March 28, 2024

About Paulina Borsook

Paulina Borsook is the author of "Cyberselfish/a critical romp through the terribly libertarian culture of high-tech" (2000). She was on the masthead of "Wired" during its early years, where her fiction, essays, profiles, journalism, and humor pieces often appeared. Her writing on culture and technology for "Wired" and other publications ranged in subject matter from the culture of Apple third-party developers, creators' rights in the age of the Internet, the crypto wars, the first-ever essay about webstalking your ex, and the technology-enabled hypergentrification of San Francisco. Her work has been published in venues such as "The New York Times", "Salon", "IEEE Spectrum", and "Written By", the magazine of the Writers Guild of America - West. She has been a frequent commentator for NPR. She has an AB in psycholinguistics/philosophy minor from Berkeley and an MFA from Columbia. An archive of her work can be found at www.paulinaborsook.com.

Neophilia and Human Nature

In the spring of 2012, I attended the memorial service for John McCarthy, a computer science founding father, at an auditorium on the Stanford campus. Among the great and good anecdotes told about this great and good guy was the mention of how McCarthy, more or less in around 1961, invented time-sharing—which, as was pointed […]