CYBERSELFISH

Dick Pountain/14 September 2000 13:57/Political Quarterly/Book Review


TITLE: "Cyberselfish"
AUTHOR: Paulina Borsook
PUBLISHER: Little, Brown
PUBLISHED: June 2000, paperback, pp 276, £14.99


Question: What do the computer and dot.com entrepreneurs of America's Silicon Valley have in common with the survivalist militias of Montana?
Answer: They both profess to want an end to all government.

That answer may surprise you as much as it did me. I've worked in the computer industry for close to 20 years and had become used to regarding it as almost part of the public sector, with a great deal of input from academia and a prevailing interventionist political outlook that stemmed from the important role that government sponsorship had played in building the industry. (After all, the Internet, the source of so much new wealth, was originally built entirely using US government, mostly defence, funds). However that familiar attitude is now being swept away by a tide of extreme libertarianism, as documented by Paulina Borsook in her interesting - if often infuriating - book 'Cyberselfish'. Borsook is a self-confessed counterculture activist from the '60s who turned to computer journalism and wrote for a while for Wired, the house journal of the hip new Internet culture. As such she has known or interviewed all the major players, from Kevin Kelly and Louis Rossetto to 'cypherpunk' heroes like John Perry Barlow and Eric Hughes. However as a woman and a feminist, Borsook has become alarmed by and alienated from the culture she describes here, in which very clever and very wealthy people formulate a view of the world that she finds to be lacking in human empathy and ultimately frightening.

Borsook begins by describing the ideas of the Bionomics Institute, a body founded in the early 1990s by computer and net intellectuals in San Francisco who wanted to explore biological metaphors for the workings of society: they liked explanation in terms of 'self-organizing' complex systems and ecological niches, the message always being that these systems are too complex for any human to understand, let alone to intervene in. One theme that emerges again and again throughout her account is the way these people distrust the political, seeking wherever possible to explain social phenomena at an anthropological or biological level: it's tempting to see this a consequence of the demise of Marxism, which would once have been the way that such very-clever-but-unconventional people would try to apprehend the world. The Bionomics Institute's ideas meshed perfectly with the economic schemes of those monetarists and free market theorists who seek to remove the 'dead hand of government' and allow the market economy to develop in perfect freedom. Indeed so good was the fit that the BI eventually merged with the conservative Washington think-tank, the Cato Institute, of which Rupert Murdoch is a trustee. Borsook suggests wryly that this extreme form of techno-libertarianism is almost indistinguishable in its practical consequences from an older religious form of non-interventionism, namely that God Will Provide, and notes that indeed several of the key participants are born-again.

She goes on to present a fairly detailed account of the cypherpunk movement, which arose to assert the right to privacy on the Internet in the face of central  government's determination to maintain its capacity for surveillance. Borsook notes that this issue more than any other has converted perhaps a majority of regular Internet users into libertarians (though the significance of the desire for anonymous access to pornography does not escape her). She is at her most provocative and perceptive when describing the paranoid 'nerd' mindset that prevails among so many of the more vocal Internet users, suggesting plausibly enough that the computer presents a safe and controllable microcosm that may be attractive to persons who lack wider social skills, and illustrating with plenty of examples from the dialogues and 'flame wars' that take place within Internet newsgroups. These are people who prefer manipulating bits to atoms because it requires less distressing social interaction. Another chapter is devoted to the rise and rise of Wired magazine and the reasons for her falling out with it, in which she documents the increasing grip of libertarian ideas on its editorial policy. This is followed by a chapter on the new importance given to charity-giving among the Internet billionaires: in short they see it as a potential replacement for, rather than a supplement to, state funding.

All this material would be useful to anyone wishing to gain an insight into the minds of this new sector of the US economic elite, were it not for one great drawback - Borsook's gratingly sesquipedalian prose style, which combines the worst of computer journalese and cultural studies jargon into a barely-readable stew, at once chatty and verbose. I put the book down more than once and had to force myself to continue. It was worth persevering though, because these ideas might come to affect us all were the Republicans to regain the Presidency (or indeed either way, since Al Gore is a personal friend of some of the characters mentioned here). An unfortunate effect of the book might be to awaken any latent tendencies the reader has toward conspiracy theorising: I'll confess that I shuddered when I learned of the connections between the quasi-fascist ideas of Ayn Rand, these new techno-libertarians and the head of the Federal Reserve Bank who was once a Rand disciple. Borsook herself espouses a measured, broadly Democratic politics, readily conceding for example that a government may well need to intercept communications in the interest of national security and fighting organised crime. After reading this account, one is tempted, almost blasphemously, to pray for a short and very sharp recession that might both dry up the sources of almost-unearned wealth that induces these libertarian fantasies, and at the same time restore some faith in the supportive powers of government. But that would be wrong.

Dick Pountain