Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Occasional audio recorded during happenings at Local Economy in Oakland, California. We're interested in community resilience, ecological sanity, weird books, civic life in the Bay, and interesting people. Many book events co-hosted with East Bay Booksellers.
Local Economy — Episode 1
Paulina Borsook on her book, Cyberselfish
Hosted by Alexis Madrigal · Recorded live at Local Economy, Oakland, September 17
Duration: 64:20
Transcript generated automatically, then labeled and corrected. Audience questions were mostly inaudible on the recording and are marked as such. [unclear] marks words that couldn't be made out.
---
[0:00] SARAH RICH: Hi, this is Sarah Rich.
ALEXIS MADRIGAL: And I'm Alexis Madrigal.
SARAH RICH: And we are the founders of Local Economy in Oakland, California. Local Economy is a community resilience hub and event space where we have loads of different kinds of events happening, from literary events to craft workshops to repair gatherings and lots of other things. And so because we do so many different things, local and in-person, we decided we wanted to start recording some of them and putting them out in some kind of podcast form.
ALEXIS MADRIGAL: Up first, we did an event with Paulina Borsook, who's the author of an amazing, strange book, first published in 2000, called Cyberselfish, which is this incredible travelogue through the tech industry and its associated hangers-on and ideologues in the late 1990s. I got the chance to interview her. So you're going to hear me and Paulina Borsook live at Local Economy in Oakland, California, on September 17. Here it is. Oh, special, special thanks to John Rieger, who recorded this. I can't promise all the rest of the recordings in this podcast are going to be of similar quality. But maybe they will be. Who knows? Maybe John will come back. So here we go. Paulina Borsook and me, Alexis Madrigal, live at Local Economy.
[1:24] ALEXIS MADRIGAL: Hello, everyone. Hello. Welcome. Welcome to Local Economy. I'm Alexis Madrigal, one of the people who founded this place with my wife, Sarah, and our kids, and the encouragement of Brad — so I can blame him for all this — next door at East Bay Booksellers. We're very excited about tonight. We're here to hear about Cyberselfish, which really marks an era. It's like a milestone in the critical thinking about Silicon Valley. Of course, there were books before it that were critical of Silicon Valley, like the books of David Noble, America by Design. And there is a long and storied tradition.
[2:05] But [this is] about the particular moment that we're living in now, in which a set of people who really marinated in this '90s technology scene have suddenly become the richest, most powerful, and also fascist-aligned people in the world. It's fascinating to revisit this kind of prologue to our current moment. The book has been called a romp, and it really is that. It feels like a travelogue. We get to go on dates with Paulina — which I'm sure now we should be posting about in the modern era — with very odd but kind of interesting people. We get to hear about her fights with the early founding editors of Wired over their sexism, among other things. It's really a trip into this techno-libertarian world, as she describes it, which kind of went into hiding for 10 or 20 years during the era when Google and the US government kind of had a revolving door, like it was Goldman Sachs or something. And then going into the 2020s, it kind of came back like some sort of metastatic cancer that had been hanging out.
So we're going to talk about the book and what's in it. But I also heard, in some ways, she's sick to death of this book. So we're also going to talk about this time that we're living in now, where technologists who in a previous era would have not wanted state intervention now would like to merge with the state in some ways, and how their ideas have evolved. So please welcome Paulina Borsook.
[3:54] ALEXIS MADRIGAL: So at the time you wrote this book — you started in the late '90s, it comes out in 2000, right? What were you trying to do with the book? Like, what was the goal at that time?
[4:04] PAULINA BORSOOK: Actually, I blame everything — I blame the entire thing on my agent, who actually picked up on me after I just got my MFA from Columbia in fiction. And he said, well, getting fiction published is really hard. Do you have a nonfiction idea that you might want to pursue? I blame him. And so I said, well, there's this strange subculture that no one knows anything about that I am really curious about, and I don't understand it. And as I always say, if I don't understand something, I want to write about it, meaning I want to explore it. So I blame him.
ALEXIS MADRIGAL: That's just slightly closer to you. Is that better? A little bit up and then down.
PAULINA BORSOOK: OK, I blame him. That's the genesis of this book. And then also, I have the curse of pattern recognition. And I just began to sense this thing — what is this? — and just kept my antenna alert to this subculture. And then when he tried to sell the book in New York — and he's a fabulous agent — no one was interested. It was like, we don't write books about the culture of Detroit autoworkers, so why should we care about the culture of Silicon Valley?
[5:10] And I was like, I don't even know what to say here. So the great thing was that Mother Jones — I knew some of the people there. And I sent them a copy of the proposal. And of course, I'm a terrible proposal writer. And they said, we don't want to publish your proposal, but we want you to pull an essay out of this. So in one weekend, I pulled a 3,000-word essay out of that proposal. And they basically accepted it right away. And they came up with the name, Cyberselfish. And my title for it was going to be "My Visit to the Hall of the Mountain Kings," which is where the trolls guard the gold, right? But nobody got the reference. And I was shouted down. And people liked the Mother Jones title.
ALEXIS MADRIGAL: And everything had to have "cyber" at that time also.
PAULINA BORSOOK: Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, I can never make my case. So that's why it's called Cyberselfish. I'm really grateful to Mother Jones, but I much prefer "My Visit to the Hall of the Mountain Kings." Because as you said, it's kind of a travelogue. So that's what happened. And I think more than I realized — when I started writing for Wired, Louis Rossetto was handing out copies of The New Journalism, which is a certain way of writing. It's kind of personal. You bring yourself into it. It's more literary than just straight reportage, right?
ALEXIS MADRIGAL: Tom Wolfe.
PAULINA BORSOOK: Yeah. Right. And so I came from that tradition. And also, I'm someone whose brain was rotted by the Village Voice in the 1970s. This is what writing can be. And so I had in my head the model of, you can write a book in this particular way, with a strong point of view, but get your facts straight, and it will be OK.
I mean, the Behind the Music story of what I call TDB — that damn book — is it went through a very difficult publishing history, which we don't need to go into. It was originally supposed to be published by Wired's book imprint.
ALEXIS MADRIGAL: Right.
PAULINA BORSOOK: But then that went away for complicated reasons. And then I got picked up by what was the hot imprint at the time. It was called Broadway Books. And I made the stupid decision. I thought, oh, for once, be practical. Go with the imprint that is the hot one in town. There's a lot more money. It did not work out. It was not a happy marriage. So they killed it for insufficient literary quality.
[7:22] ALEXIS MADRIGAL: Wait, did they write that on the top in red ink?
PAULINA BORSOOK: Well, there are legitimate reasons to kill a book, and insufficient literary quality is one of them. So my agent, to his infinite credit, was able to find another home for it at PublicAffairs. It's very hard to sell a completed manuscript that's been rejected by somebody else. So I ended up at PublicAffairs, which was a wonderful home. And that's Peter Osnos — really serious policy books. They were great. I adored my editor. But the problem is I still owed all the advance to Broadway. So all the money from PublicAffairs went to Broadway. And I still owed a kazillion dollars to Broadway and had nothing to live on. That's part of why I call it that damn book. I paid such a price for this book.
So it was very strange to me when the book first came out. It was well and widely reviewed. People tend to like it. It had good responses. I had fun on book tour. I can't complain that it was ignored. That didn't happen. It just didn't sell. And then when the media arc was over, I was totally on a desert island, is how I describe it. And I couldn't get published again. I couldn't get a fellowship. I couldn't get a teaching gig. It was just like the book put a curse on my life, which is another reason why it's that damn book — because my career came to an end. I couldn't get anything published, whether a magazine article, a book, on tech, not on tech. It really had its evil [unclear] claws into me. And I just felt ashamed of it, because something that kills your career is something to be ashamed of.
So this wonderful reputational renaissance of the last year has just been — I've been rehabilitated. I want to make it clear I had nothing to do with it. Nothing. It just kind of came creeping out of the internet, this whole reputational renaissance. And I name various people in the afterword that contributed to it. Some who are here — Gil Duran. Thanks for that. Gil Duran has been amazing. And David Streitfeld in the New York Times. But then a million other people. And it's like, I'm just sort of like, wow, I guess it was OK.
[9:29] ALEXIS MADRIGAL: Gosh, I'm not going to make you dwell on that for too much longer. It is fascinating — very sad.
PAULINA BORSOOK: Tragic, really, is more what it is.
ALEXIS MADRIGAL: I mean, one of the things that does make it interesting, and I wonder how this has played into its renaissance: it really feels like your position in this is not really as an outsider. Like when I was reading this book, I was like, oh, these are probably the thoughts that I would have been having, at least some subset of them, if I had just been around these people in the '90s. You just really come across as a very reasonable person who's like, I don't know, maybe we need government to test water to see if it has lead in it. I mean, it seemed like this libertarian position was so obviously goofy. And you were just kind of like, hey, that's goofy. And that's like a lot of the things in the book.
PAULINA BORSOOK: I think that's true, because one of the things that was so confusing to me is, here you have people living in the Bay Area with incredible natural beauty. A lot of these people love going to Yosemite. They like to take [unclear] to parks. They love going to Tahoe. How do you think all that happened? What keeps them functioning and beautiful and safe? That's the government. And the thing is, it's been very weird to me as an old hippie to be defending government, because I grew up on the anti-war movement. So to be sitting here defending the government — but then again, I realized government is a lot of different things. It can be benign. It can subsidize things. It can support all kinds of wonderful things, as well as doing terrible things. It's not one thing.
And when I was writing it, I was already in the state where I think I call myself a left libertarian. It's like, I'm a much bigger believer in regulation than subsidy. Subsidy, I think, gets gamed a lot. But regulation is really, really important. And I was very aware of all the good things that government could do. And I cannot tell you what a strange experience that was for me as someone who went to anti-war marches in the '60s. But I try to be intellectually honest and say there's another aspect to it.
[11:31] ALEXIS MADRIGAL: How do you think about, as part of Silicon Valley mythology, that one of its parents is the counterculture, getting filtered through these various figures? Your Steve Wozniak, your Jobs.
PAULINA BORSOOK: OK. There was a talk given by John Markoff a couple months ago. And I went to it. And he said something I thought was really, really smart, which is that Silicon Valley is a multicultural place — by which he did not necessarily mean your country of origin. What he meant was there's all different kinds of people there with all different kinds of attitudes, which I think is really right. So in terms of the counterculture narrative, which I know is very popular — yeah, that was there. But so was the military-industrial complex. I don't think the guys at Xerox PARC were doing shrooms. I mean, maybe they were. But I kind of doubt it. In other words, it's not one thing. And the counterculture — what is it? What's the name of Fred Turner's book?
ALEXIS MADRIGAL: From Counterculture to Cyberculture.
PAULINA BORSOOK: Right. I'm not saying it's wrong, but it's not all of it, I guess. Because to me, when I stumbled into this culture, it just seemed initially like the STEM culture I'd grown up around at Caltech, JPL. That's what the parents of the kids that I knew [did]. That's what it struck me as initially. So that's why, when this weirdo anti-government thing [came up], I thought, who do you think has been funding all this research for all these decades? I just didn't understand it. I still don't.
[13:01] ALEXIS MADRIGAL: One of the things — you split out the techno-libertarians as the sort of, like, two—
PAULINA BORSOOK: Oh, the Ravers and Gilders.
ALEXIS MADRIGAL: Moieties? Is that how you say that word? Sent me looking it up. Two camps of techno-libertarians. The Ravers, who I think most of us are probably kind of familiar with. We associate them with Burning Man, John Perry Barlow, that side of things. The part that I think is really interesting is I can't remember people talking about what you called the Gilders.
PAULINA BORSOOK: That was my name for them. No one else called them that. I named it after George Gilder, who was sort of a — I'm just curious, how many people have heard that name before? Dang. Wow. That's fine. I think he's still around. He was sort of a — I guess we'd call it now a thought leader, I guess. And I think he was pushing, like, broadband. I don't remember. But he was very much a cultural conservative. And I definitely saw people that resonated with that, that they were sort of linking intellectually with other conservative think tanks and all this kind of stuff. And that was kind of a surprise to me, but I had to admit that [it was] another subculture that was in Silicon Valley, and of course is very libertarian in the sense of, keep your laws off my corporations, don't tell me what to do with my kids. I mean, I think he's an observant Christian, in other words. I was surprised by it, but it was a definite subculture.
[14:35] ALEXIS MADRIGAL: I mean, it was just the very earliest reference that I had seen to kind of, like, the tradwife dream of the tech bro. You also cover the rise of polyamory — it's like a very extensive fisking in this book. And that, of course, if you moved to San Francisco in the 2000s, like I did, it was all over the place. That was sort of the dominant tech culture. But this part of it, which has now come around again in the — your Peter Thiel, your conservative Catholic tech people — that I thought is totally brilliant, that you identified this strain. That it was there.
PAULINA BORSOOK: That it was there. It was there and it was ready to come. It's kind of like anthrax spores in the soil. It's ready to erupt. Wait for the right conditions.
ALEXIS MADRIGAL: Exactly.
PAULINA BORSOOK: Yeah, that kind of — I wasn't happy to see it. I think — see, what I see, I always say this, but I think it's really true: I think the Netscape IPO ruined everything, because that's when people realized — the Wall Streeters realized — how much money there was to be made. And then all of a sudden, the stockholder theory of value took over Silicon Valley in a way that it really had not been there before. And so when you were saying this stuff kind of went underground — it sort of did, but I see it as more like, I love these biological metaphors, Giardia getting into the aquifers. These ideas were out there. They were spreading. And when things like Uber and Airbnb came along, those were just pure financial plays. And they really, to me, strangled the subculture. So maybe it was underground, but it was percolating along, and it wasn't gone.
What I also think is that in the 2000s, because of the dot-com crash, people never wanted to think about this stuff anymore anyway. Then we had 9/11, so people really didn't want to think about this. And then I think people began to be interested in social media and smartphones. So no one was really paying attention to Silicon Valley, the companies, their values. People just weren't thinking about it. And watching how, let's say, Google went bad, for lack of a better term — Google didn't start out being loathsome. But this culture is so strong that that's what you gotta do, I guess. I don't know if that's an answer to your question.
[16:59] ALEXIS MADRIGAL: Yeah, I mean, I think I have a sort of adjacent question, which is just that in this book, you do try and figure out: why did this happen? Was it a necessary component of this technological change that we've seen, from, let's say, 1970 to now, that it would have this politics smuggled inside of it, or not?
[17:24] PAULINA BORSOOK: I kind of think of a weirdo analogy to it. First of all, I really believe you can have innovation without these nasty politics, so it doesn't have to be like this. But what I have come to think of as sort of an analogy is — do you guys remember the rise of the redneck hippies in the '70s? They kind of took on this sort of countercultural rebel outsider thing of the counterculture, right? And drugs and sex and rock and roll, but they had scary sort of right-wing politics. And I remember being very confused by them, but I began to see evidence of them. And I sort of feel like this is maybe the Silicon Valley equivalent of that. You kind of pick and choose what's in the culture that suits you. I don't know if that's really an answer to your question, but...
[18:11] ALEXIS MADRIGAL: Well, you give a few different explanations in the book, I think. I mean, one of them is that there is a kind of geographic thing to it. One of your friends says, yeah, this is kind of like the story of the West, right? You get the government to come in and do the heavy lifting, and then you take all the money—
PAULINA BORSOOK: That's right.
ALEXIS MADRIGAL: —and tell the government to leave.
PAULINA BORSOOK: That's right.
ALEXIS MADRIGAL: And there's a few others. I mean, you offer some more cultural explanations of it as well. Like just that these people weren't really there when Silicon Valley was Lockheed Missiles and Space, when Silicon Valley was taking most of its money from the government. They just sort of encounter microelectronics all around them as if it's this magical thing, and imagine that it didn't have this sort of government investment. And so therefore, they're sort of spoiled brats who don't know it.
[19:05] PAULINA BORSOOK: Totally spoiled brats. Well, and also, I just keep on coming back to the problem with Prop 13, which is that— No, I'm not kidding.
ALEXIS MADRIGAL: We should make a Local Economy rule that every conversation must mention Prop 13.
PAULINA BORSOOK: Has to bring up Prop 13. That a lot of these people, when they arrived in Silicon Valley, California was falling apart because of Prop 13. And so they'd never seen an example of government working. And so therefore, government was bad. So I think it had become invisible to them. And of course, none of them know history or anything else. And they don't know much about the place that they're living in. So I think a hidden contributor to all this was Prop 13, in a sort of background kind of way.
[19:51] ALEXIS MADRIGAL: I think it's worth reflecting a little bit. Some of the people in this book who have something like this politics, or a version of it — you actually kind of like some of them.
PAULINA BORSOOK: Yeah.
ALEXIS MADRIGAL: What was it that you did like about some of the individuals, if not the overarching culture?
[20:06] PAULINA BORSOOK: Oh, why do you like anybody? I know. I mean, they're smart, they're warm. They've got a good sense of humor. We can talk about things. We can agree to disagree. I mean, why do you like anybody? And also, I think it's important to point this out as well: the Silicon Valley that I knew was not like the rest of the country — was not so rigidly ideological as it is now. And it wasn't so polarized. And I think of some of my friends who are these people. I think it amused them to have sort of this Berkeley feminist hippie friend that was still sort of tolerable, and we had things to talk about.
The person I love talking about is Tim May — T.C. May — one of the original three cypherpunks on that cover of Wired. And he was living in Santa Cruz, and I was at a party at his house. And I was looking at his bookshelf, and he had novels by Thomas Pynchon, John Dos Passos. He had CDs of Wiseguy, which was this incredible TV show. And I kind of looked around and I go, who is this guy? In other words, this is a person worth getting to know. And we could talk about things. I'm pathologically curious. And if someone comes across as a decent human being, I'm perfectly willing to get to know them better. I know that's maybe not what you're supposed to say, but that's how I felt. And why they put up with me, I can't answer.
[21:24] ALEXIS MADRIGAL: I do think that some of the enduring quality of the book, though, is that it doesn't feel like you're just strafing everyone at random. You really are going, like, that one's bad, that one's okay, that guy's pretty interesting, that one's truly horrible. Which feels like a useful thing to have done.
PAULINA BORSOOK: Right, right, right. Well, and also I was judging them as human beings. And we could agree — and this doesn't go on anymore — but we could agree to disagree on politics. Or they were open to listening, that I might have a different point of view. And that's what I look for in people: that there's a kind of flexibility of mind, as opposed to, you have to hew to this checklist of what's acceptable behavior or positions, or you have to leave the room. I don't like that quality in anybody. I mean, I'm not a true believer, so.
[22:12] ALEXIS MADRIGAL: I was hoping you could talk — kind of trying to pull out some of the threads that feel to me particularly prescient. The whole thing is, but there's some elements of this that really other people did not see and did not talk about. And the thing that gets the longest treatment that I think has that quality is around Bionomics.
PAULINA BORSOOK: Oh, Bionomics, yeah. And I was really good friends with those people. See, that's another example.
ALEXIS MADRIGAL: In part — this is just for people who haven't encountered this before — this is the way that they took their ideas about free-market ideology and kind of naturalized them through presenting them as about biology.
PAULINA BORSOOK: That's right: economy is ecosystem. I can still recite the name of what it is. And the thing is, a lot of their ideas were seductive, and they were like 50% right, is what I would say. And the real problem is they didn't really understand their biology, and they didn't understand the problem with free markets without regulation, because all free markets develop towards monopolies without regulation. But I was just there to be friends with them, and they invited me to their conferences for free. And it was my first real exposure to sort of right-wing think tank people, like the Discovery Institute. I mean, I kind of had early warning systems about a lot of this stuff.
ALEXIS MADRIGAL: Cato.
PAULINA BORSOOK: Cato, for sure. Oh, I have a great Cato story. When I did a reading at Politics and Prose in DC when the book came out, a bunch of young people who worked at Cato, who wore black raincoats, showed up at the reading to picket me.
ALEXIS MADRIGAL: They picketed you?
PAULINA BORSOOK: Yes, yes. And I went outside and said, why don't you come in? I'd love to talk to you. And they kind of slunk away off into the rain. And it's like, wow, this really got you going in some way. You know, another thing — people send me weird stuff now. Excuse me.
ALEXIS MADRIGAL: I bet people have always sent you weird stuff.
PAULINA BORSOOK: Well, more so, because I'm more visible again. Anyway, there's a documentary running on PBS now called, I think, Ghost in the Machine, I think is what it's called. Anyway, there's a clip in there that was taken from that reading at Politics and Prose. And it freaks me out, because it's like, how did I know that then? And the line that people like is, yeah, they just consider community as a bunch of suckers that we can narrowcast our marketing to. And it's like, gosh, that was 25 years ago at Politics and Prose. So I don't know. Am I answering your question? Probably not.
ALEXIS MADRIGAL: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
PAULINA BORSOOK: Okay.
[24:41] ALEXIS MADRIGAL: But I do — I think I want to stay in the Bionomics thing just for a second, only because it feels like one of the spores that's still a little bit out there.
PAULINA BORSOOK: Yes.
ALEXIS MADRIGAL: When I was encountering people thinking about economies as ecosystems, I didn't necessarily think of that as a right-wing idea. I just sort of encountered it as something kind of interesting.
[25:00] PAULINA BORSOOK: It is kind of interesting, but it's definitely right-wing. In other words, they were people that actively fostered this idea. They had conferences about it. They were really adamant about getting this idea into the world. And to their credit, when they felt like the metaphor had taken over, they shut it down. Like, our job here is done. And I also think it's funny that Michael Rothschild, who was sort of behind it — he started a company called Applied Bionomics, which I don't think worked very well. But okay, not all businesses do well. Anyway, I'm sorry, go on.
ALEXIS MADRIGAL: No, no, no, I like it too. You sort of gesture at "this is probably not gonna work well" in the book.
[25:43] Obviously you got many things right, observed many subtle signals, and turned them into this overarching theory of what was happening. What didn't you anticipate over this time?
PAULINA BORSOOK: What I really didn't anticipate was the sort of disappearance of the, like, Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, or the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition. I didn't anticipate that all that — I guess we'd now say countervailing forces — I didn't anticipate that all that would go away. I really did not understand that. And also, there was that wonderful conference, Computers, Freedom and Privacy, which is long gone. And I don't think there's anything like it anymore. And it was an amazing place for everyone — law enforcement, hackers, computer science, ACLU people — for everyone to get together and talk in a civil way. And I learned so much going to those conferences, because every issue that's come out since came up at a CFP in the '90s. And I didn't anticipate — okay, I guess these things come and go, but I don't see anything else as having replaced it. Partly, I think, because we live in a much more polarized and shrieky and nasty society. And CFP was not that. But I didn't anticipate that all those other voices — I don't think they were suppressed. I just think they died, they retired, they got bored or fed up. It's just kind of not around anymore.
[27:13] ALEXIS MADRIGAL: I mean, I guess politically, aren't we in a moment where some nastiness is kind of required?
PAULINA BORSOOK: I certainly know rage bait sells, if that's what you're saying.
ALEXIS MADRIGAL: No, I guess I mean, if we're serious that we're facing, like, a—
PAULINA BORSOOK: Existential crisis.
ALEXIS MADRIGAL: —takeover of our government by the forces of technology that you've identified. I mean, nastiness doesn't seem like the worst crime in response.
[27:36] PAULINA BORSOOK: I tend to be practical, which is: will nastiness get you what you want? I don't know. I tend to think — weirdly, after TDB was written, I inadvertently ended up involved with a couple of different local, regional activist issues, and mostly we won. I would say mostly we won. Everyone had a strong voice, had their facts, showed up. But it wasn't the nasty voices that won. Now, admittedly, those are regional issues. But — okay, and there are people — sometimes nastiness works. And I'm on the side of what works. And if nastiness will work, great. But it's not my mode. And I'm not always convinced it's the most effective mode. Is that a fair answer?
ALEXIS MADRIGAL: No, I mean, that's more or less my answer, but I think—
[28:26] One of the fun things in this book is that, up against the techno-utopian visions, which continue to float — also another reason Netscape's IPO was maybe a bad idea: it gave a lot of money to Marc Andreessen, who's gone on to found Andreessen Horowitz. I guess many people know this particular venture capital firm.
PAULINA BORSOOK: Right.
ALEXIS MADRIGAL: And up against that, you, along with — it's a really interesting list of signatories here, including Steve Silberman, rest in peace, who was a culture writer at Wired News at the time, Steven Johnson, and a bunch of other people — created this thing called the Technorealism manifesto. Which I kind of love. [To audience] She was rolling her eyes when I was like, look, I got it right here. She was like, ugh.
[29:16] PAULINA BORSOOK: No, no, I agreed with what it is they said they were trying to do. The problem was, it became clear to me really quickly that this existed to promote the individual careers of the people that were involved. And I don't participate — I'm not an Amway lady. I don't participate in marketing schemes, right? And it wasn't clear to me that it would help my career. And it disappeared pretty quickly. I didn't disagree with the ideas, but it just kind of self-annihilated, I would say, within six months. So it's not that it was wrong; it just didn't go anywhere.
[29:48] ALEXIS MADRIGAL: I mean, I'm just trying to imagine a technology industry that more or less had these precepts, right? Technologies are not neutral. The internet is revolutionary, but not utopian. Government has an important role to play on the electronic frontier. Information is not knowledge. Wiring the schools will not save them. Information wants to be protected. The public owns the airwaves; the public should benefit from their use. And understanding technology should be an essential component of global citizenship. And wouldn't it be pretty—
PAULINA BORSOOK: You'd think so. Yeah. Yeah. As I said, I didn't disagree with any of it, but as an entity, it disappeared within about six months.
[30:25] ALEXIS MADRIGAL: Do you think that it's just because it didn't have that, like, let's-put-you-on-the-cover-of-a-magazine [quality]? Like, it's too reasonable.
PAULINA BORSOOK: Yeah, it's too reasonable.
ALEXIS MADRIGAL: Well, it's true, like the sane moderate center no one cares about. Everyone wants to scream at each other.
[30:39] PAULINA BORSOOK: I don't really know why it disappeared. I think it's because, in a funny way, there was no reason for it to exist. Everyone was off pursuing their own career. How could you promote this as an agenda? If you have these values and these points of view, that's great, but where does it get you? In other words, there was nothing wrong with it. It just kind of crumbled.
ALEXIS MADRIGAL: That's interesting. Let's talk a little bit about the situation today.
PAULINA BORSOOK: Okay.
[31:12] ALEXIS MADRIGAL: What do you see? I mean, you're obviously sensitive to many signals. So what are you seeing out there?
[31:22] PAULINA BORSOOK: Well, I'm a teeny bit encouraged by the pushback against data centers. I'm a teeny bit encouraged by people going after their Flock cameras. That's really good. I'm encouraged that people are beginning to realize that AI is just a damn Ponzi scheme. And so there's just beginning to be that kind of awareness. So, you know, I don't make predictions about the future. I'm just saying, more quickly than I would have thought, I'm beginning to see some shakiness in the edifice, I would say. And that's not much of a signal, but that's what I'd say.
[31:59] ALEXIS MADRIGAL: I guess, why do you think the data center pushback has been so effective?
PAULINA BORSOOK: I think when people can see it in their own backyard. And also, a lot of people are thinking, okay, you hear, oh, AI is gonna cure cancer, it's gonna do whatever. Well, no one I know, mostly, has seen really great value from AI. And meanwhile, you've got this thing that causes your utility rates to go up, affects your water. You know, what are we getting out of this? I think it's just, you know, all politics is local kind of thing. That's just my theory, that's why.
[32:31] ALEXIS MADRIGAL: I've just been totally fascinated by it, because I agree with you that it's one of the more heartening political signals out there. But sometimes people are like, I don't want a data center, I want a logistics facility there. And having written about logistics facilities, I'm like, I don't think you actually want a logistics facility there any more than you want a data center. But there's no comparable pushback.
[32:54] PAULINA BORSOOK: I think with data centers, though — and I could be wrong here, but people bring up the noise — I think its negatives are easier for people to see than what's wrong with a logistics center, is what I would say. I don't know.
ALEXIS MADRIGAL: But it's interesting — like, trucks are going out of a logistics center, you know. For me, it's almost felt like — I read a great dissertation about blight. All this bad stuff was happening in, like, 1950 American cities with buildings, but people didn't really have a way to talk about it. And they were like, wait, there's this set of things that are happening — what do we do? And eventually they named it blight, and they did all these terrible things in the name of that — urban renewal. This is almost like the positive version of this, where they're sort of like, we don't have a way to talk about everything that we're mad about that's happening in the technology industry. And so data centers are the way.
[33:45] PAULINA BORSOOK: It's a good thing to latch onto. And also, I think with data centers, for some people, it makes them connect the dots. What is this in service of? What will it actually do? What is this industry actually about? I think for some people, they have a little bit of a more general political awakening from it.
[34:06] I read a funny thing about this somewhere. You probably know this, but someone was criticizing the AI industry. And they said, you know, every single time one of these data centers comes in, they always say it will create 250 permanent jobs. They always use the number 250. In other words, it's a talking point that somebody gave them. And 250 sounds like a meaningful amount of jobs, but the fact that it's the same number no matter where the data center's going in — I thought, that's perfect astroturf.
[34:36] ALEXIS MADRIGAL: What about some of the people that you — I was thinking about a lot of our current class of billionaires, and I guess trillionaire types. What you're writing about in the book is exactly the moment in which they are coming into their first fortunes. Are there things that you know from having been there that we should be looking out for in them, even more than is already obvious?
[35:04] PAULINA BORSOOK: I'm not sure I understand the question, because I went to a green tech conference in, like, 2008, '09, and Musk was there. And he was — I hate to tell you this — he seemed perfectly reasonable then. He hadn't taken all the ketamine yet, maybe. But a lot of these people have devolved; they've just gotten much worse with time. So it's hard to say, well, what should I have been looking for, where do they go? I mean, this level of kind of sociopathic stupidity that these people exhibit — it just wasn't that acute back then.
Just like the women issue was different then. I got together with a couple of friends of mine — women working in technology in the '80s and '90s — a couple of weeks ago. And we all talked about how, yeah, there were bad bosses. No, it wasn't perfect. But this weird sociobiological retro nonsense that you see in Silicon Valley — it just was not there. It was a much better environment for women working in tech. And I don't just mean in the pink collar of documentation. These are women working in all kinds of roles, and it was much more, okay, can you do the job? Okay, fine. And it's a kind of backsliding that I would not have expected. And also — well, I'm sorry. No, I'm repeating myself, so ask another question.
[36:30] ALEXIS MADRIGAL: Well, I wanna turn it over, actually, so that folks have a chance to ask you some questions.
PAULINA BORSOOK: Is it also okay for me to say that I wrote a lot of stuff that wasn't just TDB? I wrote a lot of pieces that to me were really relevant to the technology culture at the time. And so, working with my friend John Rieger here, we created some four- or five-minute discussions of these pieces that are still relevant, because I'm always having the thing of, yes, I wrote about that 30 years ago. And so we parked them on my YouTube channel, and I hope somebody bothers to go. But anyway, I wrote other stuff aside from TDB. I know a book is a cultural object, and that's how people can kind of know you. But I wrote a lot of other stuff.
[37:13] ALEXIS MADRIGAL: What's one of your favorites from that?
PAULINA BORSOOK: Let me think. Well, there are two that come to mind right away. One is — and it's sort of related to TDB — this humor piece I wrote for Suck. They called it "Sex and the Single URL." It's the Cosmo Girl's Guide to Dating Technolibertarians. That is spooky. Go back and read it. And then — I don't think you were at Wired then — but HotWired used to have this thing called Brain Tennis, where they'd have kind of like point-counterpoint.
PAULINA BORSOOK: Yeah, point-counterpoint. So the first one they did, it was indeed with Max More, Mr. Extropian. And so we had a square-off. And what's really weird, going back and reading it now: none of these issues have gone away. When I did it at the time, the editors of HotWired went, wow, you're really wiping the floor with him. Now you go back and read it and go, I bet a lot of people reading this don't even understand what my objections are. And they're totally on the side of where Max is coming from. So that was a little freaky. But anyway, we have other—
[38:13] ALEXIS MADRIGAL: Wait, tell me about the Extropians. Tell us about the Extropians a little bit.
PAULINA BORSOOK: Okay, [unclear]. They believe in using technology to enhance life. And maybe you can upload your brain into a computer and go to Venus, and you're maximizing human potential. Is that a fair description of them? And that mindset is extremely common in Silicon Valley these days. And at the time it was sort of fringe. Entertaining, but fringe. I mean, maybe that makes me a bad person — that I found these people more entertaining than not, as opposed to seeing them as a serious threat. And yeah, just that.
[39:03] ALEXIS MADRIGAL: All right, who's got a question? Okay, we got right here.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: [Question about Borsook's fiction for Wired — largely inaudible]
PAULINA BORSOOK: Well, there's backstory with that. When I was at Columbia, I did my MFA thesis on how the new information technologies — this was 1991 — were deforming relationships. And I had a whole bunch of these. And then "Love Over the Wires" was this novella-length thing. Basically, it was the first documentation, in a fictional way, of email adultery. No one had ever written about this before. And when I was marching it around New York to all the literary magazines, [they said] this is unrealistic, and who cares about these people? Typical New York reaction. And so Wired had just come out, and I got a copy of it. And I thought, well, maybe they will get this. This was a very different time. I emailed Louis Rossetto, who was the editor-in-chief, on a Friday, and on a Monday, he said, we'll run it. And that's my relationship with Wired. And then once that came out, they said, well, maybe you could do some other stuff for us. And that's how it happened. And it was, again, one of these things I wrote in a three-week fugue state. I just sat down and it came pouring out of me. And I think it still holds up.
[40:25] ALEXIS MADRIGAL: And it was one of the few pieces of fiction Wired ever ran. And we can still read it, right? I mean, it's online?
PAULINA BORSOOK: Yeah, yeah. And the thing is, Wired, when it got started — and this is something I really appreciated — it was a much more literary kind of magazine. And they were open to all kinds of things. People may not remember this: I did a lot of humor pieces for Wired. And it was kind of like, anything goes if it's within our sensibility. And the sensibility was broad, and it was deep, and it was literary. And then it became more ideological, and very much more propaganda-ish, and more of a business publication. And obviously that was not gonna work out for me in the long term, because that's not what I do.
And also — I don't know if I should say this — how much was I still finding what was going on in the technology world that interesting? I'm not so sure. We had the dot-com crash, and so a lot of my liberal arts flake friends lost their jobs. A lot of the promise of that — do you remember when South Park used to be called Multimedia Gulch? Do you remember that? I mean the neighborhood of South Park. I don't mean the TV show.
ALEXIS MADRIGAL: Right, right, right.
PAULINA BORSOOK: Okay, this is around South Park in San Francisco, and it's where all these quote-unquote multimedia companies got started — the first web design firms. Everyone wanted to create some cool interactive CD-ROM. In other words — don't laugh, they were sincere. I love the CD-ROM, especially an interactive one. It was kind of a chance for all the liberal arts flakes and arty people to take command of this technology and do something fun and creative with it. But then the dot-com crash, and what came back — well, what have we talked about? What's happened since then? But you know, it was a sweet, brief efflorescence. I was talking to a friend of mine who was a graphic designer around that time, and he said, you know, even then, we had the chance to design beautiful packaging. You don't have that anymore. So there was kind of a full employment act for people who have a different sensibility than, you know, what's the word, getting a [unclear] degree in information technology. There was a lot more space for different kinds of people. So, I'm sorry. I'm wandering all over the place.
[42:35] ALEXIS MADRIGAL: No, that's great. All right. Right there.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: [Question inaudible]
[43:06] PAULINA BORSOOK: Let's see if I can understand the question. Okay, one thing that I think is — I'm thinking about writing a piece about borrowed robes. It has to do with language. But the thing is, in the old Silicon Valley, where microprocessors were being designed and Hewlett and Packard walked the earth, you could not take a company public until it had seven profitable quarters. That is really different from what happens now. And now it's all about the stock play and the original investors getting their money out, and it doesn't matter if the product is crappy, if the company goes away in six months — you don't care. So the language of innovation, of venture capital, is still being used, but venture capital is an entirely other thing than what it was originally set up [to be]. I don't know if that's an answer to your question, but that's kind of how I see it. And there's been too much funny money running around the world for about 25 years. Rich people and hedge funds and everyone else have no place else to park it. So they'd rather get into these ridiculous speculative investments, because that's what they like to do. So it was a very different environment then, and I'm kind of intrigued with how the language stays, but the ideas underneath it have totally migrated, if that makes sense to you.
[44:24] ALEXIS MADRIGAL: Yeah, I also just take the point about that giant pool of money circulating around the globe, looking for a place.
PAULINA BORSOOK: That's right.
ALEXIS MADRIGAL: One of the strangest things about it is, for normal people, we think, oh man, that'd be so expensive to do such a thing. But for that giant pool of money, if you can find something like a container big enough to take a lot of it, that's seen as a good thing. So like the build-out of Uber, say, which took, you know, billions of dollars of operating dollars — that was kind of a good thing, that it took that much money, because it meant the Saudis, more or less, could just park this money in this thing and wait for the stock to appreciate.
[45:02] PAULINA BORSOOK: There's that whole term — people talk about extraction economy, which is a good term, but there's an earlier term, which is rentier. The rentier class. It's all about speculation; it's not about making anything. It's the financialization of everything. I don't know, guys, if you remember Po Bronson. He was a really lovely writer, just a beautiful stylist, great. But he became a real apologist for this. I think it was in his book The Nudist on the Late Shift or something, and he talked about some company where the engineer had, in the corner of his monitor, the stock price, moment by moment, of the company he was working for. And I felt like saying, Po, you don't see what's wrong with this? In other words, he had totally bought into that. But when you have that financialization mindset taking over everything, it kind of contaminates everything it touches.
ALEXIS MADRIGAL: It also creates these big boom-bust cycles too, which is gonna be interesting. One of the reasons so many data centers are being built isn't actually that the AI companies are planning on using them. It's just that once that cycle gets going, people go, oh, let's plow—
PAULINA BORSOOK: There's a place that money can go.
ALEXIS MADRIGAL: That's right.
PAULINA BORSOOK: You see the same thing happening, I think, with farmland. But anyway, I'm sorry.
[46:20] ALEXIS MADRIGAL: Do we have other questions? Yeah. And can you kind of speak up a little bit?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yeah, yeah. [Question largely inaudible] ...that people see Silicon Valley as sort of countercultural, and...
[47:00] PAULINA BORSOOK: Well, that's that borrowed-robes thing. The words continue; we know that what's underneath is not there anymore. I'm not a burner — I have to make it very clear, I'm not a burner. But the fact that Burning Man has all these really expensive camps and fly-in, fly-out and stuff like that, but people still wanna be there — I think people are attracted to the notion of countercultural-ness, whatever they think that is. And so even something like Steve Jobs, I think, is relevant in a funny way. Because to me, what made Steve Jobs singular is that, unlike most of these guys, he had taste and he had style, and none of these guys do. And that was informing what Apple became. That's what struck me about him — what made him really unusual.
I have a friend who was at Sony PlayStation for more than 20 years, and he was always complaining to me. He said, you know, early Apple — or Apple into the '90s, whatever — was clearly ripping off what Sony used to do. Sony used to design beautiful, elegant, simple consumer things. And he said it was so clear to him that Jobs was taking these ideas and running with them. He was a genius marketer, but he was also marketing "Think Different" and all that kind of stuff. People love the idea of that. But the problem these days — and this idea is not original to me — everyone sees themselves as being part of the rebellion, as opposed to being part of the evil empire. Doesn't matter who they are; that's how they see themselves. It's a convenient self-mythologizing. I don't know if that answers your question, but yeah.
[48:39] AUDIENCE MEMBER: Just a quick question. [Question largely inaudible]
PAULINA BORSOOK: Sure.
[49:06] PAULINA BORSOOK: Well, Scott McNealy was one of the first — I mean, he's the one, I think, who said, "You have zero privacy anyway, get over it." And this was, like, in the '90s. So Scott McNealy was no counterculture hero, and he was kind of outspoken about that in a way a lot of people weren't. And the thing about — you can't talk about Hewlett and Packard and these guys without [noting] we have the Monterey Bay Aquarium. We have the great foundations those guys set up. And it's not surprising that there was a difference in culture between the companies you were hiring for, like Apple and HP and stuff. And Sun, or Oracle would have been the worst offender, I think. I don't know if you've recruited for Oracle. Okay. But yeah, it doesn't surprise me that there are these different cultures within the companies. I'm not gonna say I knew everything about them, but yeah, they're different. I remember when SGI was the cool company in town, and all the cool kids wanted to be at SGI, and why would you wanna go work for anyplace else when SGI existed? They're different countries, I would say. Yeah, you're back.
[50:11] AUDIENCE MEMBER: My name is David [unclear]. [Question largely inaudible]
[50:39] PAULINA BORSOOK: Well, you have to look at — the stockholder theory of value has taken over the entire economy and the entire world. You can't divorce Silicon Valley from that. What I think is interesting, in a terrible kind of way, is that Eisenhower warned us about the military-industrial complex. And here we are with Thiel and all of his — what's a nice way to put it? I love bats, but I kind of think of these bat wings, evil people flying around — with all the defense companies that are involved. They're Thiel spin-offs or Thiel wannabes and stuff like that. It's so interesting to me the way that has come back as a thing — the government intertwining with Silicon Valley in this really toxic, scary way. And I wouldn't have necessarily anticipated that. Like, I think Gil has talked about the purge of Palantir people, which I think is — they're great.
So I'm not a big one for making predictions, but I tend to be more like, what can you do to have people connect the dots and see also where it affects them personally? Because I think people respond to that much more than abstract theoretical ideas. I lived in Berkeley for many years, and that kind of immunized me against a certain kind of abstract political rhetoric. I can't put it any other way. I mean, how do you get people to care about it for themselves? Because that's what people care about. I don't know if that's an answer for you, but yeah, right.
What I also think is creepy is all these sort of strange, deformed effective altruism people coming out of Berkeley. And I've always had issues with effective altruism, even before it kind of mutated into something scary and pathetic. So, you know, it's not just Stanford.
[53:03] AUDIENCE MEMBER: Let's beat up on Stanford too, though. Go ahead.
PAULINA BORSOOK: I'd love to beat up on Stanford. You know, I was involved with that magazine. But still — sorry.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: [Comment inaudible]
[53:23] PAULINA BORSOOK: But again, Stanford is a place where there are all different kinds of people, and they're not all as slimy as the people that you're talking about. What I was gonna say is, I've been involved with this magazine called Information Every Day — "Computers Making People Easier to Use." And the editor-in-chief of that — we had a conversation about how some friends of his came to visit him. He lives in the city. And the two responses were: what is with all those weird billboards in San Francisco? — the AI billboards. And they also said to him, what is wrong with that Stanford place? Because all this bizarre stuff is spinning out of there. So you have the Stanford which — you may not believe this — does good work in the world and has good people working for it and doing great stuff. And then you have this cesspool.
Part of [that magazine] is that I did a fake Stanford program — you know, a master's degree. I came up with a description of it. And it was about basically trying to do some sort of ethical MBA, which I don't think is possible. But the real joke on this is that every single class I listed for this program already exists at Stanford. In other words, they didn't realize they were already giving this degree out, which was the real joke behind it. So, I'm sorry, I give you these elliptical answers, because that's how I think. I'm a lateral thinker.
[54:57] ALEXIS MADRIGAL: Yeah. I think there is something to say — I mean, Stanford in its mid-century version. You have Fred Terman in the book, who was the guy who pioneered the idea that there was gonna be the Stanford Industrial Park. The historian Margaret O'Mara calls it, you know, the perfect university for the military-industrial complex to suck funds down into itself. And I think that stuff didn't really go away. It set itself up as being a place that wasn't only an institution of higher learning, but that it was essentially a business also.
[55:38] PAULINA BORSOOK: Well, I'm not nearly as familiar with it, but I think that's also somewhat true of MIT and their relationship with what was the Lincoln Laboratory. I mean, I don't know MIT that well. But that's like saying, what is it that makes the Bay Area unique? We could have a lot of answers to that question — uniquely good, uniquely bad. I don't have an easy diagnosis for you, because—
ALEXIS MADRIGAL: I think it's Prop 13, actually.
[56:04] PAULINA BORSOOK: Well, you know, I have friends who are faculty at Stanford, and everyone in this room would find them sympathetic without having to explain more than that. And I've been so struck, in getting to know them, how many of their friends and colleagues are perfectly fine. There's no other way to put it. It's just this weird — it's kind of like an oak gall or something, or like this cancerous thing on the body politic of Stanford. So I understand a little, I think, [the feeling] about Stanford. I share it, but I have to acknowledge that there's another Stanford — like there's something called the Woods Institute, which does great work with environmental stuff. So I'm not arguing with what we're saying about Stanford, but it's a city unto itself.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I didn't mean to suggest—
PAULINA BORSOOK: Yeah, okay, yeah, yeah.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: It's where the money is, where the endowment is.
[56:59] PAULINA BORSOOK: How do you want to do the money equation? Because that's really what's driving all this.
[57:07] ALEXIS MADRIGAL: Maybe, like, one or two more questions. Yeah.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: [Question inaudible]
[57:16] PAULINA BORSOOK: Well, there just seems to be this weirdo relationship between the investment firms and the AI companies. In other words, there's this weird circular economy going on, of international investment looking for a place to park their money, and the AI firms — they've taken so much money, then they prop up the valuation. I sort of see all the scare tactics — oh, AI's gonna end the world; no, it's gonna save the world — as just a way to prop up your stock, make it seem scary and powerful, something you want to get involved with. I've read articles that basically say, this entity invests in it, and this thing invests in that. This entity takes that person's debt, applies it to that. It really reminds me of the CDO swaps of 2008. Other people have written more eloquently about it than I have, but that was my takeaway. Oh, it's 2008 all over again, because they're all circularly — is that a word? — they're all circularly involved with each other.
ALEXIS MADRIGAL: They're also taking on massive amounts of debt. Tech companies for so long had these massive cash hoards — they didn't know what to do with it. And then they started to spend through that to build these data centers, and now they're all getting debt-financed in all these different ways. I'm actually — I probably shouldn't say this in the room — I'm a believer in AI as a useful thing, but I think the data center thing is going to crash for exactly the reasons you're—
[58:42] PAULINA BORSOOK: Well, but also, AI is such a broad term. What do we mean? It means a lot of different things, used by a lot of different people. And when you use this big word to mean a bunch of different things — I'm so old school, I wanna say go back and read Hubert Dreyfus's What Computers Can't Do. It will give you a framework for understanding all this. What will it do? It's not gonna do the grandiose things it's being promoted as doing. It does help with certain things which are compute-intensive, certain kinds of search. I'm not saying it's useless.
Okay, I'll plug here. The only good use of AI art I've seen is done by this Berlin YouTuber called Demon Flying Fox. And he does these incredible — like, he did one about the Greenland resistance front, from when Trump was talking about doing it. It was hilarious. For example, there were polar bears dressed up clearly in uniforms that are an homage to the Finnish freedom fighters in the Winter War. That was a smart human using this the way a smart human would use Photoshop. In other words, there was someone with a good artistic eye who understood the potential of the stuff, as opposed to most AI art — because most AI art is god-awful, but this guy's stuff is great. I was sitting with my friends and I watched it over and over again. He has one on the Penguin Democratic Republic. He's got some great ones about Canada resisting. So it is possible, but it takes somebody with a good eye and a great sensibility to figure out what is the proper use of these tools — not the dreadful stuff that we're all subjected to all day long.
When AI slop first started coming around a couple years ago, I would sit there and go, I don't know what it is about this, but I can't read past the second sentence. There's something that's kind of flat on the page about it. It's really boring, and I can't say why, and it has that reaction of — you know — my eyes glaze over. I'm not gonna say it's because they have too many em dashes. I don't know what it was, but you can always spot it, because there's no human behind it, and you can kind of feel it.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: And oily, I would say.
[1:00:55] PAULINA BORSOOK: Yeah, and I can't quantify it. It's like so many things — the subjective is what counts, and that's not what these people understand at all. Somebody — John, I think we were talking about this — this idea of super-autocomplete, that that's sort of what AI is really turning into, I think.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yeah. [Partly inaudible] ...a couple of days ago... it was about how it has no voice, and you can't write unless you have a voice, and the machine does not have a voice, and that's the real problem with it.
PAULINA BORSOOK: Yeah. Yeah.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: A voice [unclear].
PAULINA BORSOOK: Yes, exactly.
[1:01:41] ALEXIS MADRIGAL: Let's go deep in the back.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I know you're close to the end, and you would have a little [unclear] at a very specific question—
PAULINA BORSOOK: Wait, wait, I've got to interrupt you. This guy's my surrogate little brother. So, okay. Hey, how's it going?
[1:01:57] AUDIENCE MEMBER: Those videos produced by Iran — those Lego videos — remarkably entertaining and educational and motivational. I'm just wondering how [unclear].
[1:02:15] PAULINA BORSOOK: I gotta say, I've avoided watching them. I just know that I would get so upset, so offended — it's like, this is so cheesy, I can't even watch this. But that's me. One man's flop, another man's treasure.
[1:02:31] ALEXIS MADRIGAL: Here's the deal. Okay, fine, we'll give you one last question. One last question right here.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: [Question inaudible]
PAULINA BORSOOK: Okay, okay. Yes. Okay. I have, as usual, kind of a heretical opinion about this, which is that — you guys probably remember the ELIZA experiment from the 1960s. He just programmed a very simple Rogerian therapist onto whatever the mainframe was at the time, but that's not the interesting bit. The interesting bit was his secretary — why was it that she was more comfortable confiding in this than talking to a therapist, or partner, or friend? There is some way that interacting with a machine is more comfortable and happier, or something, for a lot of people, and you can't pretend that's not a thing. It's not good, but you can't pretend that there's not something in some people that this really pulls — that they'd rather have that than an actual encounter with a human being. And I'm not gonna say it's all because the culture's changed. The culture's changed very much for the worse, but I think that element in the human character has been there for a long time. As usual, heresies.
[1:03:56] ALEXIS MADRIGAL: Okay. We're gonna send Paulina next door to sign at East Bay Booksellers, so if you wanna get your book signed, go there. We can make a little space so we can get you over there. But before you do that, please thank Paulina. Thank you.
PAULINA BORSOOK: And thank you for having me.