The Forum with Paulina Borsook: Cyberselfish

About this event

“Would be even funnier if it weren’t also so scary.” —The Christian Science Monitor Twenty-six years after the original publication of Cyberselfish, Paulina Borsook’s “smart, funny and irreverent” (The New York Times) critique of high-tech culture reads as a remarkably prescient assessment of an ethos that has seeped into nearly every corner of our world. Cyberselfish identified the warning signs of a culture profoundly lacking in compassion, deeply suspicious of regulation, more comfortable with computers than people, and surprisingly ignorant of history and politics. It also exposed the contradictions beneath Silicon Valley’s mythology of self-reliance: a culture whose extraordinary success was made possible in significant part by massive government investment, yet whose leaders often embraced Ayn Rand, the primacy of shareholder value, and a suspicion of the public institutions that helped make their success possible. Borsook foresaw that as technology companies reached unprecedented levels of wealth and influence, their leaders would come to believe that success in one sphere entitled them to greater power in others. Today, as tech titans have inserted themselves ever more deeply into politics, culture, education, media, and public life, Borsook’s insights seem more relevant than ever. What happens when the people shaping public policy and society at large possess enormous technological and economic power, but little understanding of history, political institutions, or—perhaps most importantly—how to live with other human beings? Cyberselfish called this the true revenge of the nerds. Join Malcolm Clemens Young for a conversation with Borsook about the assumptions that shaped the early digital age, what they have wrought, and what they might teach us now. Can we imagine a digital culture oriented not simply toward innovation and individual success, but toward human flourishing and the common good? Buy Cyberselfish. Books will also be available for…

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