Who Killed Paulina Borsook’s Career?

The offers hadcome in earlier that day. Paulina Borsook, 72, allowed herself a flash of excitement before returning to the question of what had ruined her life.

“I don’t know what to make of it,” she said as we drove to lunch. I’d picked Borsook up outside her home near Oakland, California, a basement unit that she calls “Ice Station Zebra” on account of the cold and the color scheme and the isolation. At least that’s how I was encouraged to picture it. Borsook didn’t want me to come inside, lest I pull the old magazine hack’s scam of investing the decor with symbolic significance. She wrote enough stories of this kind in her heyday, back when she was landingbylines in WIREDand the like, to know how the game gets played. Later, she explained over email: “this place i ended up in reflects me not at all. i lost all i owned when i couldnt pay for storage and this place is the best i could find that worked with my disabilities. so i feel it REALLY doesnt reflect me/my taste/my preferences. shame and aversion.”

What had happened to Paulina Borsook? The question was haunting her, even on a day when she’d gotten such good news. It’s haunted her for a quarter-century now. In 2000, after years writing about Silicon Valley, she published a book,Cyberselfish, that discerned within the tech utopianism of the era a dead-eyed, woman-hating social malevolence—what the subtitle called the “Terribly Libertarian Culture of High-Tech.” It was smart at a moment when the whole of the tech industry had gone dumb, and it was funny where Silicon Valley was at its most self-serious.Cyberselfishgot warm, if occasionally baffled, reviews. It sold something like 5,000 copies in hardcover and another 2,000 in paperback, a respectable mid-list number, no blockbuster but not a dog, either.

And then … nothing. Editors stopped taking her calls. No fellowships materialized, no second book deal, no regular MSNBC spots for the dotcom Cassandra of the boom times. Borsook couldn’t get work. She began to wonder if she had been blacklisted. Her health, always wobbly, only worsened. She was living in other people’s houses. She went broke, a process she likened to a fire in which everything burns to the ground, and was getting by on aGoFundMeand support from friends. She’d taken to calling the book TDB.That damn book.