Paulina Borsook saw there was something rotten afoot in Silicon Valley in the 1990s, and in her book Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech, she set out to document and understand a peculiar mindset she saw emerging. Originally published in 2000, Paulina’s observations in Cyberselfish have proved truer now than when it was first written. She saw that the culture of high tech was determinedly anti-government, even as it owed its growth to government subsidization. That tech prioritized the idea of progress and profits and ignored all costs. That it co-opted the language of evolution to make human decisions and power structures seem inevitable. That the industry was hyper-male and tended toward hyper-misogynistic. That its figureheads possessed great wealth but were abysmal at sharing that wealth through philanthropy.

Cyberselfish was published into a moment in which tech and its leaders’ reputations were immaculate and unquestioned. Now we know better. Thanks to a surge of interest in her prophetic insights, Cyberselfish will be reissued this fall to a world that’s finally ready to listen. The following is an excerpt from the new edition.

When we were hired by the United Electrical Workers to spearhead the union drive at Twitter, it seemed the tech industry might finally be bending to progressive pressure. It was early in 2022, a year after the historic Capitol attacks of January 6, which saw Donald Trump call on his nearly eighty-eight million Twitter followers in an attempt to overturn his electoral defeat to Joe Biden. More and more public outrage was being directed at the tools that had enabled the president to mobilize his supporters. And Twitter, after deleting a series of Trump’s incendiary posts, had taken the most extreme measure of all the major social media platforms by issuing a permanent ban on the sitting president’s account.

Many outside the industry attributed the decision to Silicon Valley’s then-progressive values—management taking a principled stand against an overt attack on democracy—but in reality, it was almost entirely worker-driven. Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s founder and then-CEO, initially hesitated to take action after the Capitol attack. He said to staff that the company was not “the government,” and it was the responsibility of elected officials—not a private platform—to “do the work to right this and bring the country together.” Twitter’s employees, feeling complicit in enabling Trump’s insurrection, pushed management for decisive action. Two days after the sitting president’s self-coup attempt, hundreds of workers delivered an open letter to their employer that demanded Trump’s permanent suspension. “As Trump’s megaphone,” the letter declared, “we helped fuel the deadly events of January 6th.” That internal revolt proved decisive. Twitter’s leadership caved and permanently removed Trump from the platform.

Emboldened by their success and fueled by a newfound sense of solidarity, the group of employees who penned the letter decided to launch a union drive to codify their collective leverage and ensure the platform would never enable events like January 6 again. They had helped safeguard democracy before. This time, they were determined to win it for themselves—and we, joining their drive as dedicated staff, were determined to help them. Clarissa had helped win one of the first tech unions at Kickstarter. JS, meanwhile, had organized graduate students at MIT. By bringing our experience as organizers to Twitter’s campaign, we hoped we could harness the nascent movement’s energy and steer it with some established labor tactics. We knew we were in for a challenge—but we could never have anticipated how quickly the tech elite would dig up the ground from underneath us.

Some Samsung smart fridges stopped working on Tuesday due to a firmware update.

Korean outlets were the first to report the problems, which affect Samsung’s Bespoke AI line of fridges. Star News Korea, per a Google-provided translation, said that most of the affected devices were four-door fridges from 2024 or later.

Affected fridges “suddenly lost power and stopped functioning immediately after” trying to issue a firmware update through SmartThings, Samsung’s smart home platform, per Star News Korea. The SmartThings app then showed the devices as offline. Some users said that their fridge’s internal display was stuck showing the message “Checking SmartThings app during update.”

There are numerous reports on Samsung’s Korean community forum detailing the problem. Some users claim that they have owned their affected fridge for just a year or less.

“[T]he refrigeration and refrigeration functions themselves did not work normally, so all the food in the refrigerator had to be disposed of,” one user wrote, per a translation.

Something I noticed as a consequence of online culture and platform design, especially on social media:

It is very common online to follow an account not for the person behind it, but the way they present and discuss a topic or niche, even if they aren’t doing this with a professional intent or style. Then when the topics shift or we get tired of the person, people try to find someone else that scratches the itch.

It’s like we use people online to engage with topics by proxy, and they are rather replaceable. We don’t just watch crochet videos, we watch this specific person crochet, but not for her as a person, and so on. People seem to have roles to fill in terms of who they follow, and they’ll move on if the role is no longer adequately filled, or the roles change. Feeds are highly curated; too many posts considered off-topic and you are ruining the vibe.

In today’s digital landscape, corporate interests, shifting distribution models, and malicious cyber attacks are threatening public access to our shared cultural history.

The rise of streaming platforms and temporary licensing agreements means that sound recordings, books, films, and other cultural artifacts that used to be owned in physical form, are now at risk—in digital form—of disappearing from public view without ever being archived.

Web sites like MTV News, Gawker, and others are removed from the live web by their corporate owners, leaving only web archives like those in the Wayback Machine as the last remaining public record of their reporting and cultural impact.

Cyber attacks, like those against the Internet Archive, British Library, Seattle Public Library, Toronto Public Library and Calgary Public Library, are a new form of digital barrier, impeding access to information at community scale.

When digital materials are vulnerable to sudden removal—whether by design or by attack—our collective memory is compromised, and the public’s ability to access its own history is at risk. Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record aims to raise awareness of these growing issues, featuring essays from:

• Digital librarian Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive;
• Humanities scholar Luca Messarra;
• Book historian and social media star Allie Alvis;
• Game designer Jordan Mechner;
• Journalist Philip Bump;
• Writer and editor Maria Bustillos;
• Film archivist Rick Prelinger;
• Digital humanities scholar Nichole Misako Nomura;
• Writer and book artist Eve Scarborough;
• And many more…

The report details recent instances of cultural loss, highlights the underlying causes, and emphasizes the critical role that public-serving libraries and archives must play in preserving these materials for future generations. By empowering libraries and archives legally, culturally, and financially, we can safeguard the public’s ability to maintain access to our cultural history and our digital future.

obligatory preface: we’re 100%-user funded and everything you donate to us specifically goes to the website, or any outside labor we pay to do something for us. you can donate here.

after a few months, we’re finally stable enough to put another one of these out. to make a long story short: getting our money out of the old collective and into the new one was actually much more of a mess than we thought—and very little of the functionality we expected came to fruition—so it’s essentially taken us six months to re-establish our financial situation.

August’s numbers are:

overall expenses this month: $183.58

$142.13 for hosting the site

• $112.00 for hosting the site itself
• $22.40 for backups
• $7.73 for site snapshots

$28.80 for Hive, an internal chat platform we’ve set up (also being hosted on Digital Ocean)

• $24.00 for hosting Hive
• $4.80 for backups

~$4.16 for email functionality, which can be further subdivided into

• $0.00 for Mailgun (handles outbound emails, so approval/denial/notifications emails; also lets us not get marked as spam - we currently don’t send enough emails to trigger the threshold for payment)
• ~$4.16/mo ($50/yr, already paid in full) for Fastmail (handles all inbound emails)

$8.49 for BackBlaze (redundant backup system that’s standalone from Digital Ocean)

overall contributions this month: $176.28

unsurprisingly, the mess of a switch-over, the several months it’s taken to sort everything out, and our minimal encouragement of donations in the interim of sorting things out has resulted in a decrease in funding. for the first time in a long time, we’re not breaking even—and without the one-time donation we’d be out about $100 this month.

breakdown:

• 15 monthly contributions, totaling $80.82
• 0 yearly contributions, totaling $0.00
• 1 one-time donation, totaling $95.46

total end of month balance: $6,849.83

expense runway, assuming no further donations: about 3 years

this dovetails into an announcement we need to make: we need your help to gradually rebuild our donation base. to be clear, we are obviously not in any danger of shutting down right now—but we have taken a very material hit in terms of finances^[1] and as a result we’re now running off of the financial cushion you’ve given us. even though we have a long expense runway, we’d like to proactively return to breaking even and not having to think about how much we’re losing per month.

our current monthly contributions are about $100 short of breaking even, so consider that our rough financial goal. please donate if you are able.

unfortunately—and as mentioned at the top—the tools to switch over any previous subscription you may have had on Open Collective Foundation don’t appear to exist. this means you will have to manually resubmit your information on Open Collective Europe Foundation if you haven’t already. (we may or may not send out a mass-email to our current/previous donors in the future to this effect.)

Hello folks, this is an impromptu emergency announcement.

In short: Open Collective Foundation, the fiscal host we use for Beehaw, will no longer accept donations starting on March 15, 2024. They will shut down completely at the end of the year, December 31, 2024. This was an extremely sudden decision by them; we were only made aware of it last night through their email to us. The cause given is “Open Collective Foundation’s business model is not sustainable with the number of complex services we have offered and the fees we pay to the Open Collective Inc. tech platform;” they note that they froze accepting new collectives last year.

This obviously presents a lot of problems for Beehaw. Here are all the relevant dates given to us by Open Collective:

• Last day to accept funds/receive donations: March 15, 2024
• Last day collectives can have employees: June 30, 2024
• Last day to spend or transfer funds: September 30, 2024
• Day they formally dissolve: December 31, 2024

Because Open Collective holds our funds, based on our understanding it seems likely we will not be able to keep our existing funds unless we find a 501©(3) organization to be our new fiscal host or become one ourselves by September 30. (EDIT: Or, we just spend it all preemptively.)

Open Collective Foundation’s also email writes that:

We will be providing assistance and support to you, whether you choose to spend out and close down your collective or continue your work through another 501©(3) organization or fiscal sponsor.

and so we’ll be contacting them as soon as possible to see if we can arrange a solution with just their help.

But: in the mean time (and in case they can’t help us, given the suddenness of this announcement) we need your help to find solutions–and we will probably need them urgently. If you have any help you can provide us, any services you can recommend, or anything that might help us quickly (and as painlessly as possible, given the short notice) transition to another service, that would be greatly appreciated. Fair warning that this will also likely derail the March financial update until we have a clearer picture of what we’ll do and if OCF can help us going forward.

Thanks, and hopefully we can resolve this situation without difficulty.