Author Reading: How Tech Turned Right and Went So Wrong
Join us for a conversation with authors Paulina Borsook and Jonathan Weber on how right-wing tech culture influences global politics. Published twenty six years ago and finding new life, Borsook's book, *Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech*, is an urgent warning the public has only just begun to grapple with. In tandem, Weber's book, *City on the Edge: Technology, Politics, and the Fight for the Soul of San Francisco*, looks at the city’s transformation into a global capital of technology and how it might continue to evolve. **About the Books** ***Cyberselfish*** **Twenty-six years after its original publication, Borsook’s “smart, funny and irreverent” (The New York Times) critique of high-tech has proved a prescient assessment of a toxic ethos which has seeped into every corner of our world.** *Cyberselfish* saw the warning signs about a culture violently lacking in compassion, tremendously opposed to regulation, more comfortable with computers than people, and surprisingly ignorant. An ironic position, given this cohort was perhaps the single biggest recipient of the greatest government subsidy of technology and expansion in history. But it is also a culture that believes in Ayn Rand and the stockholder theory of value and acts as if privacy isn't for the Little People. ***City on the Edge* The story of San Francisco’s dramatic transformation from an eclectic post-industrial melting pot to the global capital of technology, and how the same creative and political forces that gave rise to its boom nearly engineered its collapse.** Jonathan Weber offers a sweeping history of a city that rose to dizzying heights in the internet era, only to be battered by the heedlessness of a tech industry it did so much to spawn and politicians who had lost the plot. Drawing on 200 interviews with mayors, CEOs, political leaders, activists, entrepreneurs, and artists, *City on the Edge* is more than a simple chronicle of a city. It’s the story of a war waged for the heart of San Francisco—one that anticipated the culture wars raging around the world. As the AI boom revs up, with San Francisco as its undisputed capital, the conflicts are playing out yet again, and will have an impact far beyond the city’s famed Golden Gates. **About the Authors** **Paulina Borsook** has worked in and around Northern California tech culture since the early 1980s. Formerly on the masthead of Wired, she has written for multiple tech publications and companies and for countless non-tech publications. She is currently a contributing editor for the magazine "InFormation/every day computers are making people easier to use", which offers both silly and serious critiques of tech as written by people within it. **Jonathan Weber** was named the *Los Angeles Times’s* first-ever Silicon Valley reporter in 1990. He was later editor in chief of *The Industry Standard*, which chronicled—and lived—the first dot-com boom. He served as editor in chief of *The Bay Citizen*, a local news non-profit, and oversaw West Coast news and global technology coverage for Reuters. He was most recently the founding editor in chief of *The San Francisco Standard*. He holds a B.A. in Philosophy from Wesleyan University.
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