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Recently in Salon Technology

Books
Time warp
In "Cyberselfish," Paulina Borsook denounces high-tech culture as pitiless, egotistical and libertarian. She was right in 1996.
By Brad Wieners
[05/04/00]

Fumble.com
Internet companies threw millions into the air at the Super Bowl. They're still pretending they scored a touchdown.
By Katharine Mieszkowski
[05/03/00]

Books
It's a bubble, all right!
In "Irrational Exuberance," Robert Shiller credits investors' folly with keeping the bull market on its feet.
By Thomas Scoville
[05/02/00]

Column
Sayings of Chairman Bill
Gates' Microsoft defense is full of holes, but so is the government's breakup plan.
By Scott Rosenberg
[05/01/00]

Technology: View from the top
On the record
RIAA chief Hilary Rosen defends the music industry's recent litigation against Napster and MP3.com.
By Janelle Brown
[05/01/00]

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I guess it's because I had been writing so much for Wired and I had the usual love-hate relationship with the magazine that many of us did in the early days, which was that I loved that the magazine was so literary and so cultural and did new stuff that nobody else would have done, and placed technology alongside culture, and I was besotted with it.

But then I began to realize that they were deeply libertarian -- which freaked me out; I didn't know that going in -- and I didn't understand it. And any time I don't understand something I have to write about it, like that old George Orwell notion of "I write to find out what I think." This intersection of technology and libertarian philosophy and world view -- really it's not so much politics, but something else -- was fascinating, and it just seemed worth a book.

I really intended the book as a tour guide to a subculture. It's like, if you were an anthropologist from Mars and you were to come down to late 20th century earth, and you might look at a Russian Orthodox priest and a lay Unitarian gay community worker and those two people might think they're really different from each other, but the Martian anthropologist would see two vague Judeo-Christian things that were more alike than not. With "Cyberselfish," it's really important that people understand that I'm talking about a spectrum of things -- it's subtle, it's not just aimed at people in the Cato Institute or something. It's really important to stress the number of times I've heard computer people say, "Well, I'm not a libertarian like that wacko over there, but I think the government is in people's lives too much," or "I believe in the free market," or advance this fantasy that there's no interdependency or no mesh and that somehow the government doesn't make this a safe, reasonable place to live and make lots of money.

You write about the willful blindness by techies to the prior contributions of government and universities in creating the foundations of the Internet. In your own perfect hypothetical world, what kind of evil torture might you contrive to open their eyes?

I want to say something like an "It's a Wonderful Life" kind of scenario: "Look, Jimmy Stewart -- what would it be like if you hadn't lived!" I mean, you'd have to think of something like that, because, the problem with the Internet example, and all the other examples in the book -- there's nothing new in there, I'm just pulling it all together -- is that the really important thing to remember is the Internet/ARPANET was sheltered from having to make any money for, like, 15 years. So how can you give people an image of what it would be like to live in a world without economic shelter of any kind?

What would it be like to live in a world in which there was never a time-out from the philosophy and pressure of the marketplace? It's kind of like trying to explain to people the notion of prior restraint, or how their world is impoverished by the absence of something they've never seen. And that's a very hard thing to do, and since I'm not fundamentally sadistic, it's hard for me to come up with a torture.

There seems to be this hidden assumption in geekdom that cleverness at coding must naturally generalize to all other areas of knowledge -- as if being a good hacker qualifies geeks to be philosopher-kings as well. Would you agree? Where do you think this feeling of intellectual entitlement comes from?

I would totally agree, but then again I must be a little bit fair -- there are lots of doctors and lawyers and other people who think, well, if I ran the world, I'd know what I was doing. I think perhaps that in the geek world -- because you're basically always creating a system that will work and respond, you're creating little, bounded universes all the time -- I think perhaps it's more tempting to think that this kind of general omnipotence can extrapolate out from that. Because [as a programmer] you're often being brought in to solve a problem -- whatever it is -- and even if you solve that problem poorly, or with unnecessary complexity, the fact is that you're confident in your skill set as a problem-solver. So why wouldn't that extend to everything else?

If the shakeout of the dot-coms continues as we've seen recently, if more companies die off or are eaten by larger companies, and the prevailing technolibertarian meritocracy pose becomes less and less tenable, do you think the rhetoric within the industry will change? As the losers file for protection or seek government intervention, do you anticipate a, shall we say, softening of the libertarian hard line?

I'm very, very curious to see what happens -- whether [technolibertarians] are going to hew to the social Darwinist line or maybe be more intellectually honest, and say it's more a matter of luck -- but I don't see that happening in high tech.

It's a lottery -- it's a less rigged lottery than other things, but it is still a lottery -- so, I'm going to be very curious to see what happens when people want to say, "It's not fair, it's not fair, my company never IPO'ed, but my friend's company went public six months ago, and he got his money out and I didn't, and it's not fair."

So, it's going to be hard to tell because -- you know the notion of cognitive dissonance -- it's like some chiliastic cult that thinks the end of the world is going to happen, and then it doesn't happen, and their fearless leader comes up with an explanation of why the end of the world didn't happen. This ideology is so pervasive and largely invisible that I'm not going to say yes, they're going to have a more sober and mediated view of human life because of witnessing a NASDAQ wobble. I could hope that might happen, but I'd be reluctant to predict it.

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