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26 years ago, she published a wildly prophetic book about Silicon Valley. Then she disappeared. What happened to tech writer Paulina Borsook?

In 2000, after years writing about Silicon Valley, Borsook published “Cyberselfish,” a book 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.”

“Cyberselfish” got 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. And then … nothing.

After the book’s publication, Borsook could no longer get work. She began to wonder if she had been blacklisted. She went broke and was getting by on a GoFundMe and support from friends. She’d taken to calling the book TDB. That damn book.

But last year, Borsook’s work had a renaissance on social media. Celebrated tech critics like Gil Durán of ‘The Nerd Reich’ waved ‘Cyberselfish’ around as proof that, even in the go-go days of the dotcom bubble, some people saw where things were headed. www.wired.com/story/paulin...

Borsook was christened a prophet, unappreciated in her time but uniquely fitted to ours. The New York Times profiled her, calling her “The Writer Who Dared Criticize Silicon Valley.” It’s like what a friend once told her: The universe isn’t done with you yet.

Borsook was an early critic of the tech industry’s male-centeredness. In a 1996 essay, she reviewed every issue of WIRED and ran the numbers, finding that only 15 percent of authors to June 1995, including herself, were women. One month, she was the only woman on the masthead.

In a sense, “Cyberselfish” is a continuation of Borsook’s criticisms of early WIRED. If sales were modest, the book was “a reputational success” for the publisher, her agent says. But the work dried up afterwards.

Could an actual blacklist have been among Borsook’s torments? WIRED contributor Tommy Craggs put the question to a number of people. Read this story for free for a limited time in the new WIRED app: www.wired.com/story/introd...