Who Killed Paulina Borsook’s Career?

The piece appeared in a remarkable anthology from 1996, Wired Women: Gender and New Realities in Cyberspace, published by Seal Press, a sort of consciousness-raising meeting in book form. One of the anthology’s editors, Elizabeth Reba Weise, stops short of saying it was the first book to examine the experience of women online, but it was certainly one of the early ones. “We called it cyberspace, for God’s sake,” Weise says—that’s how early this was. Over and over the contributors, a mix of academics and journalists and women working tech jobs of one kind or another, emphasize that the computer and the internet are tools for women, a way of enabling communication and connection—the gendered division of labor coming to roost now in the differing ways of being online. From Weise’s intro: “In my circle, computers aren’t fetish objects, but tools.” From Ellen Ullman’s essay: “We use the Internet as a tool, like the phone or the fax, a way to transmit news and make appointments.” Susan Clerc: “Like the TV and VCRs, the home computer is a tool that lets her participate fully in the community.” And Borsook: Women “generally are interested in the utilitarian value, not fetish-worthiness, of tools.” The Australian feminist Dale Spender has a pithy old line about computers that is applicable here: “Women use them, whereas men fall in love with them.”

WIRED from its start in 1993 was a magazine for falling in love with computers. Digital utopianism was the order of the day. One of the magazine’s founding editors, John Battelle, today calls the mindset a “naively optimistic libertarianism.” There were more circumspect voices in tech media—in particular the inspired and unjustly forgotten Processed World, which viewed computers from the perspective of the people who had to work with them. In 1995, a British magazine called Mute published an essay, “The Californian Ideology,” that laid out a “critique of dotcom neoliberalism” similar in some ways to Borsook’s. A decade earlier, Lenny Siegel and John Markoff published The High Cost of High Tech: The Dark Side of the Chip, an early criticism of Silicon Valley. Alongside the media were tech-dubious movements, like the mostly memory-holed Neo-Luddites of the 1990s, not to be confused with the new Neo-Luddites. But the critics weren’t breaking through. Processed World’s cofounder, Chris Carlsson, characterizes the era as “an unbelievable frenzy of boosterism and back slapping, we’re all getting rich, ha ha ha, isn’t this great, here, have another line, come to this fancy dinner, here’s a glass of champagne. Oh, you don’t want to be part of the party? Get the fuck out of here.”