July 25, 2000
BOOKS OF THE TIMES
Silicon Valley Views the Economy as a Rain Forest
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
|
CYBERSELFISH
A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech.
By Paulina Borsook.
276 pages. Public Affairs. $24.
|
s high tech spreads outward
from Silicon Valley to American society at large and people spend more
and more time in cyberspace, the
journalist Paulina Borsook steps
back to look at the digerati and their
view of the world.
Her conclusions: that high-tech
culture is ravingly antigovernment,
antiregulation and "psychologically
brittle," that it manifests "a lack of
human connection and a discomfort
with the core of what many of us
consider it means to be human," and
that its view of human nature "reduces everything to the contractual,
to economic rational decision making" and "ignores the larger social
mesh that makes living as primates
in groups at least somewhat bearable." In short, that high-tech culture
promotes an Ayn Rand-ian view of
the world, where the strong in tooth
and claw survive, and the meek and
unmarketable perish.
Ms. Borsook does not write as a
Luddite outsider but as longtime observer of the tech world -- she was a
contributing writer to Wired magazine in its formative years -- and she
has written a smart, funny and irreverent book. "Cyberselfish" is both an
engaging bookend to "Escape Velocity" (1996), Mark Dery's provocative
study of cyberculture in the 1990's,
and a bracing antidote to the Pollyanna-ish cyber-utopianism of Esther
Dyson's "Release 2.0" (1997).
The dominant mind-set in high
tech today, Ms. Borsook argues, is
libertarianism -- in its many manifestations, from laissez-faire free-market economics to a more virulent
form of "anarcho-capitalism." It
boasts an ugly, selfish code of behavior and functions as a perfect mirror
of the dark side of our "winner-take-all casino society." Many techies
also evince an aggrieved, adversarial attitude toward the establishment
or, in tech-speak, TPTB, "The Powers That Be." There is a tone of
adolescent paranoia reminiscent in
equal parts of "The X-Files" and
"Falling Down" to many technolibertarian exchanges; a sense, in Ms.
Borsook's words, of "testosterone-poisoned guys with chips on their
shoulders and too much time on their
hands."
Ms. Borsook contends that many
of the favorite arguments of technolibertarians come from "bionomics"
-- that is, they like to use metaphors
drawn from biology to explain economic behavior and endorse a decentralized free-market system. Reduced to a bumper slogan, Ms. Borsook writes, bionomics states that
"the economy is a rain forest"; in
other words, it suggests that "no one
can manage or engineer a rain forest, and rain forests are happiest
when they are left alone to evolve,
which will then benefit all the happy
monkeys, pretty butterflies and funny tapirs that live in them."
This social Darwinism not only
fails to afford protection to those less
equipped to flourish in the jungle --
those "hypersensitive maladaptive
no-commercial-potential individuals" -- but in Ms. Borsook's opinion
also fails to ensure the triumph of the
best. "It's a dirty little secret in high
tech that superior marketing and
inferior technology will beat out superior technology and inferior marketing every time," she writes, "and
that other factors, aside from Darwinian fitness, determine which
technologies and which companies
thrive or perish."
Ms. Borsook makes it clear that
she shares many of the libertarians'
most fundamental assumptions --
"What I most want is to be left
alone," she writes. "I don't have that
will to power that would ever suggest
that I know how to tell other people
how to live their lives" -- and she
criticizes the United States government for what she calls its "mostly
awful handling of free speech and
privacy as these relate to technology."
But while she comes down hard on
federal efforts to curtail digital privacy, calling them a violation of civil
liberties and due process, she is
equally tough on those technolibertarians who extrapolate their anger
at the feds' stand on cryptography
(encoding used for security purposes) to the government at large.
"For the most part," she observes,
"the government has made Silicon
Valley a fine and dandy, safe and
regularized place to make scads of
money. A gargantuan infrastructure
of suppliers and educational institutions, directly and indirectly subsidized by the government, nurtured
the defense-electronics industry,
which formed the substrate for today's high tech industry."
She is equally impatient with what
she sees as high tech's insular selfishness -- its gonzo, go-it-alone individualism animated, she says, by a
crippling blindness to human frailty
and imperfection. She argues that
techies' love of machines and rule-based programming leaves them ill-equipped to deal with emotions and
such unquantifiable things as art,
that this is why the digerati often
prefer to escape the real world for a
virtual one and demonstrate little
sense of civic responsibility.
There are passages in "Cyberselfish" where Ms. Borsook's fervor
gets the better of her fair-mindedness. Her portrait of a former Reagan speechwriter, George Gilder -- a
hero to the conservative wing of high
tech just as the former Grateful
Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow remains the avatar of its neo-hippie
wing -- turns into an angry rant; and
her assessment of high tech's philanthropic record verges on the churlish, taking the digerati to task for the
sort of donations (often computer-based in nature) that they choose to
make.
For the most part, however, Ms.
Borsook combines common sense
with an old-fashioned humanism to
make sense of the current high-tech
gestalt. She has done a nimble job of
tracing the digerati's libertarian
roots in the counterculture of the 60's
and the Reaganism of the 80's, and
she proves equally adept at exploring the social and political fallout of
their cultural ascendance.
