Who Killed Paulina Borsook’s Career?

When Borsook and I first met, in December of last year, she was fully in the midst of what she terms “this resuscitation thing.” It had happened so quickly and altogether without her knowledge: a social media post here, another one over there, celebrated tech critics like Gil Durán of The Nerd Reich exhuming her book and waving it around as proof that, even in the go-go days of the dotcom bubble, some people saw where things were headed. “Instead of centering men who missed the boat (and still don’t seem to get it), let’s lift up the work of Paulina Borsook, who saw it all very clearly and tried to warn us 25 years ago,” Durán wrote in a widely shared post on Bluesky—in response to a 2025 WIRED essay by Steven Levy. Borsook was christened a prophet, unappreciated in her time but uniquely fitted to ours. Hadn’t she written of “testosterone-poisoned guys with chips on their shoulders and too much time on their hands” years before the manosphere? Hadn’t she recuperated the Luddites as “early protesters of de-skilling” back when “Luddite” was an epithet? Hadn’t she raised her eyebrows at the theorists of Sand Hill Road playing footsie with eugenics? Cyberselfish became a minor phenomenon without Borsook so much as saying a word about it. 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.

Publishers were now keen to get the book back in circulation. That day in December, five of them had sent their bids to her agent. (Eventually, Borsook would settle on Tin House, which published a new edition of Cyberselfish in mid-September, with a foreword by Durán.) The offers were validation, after all those years in the wilderness. Things were finally looking—

“It really kind of broke my heart in so many ways,” Borsook was saying now at the restaurant, as we waited to order. Her mind was back in 2001, wondering again what had happened to her career. Was it something she’d written? Could it have been an actual blacklist? Was it something as depressingly commonplace as sexism? “I really hate playing that card,” she said, “but I do have to wonder.” She just couldn’t figure it, even still, all these years later. In a way, the happy turn of events in the past few months had left her even more discombobulated. As she told me more than once, “I don’t know how to think about myself anymore.” She’d won me over in a matter of hours—a common enough phenomenon, I would learn, among people who find themselves in Borsook’s orbit. When I dropped her off that afternoon, I promised—only half in jest—to find the guy who killed her career.

Ok, but first I have to tell you about Dick Pick. Literally his name. Richard A. Pick. Went by Dick. It was the 1960s, and back then you could walk around with a name like that and no one would think to laugh, even if you were, as Dick Pick apparently was, something of a serial flirt.

Dick Pick was a software developer for a military contractor during the Vietnam War. The story goes that the Army needed a way to track spare parts for Lockheed’s Cheyenne attack helicopter. Alongside his business partner, Don Nelson, he came up with a database operating system that they called—and here you have to imagine two of the shit-eatingest grins you’ve ever seen—the Generalized Information Retrieval Language System: GIRLS. (What, you thought tech bros were a new phenomenon?) Like a lot of tech innovation underwritten by defense spending, GIRLS was soon put to commercial use. Eventually it came to be known as PICK, and it was with this latter name that the operating system found itself under the fingertips of one Paulina Borsook, an employee at a small software company in Marin County.

Before she became one of the sharpest media observers of early Silicon Valley, Borsook first learned how to see tech. That happened in the early 1980s, in front of one of those so-called minicomputers that were in fact big enough to be buried in. The company was called Construction Information Systems, and Borsook was doing some technical writing, documenting in the plainest language she could muster how the software worked.