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Paulina Borsook was an early and nearly solitary critic of the excesses of Silicon Valley and its virtual extensions. She argued, against the conventional wisdom, that wealth and technology were not the greatest goods in today's society. Raised in a Jewish home, a member of the American Civil Liberties Union at age 14, the former contributor to Wired now describes herself as a "secular humanist and fierce civil libertarian." With her recent book Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech (Public Affairs, 2001), Borsook has only cemented her position as a prophetic voice in today's high-tech wilderness. She recently spoke with Helen Lee, a former editor at Christianity Today who is now CEO of SmartBride.com, about the values of Silicon Valley and its influence on society at large.

Could you describe the tenets of the "religion" espoused by the high-tech community?

The beliefs include things like "Technology is the solution to all human problems," "The market is the true test of everything," "Money is the highest good," and "All government and regulation is bad."

There is also an overreliance on the spreadsheet way of knowledge, which says that if it can't be quantified, then it has no value. In the high-tech world, the intuitive and subjective is bad. If you can't count it, it doesn't exist. So I ask, How do you quantify social services or art? Do these things have no value because they are nonquantifiable?

How much have the cultural changes prevalent in Silicon Valley migrated to the rest of America?

The other incredibly toxic aspect of this culture is the narcissism of the high-tech community. These people have bought into the idea that they are part of the best, most important, most innovative thing that's ever happened. And anyone who is outside it doesn't add any value.

The high-tech culture is not divorced from the rest of society; it is an exacerbation and exaggeration of what's going on in society as a whole. The '80s were another time of cuckoo financial speculation, when the economy was about "winner takes all" rather than being about what companies were actually doing. What happened more recently in high tech was just an extension of that financial system and an exaggeration of what's been in play for years.

The question is, What are our value systems as a society? The stockholder theory of value has become dominant over the last 20 years, and what's crazy is that a company's highest priority is now to its stockholders, not to its customers, certainly not to its employees, or to its community. Most people today have a 401K, a retirement fund, and they want to see their portfolios going up, and those portfolio managers want to see quarter-by-quarter returns—so in a terrible way, we're all playing a part in the fact that stockholder value is taking over everything.

Are we seeing this attitude change now that the days of easy money seem to be behind us?

I don't know yet; it's a little early to tell. I have to wonder, with the Nasdaq sinking and dot-coms dying, what are people going to fall back on? If they've been taught that money is the only and best good and that the market is the best test, what are they left with? I wonder about the people who felt that money was the only thing worth having, that the wealth somehow proved you were a hip, evolved, wise person, but now what? Are you not as evolved?

Has Silicon Valley changed in light of all this?

With all this real dot-com kookiness gone away, perhaps there's going to be a resurgence of craft over wealth, people attracted to this stuff only because they like it instead of wanting to just get rich quick from it.

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August 6 2001, Vol. 45, No. 10