Writer and technology critic Paulina Borsook has written for Wired, Mother Jones, and Suck.com. She is perhaps best known for her 2000 book Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech She’s also an artist, with projects like “My Life as a Ghost” and “The Hindsight Institute.”
In our Plutopia News Network interview, we discuss her writing career, Silicon Valley libertarians, traumatic brain injury, and her art project, “My Life as a Ghost.”
“To pursue my artistic pretensions, I went first to the MFA program at Arizona, which was ghastly. And then I transferred to Columbia, which was the right program for me. I had the one good writing teacher I ever had in my life, the guy’s name is Philip Lopate. You may have heard of him, he’s an essayist. I tried out some story, and he yelled at me, and he said ‘Quit jumping around in time and space! You’re doing the pseudo Thomas Pynchon stuff. Knock it off!’ But he said, ‘You know, you really have captured the pseudo intimacy of the online world. I think you should write about that.'”
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