Last year, used copies of a 25-year-old book about Silicon Valley politics started getting pricier. Nobody at a publisher's office noticed. The author did.
Paulina Borsook wrote Cyberselfish in 2000, when the dot-com boom was still being sold as a revolution in human nature. The book went out of print. By her own account, her career as a tech author went with it. A new edition is now coming from Tin House, and how it got there says as much about tech's mood today as it does about the book.
A used-book market gives the first hint
Borsook told TechCrunch's Anthony Ha, in a Zoom interview published October 25, that the revival began with small, odd signals. Resale prices ticked up. Strangers she'd never met posted online about why the book mattered. Academics in Europe wrote to her with questions.
Then the bigger names arrived. Gil Durán, author of Nerd Reich, publicly argued that Borsook's career deserved a second act, saying she saw the whole thing clearly and tried to warn everyone a quarter century ago. The New York Times followed that fall with a report on new readers who picked up Cyberselfish hoping to learn why the tech industry lost its way. Durán wrote the introduction to the Tin House edition.
That almost never happens. Tech books usually die the way gadgets do, bumped by whatever ships next. This one is being read as a prequel.
What she was actually writing about
Borsook calls her subject techno-libertarianism, a cluster of beliefs she describes as fiercely hostile to regulation. Her complaint, then and now, is the irony. In her view, few groups in American life had gotten more from government and paid less for it than the engineers and founders talking as if government were an obstacle.
She came to that by comparison. Borsook grew up in Pasadena, among the families of the Caltech and JPL space-program world: scientists and engineers who, she said, knew exactly what public institutions could accomplish and didn't dress themselves up as lone geniuses. So when she began moving through Bay Area tech circles in the early to mid 1980s, she figured she was on familiar ground. Another STEM culture.
Not quite. By the early 1990s she kept catching offhand remarks she couldn't decode. She isn't, she says, a person who argues. She listens. And what she heard didn't square with what she knew about how scientists and the state had worked together.
The book itself happened by accident. After an MFA at Columbia, her agent told her fiction was hard to sell and asked whether she had a nonfiction project in her. She pointed to the strange subculture she'd been watching and couldn't explain. That became Cyberselfish.
She doesn't pitch it as a polemic. She calls it "almost a travelogue," a run of snapshots rather than a sustained argument, in the spirit of Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. Modest, sure, and a little sly. Snapshots are harder to rebut than theses, and they pile up.
Why Cyberselfish found readers again
Borsook is blunt about what the original release cost her. After it came out, she says, nobody wanted her views on anything, tech or otherwise, ever again. She has yet to publish a second book.
That's a steep price for being early. The 1990s tech press, as she remembers it, was overwhelmingly celebratory, and a skeptical outsider asking what was going on inside this culture didn't fit the mood. She has said she was one of the few paying attention, which she admits appealed to her ego.
Her diagnosis of what came next is vivid. Even after the dot-com crash, she argues, the attitude never got corrected. It kept "contaminating the aquifers," seeping outward while everyone looked elsewhere. Buy that or not, you can see why a reader in 2026 would reach for it. The ideas she mapped have gone from a quirk of the Valley to something with a public face and a political program, and people want the origin story.
A caution, though. A book that looks prophetic in hindsight flatters everyone involved, which is reason enough for suspicion. Plenty of 2000-era writers were also confident and wrong. What gives Borsook's case weight is that her central question was specific and checkable: why do people who profited so much from public investment speak so contemptuously of it?
That question hasn't expired.
What the revival leaves open
The full TechCrunch conversation also ranges into artificial intelligence, how much the industry has changed in 25 years, and what she'd tell young people hoping to work in tech. Those answers will find their own readers.
The bigger puzzle is publishing. A book vanished, a writer was sidelined, and the correction came from used-book prices, strangers on social media and a few academics, not from any institution deciding to look back. The market needed a quarter century and a very different political moment to catch up.
Two things to watch. Does the Tin House edition reach people beyond those already convinced? A book about a worldview does little if only its critics open it. And does Borsook's long silence end? She was told once that nobody wanted her take. Plenty of people appear to want it now.