I am just barely old enough to have shadows-on-the-cave exposure to, and shared fascination with the early WIRED magazine era. I never had a WIRED magazine subscription, my money went to Mad Magazine and Guitar Player, but I was very aware of it and the 90s colors, type, and composition it brought to beige world of computing at the time. I read HotWIRED and I read suck.com (I probably read Sex and the Single URL on Suck the first time around), and often enough that, looking at copies of bookmarks.html I have from that era, it doesn’t look like I even bothered to bookmark them.

As a sophomore in community college circa 1999, our Graphic Design class visited a local design firm’s studio in Frederick, MD (that I sadly don’t remember the name of). In the lobby of their very hip loft space, a contemporary pair of chairs and a reception desk were situated in front of a show piece bookshelf full of what could have been but probably wasn’t quite the entire run of WIRED magazine to that date. The effect of a wall of that characteristic 1990s pallet of cyans, magentas, yellows, blacks, and their complements of neons and other saturations checker-boarded on rows of spines exuded a modernity that was very compelling. “You can trust us to handle your design work, we read WIRED” is a whole vibe. WIRED wasn’t a design magazine, after all.

I bring up all of this ancient history to situate for myself why someone as smart and engaged as Borsook would have even worked in this space and befriended those who she so expertly skewers in Cyberselfish, as a writer at WIRED, with pieces in Suck and elsewhere. Because it was important, and cool as all get out, is entirely plausible! That it was also frustratingly blinkered and doomed informed Borsook’s work; she did not give it a Kara Swisher style pass.

I picked up Cyberselfish immediately after finishing The Nerd Reich, on Gil Durán’s strong endorsement. Borsook’s a very fun read! In Cyberselfish, Borsook recounts her experiences covering bay area technologists and libertarians and the theories and conferences and movements that motivated them, as a journalist and a friend of technologists in the 1990s and very early 2000s.

Borsook’s treatments of the people she is critiquing, to me, are fair, but it might help to remember, “Hey, it’s the 90s” like Michael Che jokes on SNL Weekend Update, after telling an off color joke. Antisocial behaviors are not given the accommodations they began to get in the 2010s from Borsook, and, imho, on refreshingly blunt terms.

A great read for fans of Levy’s “Hackers” and Kidder’s “The Soul of a New Machine” and Ursula Franklin’s “Massey Lectures”, Cyberselfish should sit alongside them in the canon of 20th century “tech” books.

Buses in San Francisco now say FARE REQUIRED on the LED displays on the front and side where they used to only indicate the line number and final stop street name or something like that. For a few seconds that is replaced with what it used to say, which is helpful.

It’s an LED display because buses aren’t fixed to a line and might be used on one line on day and another line some other day.

Anyway, this implies that FARE REQUIRED is also a temporary situation that might change, which is nice.

In the interim between now and it going away, I just accumulate 5 seconds or less of vitriolic hatred for the bureaucrat who is imposing this useless delay on my life while I stare at a thing I already know waiting to find out if the bus is going to be one I’m waiting for or not.

I add this to the 2 seconds of my life the new BART gates take to open when the old ones were instant and when I collect enough I convert these seconds to Camel Cash™ which it turns out is still a thing.

"Well, it’s complicated, they are doing that because—“

Let me stop you right there. Enjoying and knowing complications is gross and I want no part of it and do not truck with those who do. No. Absolutely not. It sucks and I’m right that it sucks. Thank you.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@256/117361084384981223

Hot Buttons.

Funny to me how modern the cover over Oscar Peterson’s »hello Herbie« text scans with it’s “ascii art” lettering.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAZh6VpgrZ4

I’ve been reading Durán on socials for a while and pre-ordered The Nerd Reich as soon as that was possible.

It is an incredible bummer that a few thousand weirdos have accumulated so much, and even more of a bummer, for lack of sufficient invectives, curses, and scenes of pianos and ACME safes and potted flowers falling on their heads one after the other just before they light an exploding cigar only to get get hit by a speeding locomotive and then run over by a municipal bus full of commuters, that a pile of them are fascists. That they beclown themselves so thoroughly is at least a hopeful preview of their future demise but in the meantime, here we are.

And so of course they merit another book by and for the left detailing all of the material power they’ve marshaled for the right, and why.

I have friends who enjoy hate reads. We have learned to make them hide the links they posts to each other so that the rest of us don’t accidentally follow. This book is not a hate read, but if you are like me, you will not exactly enjoy reading it. This kind of read renews my enthusiasm for not extending libertarians any generosity whatsoever, a limitless enthusiasm that needs no renewal. And so it takes me a while to get through because I have to treat this kind of nonsense like an assignment to myself, which I keep putting down saying things like “god damn it” and “what an asshole” and so on.

Durán includes dozens of pages of citations. This is great because it made for a happy surprise when I finished the final chapter with plenty of paper left in my right hand.

I haven’t used these citations to look up any of the more frustrating claims Durán makes, and I need to be cause I winced near the end of the penultimate chapter, Antichrist, when Durán cites a poll that found that 44% of American christians support a specific weird set of principles the book has presented. This is of course plausible (that said poll exists and concludes such a thing) but the conclusion it comes to, to me, is not. I’m not a christian and so who am I to know what’s going on with American christians lately but I don’t think it is plausible that many of them share even basic beliefs about what their own religion is all about. I winced similarly when reading a Good Naomi (Klein) book’s story about some beclowning of their own that SFO Airport officials got up to, I think in The Shock Doctrine, which I happened to have just read a bunch about, when her telling of the same tale was fine but a little off.

I winced because I like to think I’m reading stuff like this from the high ground, and not also mad and titled by and like the subjects being described but of course I am mad and tilted, and I don’t know how anyone can write bout this stuff without feeling similarly and maybe allowing a little of that frustration to bend their analysis. It’s fine, whatever.

A great gift for the tech executives in your life, or if you like tilting your actual friends, them too I guess. I really hope a bunch of people read it and come to the obvious conclusions Durán has come to, and so it is nice to see it and Durán get the attention it merits. I would much rather that hard line dogmatic poll-driven pluralistic better-things-are-worse-actually aw shucks there is no such thing as neoliberalism third-way Atlantic reading capital D democrats read it. Haha, just kidding… unless?