High-tech libertarians

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times, July 25, 2000

BOOKS OF THE TIMES

Silicon Valley Views the Economy as a Rain Forest

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

As 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."

Full review at:
http://www.nytimes.com/library/books/072500borsook-book-review.html


Louis Proyect

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