicks (as it were) behind the system. Once, she described her writerly voice as one of “agonized humanism,” and that’s it exactly. She was appalled by those in the industry who were determined to leave the human behind. “The most virulent form of philosophical technolibertarianism is a kind of scary, psychologically brittle, prepolitical autism,” she wrote in an especially pungent passage in Cyberselfish. “It’s an inability to reconcile the demands of being individual with the demands of participating in society … these technolibertarians make a philosophy out of a personality defect.”

Her own politics ran to the left, broadly speaking, though like a lot of political commentators of her time she seemed to cherish her own à la carte apostasies. She wasn’t embarrassed to say she agreed with the libertarians in their premises. More than anything she, too, wanted “to be left alone,” she wrote in Cyberselfish. But what Borsook brought to her journalism was an understanding of Silicon Valley as a social creation. Some of that can be attributed to growing up in Pasadena during the space-age boom. She remembers the “vaguely New Deal mentality” of the engineers and scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech, all of them beneficiaries of robust state investment in the war machine. In a place like that, there could be little mistaking the public’s role in the development of new technologies. Thus did Borsook receive an early inoculation against the basic fetishism that would come to define the culture of Silicon Valley—the idea that the power of technology is inherent and not derived from the social relations that produced it.

We shouldn’t overstate things. Not everyone who lived or worked in the shadow of the military-industrial complex drew the same lessons about the virtues of government. In his indispensable 2006 book From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Fred Turner reminds us that the research laboratories spun up during the Second World War were also sites of freewheeling collaboration across disciplines, liberated (so it seemed) from hierarchy—sites of what today we might call disruption. And believe it or not, all those earnest poindexters with their slide rules offered an organizational model for the libertarian communalists of the following era. This was the milieu that would eventually spawn the magazine you have in your hands now. When Borsook began writing for WIRED in the 1990s, it was something of a collision between two very different ways of understanding the political economy of the American midcentury.

Borsook grew up precocious and miserable, the daughter of “infanticidal” parents from whom, at one point, she sought legal emancipation. In 1968, when she was 14 years old, Borsook was shot in the head with a .45 Colt at a distance of 6 feet. She’d been with a couple of girlfriends, and one of them had fired the gun. The official story, the one they gave the cops, was that it was an accident, just dumb kids horsing around. The real story, as Borsook would tell it in 2013, as part of an art installation she called My Life as a Ghost, is that the friend had taken the gun out of a kitchen drawer—it was the friend’s house, and the friend’s parents were Birchers—and started waving it around. Borsook took cover behind the wall in another room. After a moment she popped her head out to see what was happening. Her friend pulled the trigger. Borsook remembers two things: a ringing, pulsing sound, and then silence. The bullet had ripped through her cheek and left through the back of her neck.

Borsook has no doubt the shooting was “accidentally on purpose,” some violent fugitive impulse escaping the tangle of teenage love-hate. She tells the story now without self-pity or sentiment, simply as a way of explaining why her brain works the way it does. Even in the moment, she refused any histrionics. She went to the kitchen and poured cold water on the hole in her face, told her friends to call the operator, and then somehow gave them to understand that now was the time to get their stories straight.

“I felt protective” toward the friend who shot her, Borsook explains now. “I know she immediately regretted it. And I said we need to come off as like we’re just a bunch of ditzy teenagers, as opposed to these alarmingly precocious, kind of scary young women that we were.” She says she refused to cooperate with any attempt to prosecute her friend. The two remained close for years.

It was the jolt from the impact, Borsook believes, that caused the most lasting damage. The effects soon began to present themselves. “That gunshot prematurely aged my brain,” she said in her presentation for My Life as a Ghost. She continued: “I flunked calculus three times and I had no idea why this happened. Ever after, I simply could not process texts of a certain density, such as a geology textbook or a legal opinion. It all washes out. My brain just cannot process and retain quantitative transactions and language of a certain abstraction—all of which are necessary to function as a symbolic-manipulator in a knowledge economy.” (It isn’t just an issue of cognitive function. She says her lifelong environmental sensitivities—so acute now that she can’t even wear a metal watch—were likely exacerbated by the shooting.)

Borsook got a degree in psycholinguistics from UC Berkeley, but even then, communication of any kind was difficult, an issue that predated the shooting. Whether in her speech or her writing, she had a tendency to be “gnomic,” “elliptical,” “highly condensed”—her words. “How my friends put up with it, I don’t know,” she says. She developed a conversational habit, still obvious today, of rounding off her sentences by asking if what she had just said made any sense. “I began to realize that a lot of the ways I think and speak about things don’t make sense to a lot of people,” she says, “so I have to check in with them.” She was still chatty, and nothing would seem outwardly amiss. But she knew something had fritzed out in her head. “Parts of my brain just shut down forever,” she tells me. “Does that make sense?”

One thing that helped, oddly enough, was the technical writing. “Imagine if your hands were really palsied,” she says, gnarling her fingers in front of her face. That’s what it was like in her head, all the words gone stiff and useless. But the precision and clarity required of technical writing forced Borsook to work at her sentences, to limber them up, until ordinary readers could grasp them. The technical stuff certainly had no long-term effects on her prose style—her writing for popular audiences, zippy and full of late-gonzo neologisms like “el stewpido” and “our fabu hyper-accelerated crashboombang economy,” was never, ever plain. To listen to her explain it, the change was more akin to rebuilding an atrophied muscle. She had rehabilitated the capacity to make herself legible to other people. “I could just feel things sort of unkinking,” she says, relaxing her fingers and pulling them from her face. “It was like Jane Fonda aerobics.”

She moved over to the technical end of journalism not long after, joining the staff of Data Communications magazine. That’s where Katie Hafner met her in 1984. Hafner had come on as the news editor; Borsook was the new products editor. The work was impenetrably abstruse. “I have to set the scene for you,” says Hafner, who went on to have a distinguished career in tech journalism. “Paulina was a psycholinguistics major at Berkeley. I was a German literature major at UCSD. This guy Peter Schmader [the managing editor] was some kind of philosopher. The two copy editors, Sue and Sandy, were also English-major people. And we were all complete fish out of water.”

Hafner was immediately taken with Borsook: “She was like the smartest, grumpiest person I’d ever met. And I was in total awe. I’d never met anyone like her. So blunt, completely honest, had something trenchant to say about absolutely everything around her.” Once Hafner set her up with a friend. “They went on a date, and the next day he was just furious,” she recalls. “And he said, ‘Your friend, she has a lot of opinions about everything.’ And I said, ‘Oh, yeah, what’s wrong with that?’”

It was Borsook’s brain that Hafner “worshipped.” She had the right phrase for anything. Hafner remembers a piece Borsook wrote about a chocolate shop in Berkeley in which she described customers who would arrive just after close and “piteously rap on the windows.” Hafner loved the phrase so much she used something like it in a story of her own, in The New York Times. There was the time the two of them went clothes shopping, and Borsook said, “Oh, are you like me—you’re like a sausage with a string tied around the middle?” Hafner laughs. “That is indelibly etched in my head.” When Hafner was living in Berlin, Borsook visited and stayed with her. Hafner paid her friend the highest of compliments a writer could ever receive, from a fellow writer, no less: She asked Borsook to read one of her short stories aloud, as a bedtime story.

The event was in San Francisco, and it was about women and the internet. This would’ve been sometime in the 1990s—Borsook can’t remember when or where, exactly. The commercial internet was in its infancy, and for all its promise of scrambling the dominant gender paradigms, it was also proving to be a fantastic means of shoring them up.

This was also true of the communes in the late ’60s and early ’70s, the ones that gave rise to Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog and eventually to WIRED itself—the men up front, leaders of the utopia, and the “women in the back having babies and putting bleach in the water to keep people from getting sick,” as Turner has put it. But computer work had belonged to women before it was regendered, in the span of a generation, from a type of clerical job to the domain of the charismatic autonomous man. Nowhere was that more evident than in the media dedicated to covering Silicon Valley. At the talk there were some 30 women in attendance. When they were asked if they read WIRED, they all raised their hands. “And when they were asked if they hated WIRED,” Borsook wrote in an essay, “they all raised their hands.”

The piece appeared in a remarkable anthology from 1996, Wired Women: Gender and New Realities in Cyberspace, published by Seal Press, a sort of consciousness-raising meeting in book form. One of the anthology’s editors, Elizabeth Reba Weise, stops short of saying it was the first book to examine the experience of women online, but it was certainly one of the early ones. “We called it cyberspace, for God’s sake,” Weise says—that’s how early this was. Over and over the contributors, a mix of academics and journalists and women working tech jobs of one kind or another, emphasize that the computer and the internet are tools for women, a way of enabling communication and connection—the gendered division of labor coming to roost now in the differing ways of being online. From Weise’s intro: “In my circle, computers aren’t fetish objects, but tools.” From Ellen Ullman’s essay: “We use the Internet as a tool, like the phone or the fax, a way to transmit news and make appointments.” Susan Clerc: “Like the TV and VCRs, the home computer is a tool that lets her participate fully in the community.” And Borsook: Women “generally are interested in the utilitarian value, not fetish-worthiness, of tools.” The Australian feminist Dale Spender has a pithy old line about computers that is applicable here: “Women use them, whereas men fall in love with them.”

WIRED from its start in 1993 was a magazine for falling in love with computers. Digital utopianism was the order of the day. One of the magazine’s founding editors, John Battelle, today calls the mindset a “naively optimistic libertarianism.” There were more circumspect voices in tech media—in particular the inspired and unjustly forgotten Processed World, which viewed computers from the perspective of the people who had to work with them. In 1995, a British magazine called Mute published an essay, “The Californian Ideology,” that laid out a “critique of dotcom neoliberalism” similar in some ways to Borsook’s. A decade earlier, Lenny Siegel and John Markoff published The High Cost of High Tech: The Dark Side of the Chip, an early criticism of Silicon Valley. Alongside the media were tech-dubious movements, like the mostly memory-holed Neo-Luddites of the 1990s, not to be confused with the new Neo-Luddites. But the critics weren’t breaking through. Processed World’s cofounder, Chris Carlsson, characterizes the era as “an unbelievable frenzy of boosterism and back slapping, we’re all getting rich, ha ha ha, isn’t this great, here, have another line, come to this fancy dinner, here’s a glass of champagne. Oh, you don’t want to be part of the party? Get the fuck out of here.”

In her essay for Wired Women, Borsook reviewed every issue of the magazine to that point and ran the numbers. “Women were the subject of about 15 percent of WIRED articles and only one cover out of twenty-five as of June 1995,” she reported. “There are vague in-house grumbling intimations by women on staff of likely accomplished females being shot down as article-subjects in WIRED editorial meetings and of no-account off-point numb-nut guys being celebrated instead—but that’s par for the course in any mostly-male arena.” She was even more dismayed to find that only 15 percent of WIRED authors to that point were women. One month, she was the only woman on the masthead.

Borsook had been writing for WIRED more or less from its inception. She’d bailed out of Data Communications at the end of the ’80s and had gotten her MFA at Columbia, and now she was making a go of it as a freelancer. One Friday in 1993, she emailed the magazine’s cofounder, Louis Rossetto, a self-styled radical libertarian, asking if he’d be interested in her fiction. Her agent mailed over her MFA thesis, whose concluding novella was a story about an affair that unfolds over email, in all the “perversions and evasions” of what was then a newish medium. It was smart and allusive and full of finely observed shifts in interpersonal weather. By Monday, as Borsook tells it, she was a contributor to WIRED. “Love Over the Wires” appeared in the magazine’s fourth issue.

In short order she was writing big-ticket features. There were profiles of super networker Esther Dyson and Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen. While an ethos of tech utopianism pervaded, writers were allowed to roam with their prose, and Borsook’s touch was unmistakable in her stories. She called Allen “a nerd nonpareil, resembling nothing so much as a manatee with dancey blue eyes.” He was apparently upset with the description, Hafner recalls. “And Paulina, she was so funny. She said, ‘But it’s really sweet! They’re really big and gentle!’”

The pieces weren’t necessarily critical of the tech world, not in the way that Cyberselfish would be, but neither did they go in for gooey panegyrics to the likes of Newt Gingrich, WIRED’s cover boy in August 1995. Despite the plum assignments, Borsook never felt like she belonged. In her Wired Woman essay, she describes herself as a token for the “editorial boykings” of the magazine. “If one is not interested in participating in circle-jerk exercises and paying homage to the alpha male of the moment,” she wrote, “what is there left to do at WIRED?” She bickered with Kevin Kelly, WIRED’s founding executive editor, over a section in her Dyson profile in which she addressed how gender might have shaped her subject’s career. She’d been surprised by how many people asked her, in the course of her reporting, about Dyson’s dating life—surprised as well by the “personal quality of what her detractors had to say,” the snide stuff about her clothes and manners. Kelly, in Borsook’s telling, didn’t think it was relevant. They went back and forth. The section stayed in. (Kelly remembers a narrower dispute. He writes in an email: “My recollection was that she was asking Dyson if she was gay/lesbian and she wanted to report Dyson's response [which I think was ‘negative’], and I thought it was all immaterial to Dyson’s contributions.”)

“I mostly want to be left alone to do my work, to get at that still silent voice within, and not be fighting ideological battles my editors at WIRED might not even consciously realize they are engaging in,” Borsook wrote. “Progress means exchanging one set of problems for a more interesting set of problems—but my struggles with WIRED have been generating problems of ever-decreasing interest. I strive to have other, better, more rewarding and less stupid battles to fight.”

“I always had a fondness for Paulina,” says Battelle. “I mean, I generally have a fondness for difficult people. Like most of my good friends are extremely difficult people. I never was like, ‘Oh, this woman, oh my God, now I’ve gotta deal with her.’ I enjoyed working with her. And yeah, it was difficult. And I did feel like she seemed to sort of arrive besieged, you know?”

Battelle says he “got the sense she didn’t completely buy into some of the core premises and values” of WIRED in that era. He goes on: “She was very critical of the political philosophy that was evident in the magazine.”

Borsook at South by Southwest in March 2000.

In a sense, Cyberselfish is a continuation of Borsook’s criticisms of early WIRED. In the mid 1990s, her agent, Stuart Krichevsky, started pitching the book around under the pulpier title Deadly Embrace, a computer science term for when processes get stuck because each is waiting for another to release a resource. (It became Cyberselfish after Mother Jones published an essay by Borsook under that headline.) Nothing about it came easy. A deal with WIRED’s publishing arm fell apart after Borsook gave an interview in which she recited some of her criticisms of the magazine. Another publisher proved a bad fit. Eventually, Lisa Kaufman at PublicAffairs rescued Cyberselfish from publishing oblivion, and the book landed just as the dotcom bubble began to deflate.

If sales were modest, the book was “a reputational success” for the publisher, Kaufman says. The New York Times sang its praises. Turner goes so far as to call it “the first actual from-the-left critique of the tech world that I’m aware of” and “one of the first clear articulations of some of the really nasty conflicts that are built into some of the cybercultural thinking of the period.” He adds: “The thing that Paulina got right off the bat: She just saw right through that, all the way through. She saw that these firms were commercial firms. They were seeking market positions. They were seeking standing.”

Not everyone had such glowing reviews. Battelle, broadly sympathetic to the book’s premise, recalls thinking Cyberselfish was a “pretty thin deconstruction” of tech libertarian utopianism. One tech journalist recalled similar grouching among colleagues about the lack of reporting, by which they presumably meant investigative legwork. Cyberselfish was full of reporting in the most basic sense—conversations over dinner, dispatches from conferences, information gleaned from others and related to readers—but it was all of the “soft” variety, cultural and thus dismissible.

The work dried up after the book came out—though it was drying up for a lot of people in the first decade of the new century. Borsook couldn’t seem to catch anyone’s eye. She wrote an essay for Processed World in 2001 on “the disappeared of Silicon Valley,” about failure in the time of the dotcom boom, the piece itself a narrative of Borsook’s own failure to write the story she had set out to tell. She tried other subjects. Borsook was sure she could scare up some interest in a story about a grassroots campaign she was working on, Stop the Spray, which was agitating against the use of pheromone pesticides in the Bay Area targeting the light brown apple moth. Nothing. For a time she lived as an Airbnb superhost in return for free rent. All her worst suppositions about not belonging were being confirmed. “The universe is just telling me to go jump off a pier,” as Borsook puts it.

Maybe she was catastrophizing—or maybe catastrophe was just a normal state of affairs for her. “There was always this sort of Calamity Jane thing about Paulina,” Hafner says. “She’d go through stuff, and you’d go, ‘Oh, my gosh.’” She would go on a work trip, and someone would break into her room and steal her prized watches. Or she would show up to the office one day with an enormous bandage on her leg, the victim of a burst hot-water bottle. “I just thought, how does this woman endure what she endures?” Hafner says.

Could an actual blacklist have been among her torments? I put the question to a number of people.

John Battelle, who was gone from WIRED by the time Cyberselfish came out: “I think it’s conceivable. Whether or not it’s factual, I can’t speak to … WIRED was a quasi-religious community. And while we were OK with people debating fundamental principles of the community, we weren’t OK with people, you know, with ad hominem attacks. My sense is if someone kind of wasn’t on the WIRED train, then, you know, they’re not gonna be invited to write for the magazine. That doesn’t strike me as an unusual thing.”

Gil Durán, whose angry thread on Bluesky helped kick-start the Borsook revival: “It’s likely. At the same time, one of the ways you get blacklisted in journalism is just nobody’s interested in you, right? Doesn’t have to be a conspiracy or something. As we’ve seen, there was not much of a hunger for real criticism of tech in Silicon Valley. “

Katie Hafner: “I would lean heavily on the side of there was no conspiracy. She was grumpy. She didn’t want to write suck-up stories, which was a lot of what was happening back then. That doesn’t mean she was blacklisted. It’s just that she had a lot of opinions.”

Steven Levy, longtime contributor to WIRED: “I’d push back against the word blacklist—especially [given] the connotations of it, the horrendous things of the McCarthy era. It may very well be that what she was pushing in the core of her writing was an unpopular theme which now people see maybe there was something to it, but back then led to people thinking, we don’t have an appetite for that kind of story.”

John Markoff, tech reporter for the Times until 2016: “There are stories people don’t want to hear. It wasn’t so much about Paulina but that the things she wanted to write didn’t have a market.”

Hafner again: “It was just because she’s Paulina. I mean, it’s hard to be Paulina.”

“I don’t even know if the blacklist existed,” Borsook was saying. “I don’t think it existed.” This time I was the one who’d brought up her years in exile. We were sitting in the shade in her friend’s backyard in Berkeley. It was August, and she was waiting to be photographed for this very magazine, the one that had handled her roughly for a time and then, maybe worse, had decided not to handle her at all. The new edition of Cyberselfish was no longer notional. The paperback had arrived in the mail that day, and when she pulled it out of the padded envelope and held that damn book up, it was as if she were displaying an award. Her agent, Stuart Krichevsky, told me that when the Tin House offer came in, Borsook practically squeaked.

“I—this sounds weird—I don’t think TDB was important enough to be blacklisted,” Borsook said. She had come to see her own exile as part of a larger process. No conspiracies or blacklists were needed to render her disposable. “It was such a changed media landscape,” she said. It was more than the media, too. From the vantage of 2026, Cyberselfish reads a little like Borsook’s account of her own encroaching obsolescence—she was describing a campaign, ultimately successful, to root out a whole way of understanding tech. There could be no seeing the dyer’s hand, no perceiving the Dicks in the system, not in the utopia the technolibertarians were building for us.

Earlier we had been talking about ghosts, the way they seem to pop up in different corners of the story Borsook tells about her life. Even before her friend had shot her, she had this spectral sense of herself, a compulsive feeling of not belonging that only heightened with the violence done to her brain. “Hmm, maybe I really am not supposed to be here,” as she put it in 2013, “and my life ever since has been an accident.” She was standing on a deck now, white hair blowing this way and that in the wind, white scarf wrapped around her neck. A photographer was snapping away, an assistant holding up a bounce board, redirecting daylight toward Borsook’s face. A strange but happy image suggested itself to me: an old ghost in a warm sun.

Does that make any sense?

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