Whether you were at the center or periphery of the San Francisco/South Park and Silicon Valley office park circles Borsook chronicles in "Cyberselfish," it's almost assured you met her or read one of her rants, including the essay for Mother Jones that launched this book. For those who didn't, Borsook is a lively, well-read, sarcastic writer who's infamous for pissing on the inside for all to see (mostly while as a contributor to Wired magazine, where -- full disclosure -- I worked) and for getting some things said that are on a lot of minds, but that are not getting said.

She's especially talented at sketching caricatures and does so throughout "Cyberselfish," where we meet a host of cypherpunks and nerverts (nerds who indulge in unusual sex), ravers and gilders, entrepreneurial newts and programming flamingos. Her sketches are true enough that you nod and think, yeah, I know the type. Indeed, at its best, "Cyberselfish" reads like the "Radical Chic" of mid-1990s San Francisco.

Problem is, this strength also highlights the book's flaw: Her sketches are snapshots of a moment that has come and gone. A large part of the reason for this involves the book's rocky publishing history. "Cyberselfish" was originally set to be published three years ago by Hardwired, the now-defunct imprint of Wired Ventures, but the book bounced to Broadway Books when Borsook had a falling-out with Wired, and then to Public Affairs, a new division of Perseus Books, after a falling-out with Broadway. But a lot has changed since 1996.

How very long ago it seems that Phil Zimmerman, facing jail for distributing Pretty Good Privacy's encryption software, was the poster boy for the Internet. (Many of today's dot-commies probably don't even know who he is.) Today, it's all about Steve Case, Jeff Bezos and Meg Whitman. And now, rather than heroic defiance of government, some of these players are inviting the government to regulate their industries. Had Borsook recast her book as a portrait of the early, heady days of the Web, she might have had something -- the next hot "anti-memoir." Instead she overstates her case with stale evidence.

Borsook contends that "the default political culture of high tech" is small-l libertarian, and because high-tech players are amassing so much wealth and power, their technolibertarianism poses a threat to civil society and all-American ideals like good public schools. According to Borsook, technolibertarianism ranges from "classic eighteenth century liberal philosophy of that-which-governs-best-governs-least [and] love of laissez-faire free market economics to social Darwinism, anarcho-capitalism, and beyond." It manifests itself in an embarrassing lack of philanthropy and "rebel-outsider" posturing such as the "crypto wars" (the ongoing debate between technologists and the federal government over how best to encrypt digital data and therefore protect the privacy of computer users).

The "ravingly anti-government" rhetoric of the attendees of CFP (the Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference) also strikes Borsook as appallingly ironic since the Internet, like so many technologies that underlie the recent economic boom, was subsidized and cultivated by government agencies.

"Much as there are two forms of the plague -- bubonic (less contagious and not necessarily lethal) and pneumonic (violently infectious and almost always fatal), technolibertarianism manifests in two forms: political and philosophical," she writes. The political strain, she says, is mostly just "convenient obliviousness" to the need for governance and giving back. It is often latent, or even denied. "I can't count the number of times," Borsook writes, "I've gotten into a discussion with a thoughtful, sweet high-tech guy about something where he will snort disdainfully about how he's not a libertarian ... and then will come right out with a classic libertarian statement about the el stewpido government or the wonders of market disciplines or whatever. It's rather like women who say, 'I'm not a feminist but I do believe in equal pay for equal work.'"

Philosophical technolibertarianism, Borsook argues, is the pneumonic strain. It's "psychologically brittle, prepolitical autism," she warns. "It bespeaks a lack of human connection and a discomfort with the core of what many consider to be human. It's an inability to reconcile the demands of being individual with the demands of participating in society, which coincides beautifully with a preference for, and glorification of, being the solo commander of one's computer." Momma, don't let your babies grow up to be John Perry Barlow!

In the chapters that follow, she takes us to the incubators and hot zones of this plague. She attends the since-discontinued bionomics conferences; examines Wired during its first five years; takes us inside the cypherpunk subculture. Then she discusses the prospects for "cybergenerosity," explores the origins of technolibertariansim, and concludes with a bit of "what then must we do?"

As you might gather from her plague metaphor, Borsook is not much in favor of technolibertarianism. Elsewhere she calls it a conspiracy (with a parenthetical wink) and a demon. Since I am essentially a small-l liberal, it didn't bother me that she presumes that right-leaning technolibertarianism is frightful, but others will understandably balk at this. There are a number of thoughtful arguments that can be made to support the contention that free markets have done more to relieve poverty than anything a government ever has, and Borsook doesn't address herself to these at all. Rather, she argues that unchecked technolibertarianism threatens ill, if not catastrophic, consequences. We must read her book, she implies, to inoculate ourselves.

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