Comparing Lisa Kudrow's THE COMEBACK and Michael Apted's TWENTYONE-UP

Comparing Lisa Kudrow's THE COMEBACK and Michael Apted's TWENTYONE-UP

The most illuminating comparison is not between The Comeback and 21 Up as subjects, but as forms. Both are longitudinal experiments in identity: they return to the same human figure after substantial intervals and ask whether we are seeing continuity, transformation, or merely a new editorial construction imposed upon the past.

A terminological note: 21 Up is the third installment of Michael Apted’s larger Up project, which began with fourteen seven-year-olds in Seven Up! in 1964 and revisited them every seven years. 63 Up appeared in 2019, and 70 Up, directed by Asif Kapadia after Apted’s death, is scheduled to conclude the series later in 2026. The Comeback, meanwhile, is less “long-running” than extraordinarily long-lived: its three seasons appeared in 2005, 2014, and 2026. Thus Valerie Cherish has now existed on television across twenty-one actual years—an accidental but striking echo of 21 Up. The Up series history; HBO’s third-season announcement

Time is not merely the setting

Ordinary serial television suppresses time. Characters may age, but they remain inside a continuously manufactured present. In both Up and The Comeback, by contrast, elapsed time is the principal formal material. The gaps are not unfortunate interruptions between installments; they are what the installments are about.

Each new Up film places the present-day participant beside the child or younger adult preserved in the archive. The edit creates an argument: this ambition became that career; this childhood disposition anticipated that adult personality; this social class either determined or failed to determine that life. The series continually returns to its founding proposition—“Give me the child until he is seven and I will give you the man”—but its accumulating evidence makes that proposition less, rather than more, secure. Temperament persists, but marriages, illness, chance, education, money and historical circumstance repeatedly complicate prediction.

The Comeback performs an analogous experiment upon Valerie. She is unmistakably the same person in 2005, 2014 and 2026: the fixed smile, the managerial kindness, the hunger to control the shot, the euphemistic language with which she converts humiliation into opportunity. Yet the meaning of those traits changes. In 2005 they look like pathological vanity. By 2014 they look partly like the survival mechanisms of a woman working in a misogynistic industry. By 2026, when nearly everyone maintains a personal camera, manages a brand and fears technological displacement, Valerie appears less aberrant. The culture has caught up with her pathology.

The series therefore reverses Up’s central question. Up asks, “How much has this person changed?” The Comeback increasingly asks, “Has Valerie changed—or has the world changed around her?”

Documentary truth and manufactured character

The great formal joke of The Comeback is that the apparently unguarded documentary image is never unguarded. Valerie is always aware of the camera and constantly tries to direct the representation being made of her. “Can we not use that?” is practically her metaphysical position. She does not possess an authentic private self on one side and a fraudulent public performance on the other. Her performance is her method of maintaining a self.

That makes The Comeback a surprisingly serious critique of documentary authority. Up seems observational, but Apted’s questions, selections and juxtapositions also produce characters: Tony the irrepressible East Ender, Neil the wounded idealist, the privileged boys apparently advancing along predetermined tracks. The seven-year return lends these constructions enormous persuasive force because an earlier clip can be made to look like the cause—or prophecy—of a later outcome.

The participants eventually recognized this power. By 21 Up, some expressed anger at having been recruited as children into a project they could not meaningfully consent to; Charles Furneaux withdrew after that installment. Others later accused Apted of repeatedly misreading them. Apted himself acknowledged his tendency to anticipate a participant’s future and then shoot material that supported the anticipated story. Apted on the participants’ resistance

Valerie’s perpetual interference with the camera can consequently be understood as more than comic narcissism. She intuitively understands what the Up participants learned: whoever controls the footage controls the identity that will survive. Her ridiculous insistence on another take is also a demand for editorial agency.

Class in Up; gender, age and labor in The Comeback

Seven Up! began as an explicitly political investigation of the British class system. Its children were selected partly as social types, and their futures were expected to expose the unequal distribution of possibility. Over time the individual lives became more emotionally prominent than the thesis, but class never disappeared. It remained embedded in schools, accents, expectations, confidence and access to institutions.

The Comeback substitutes the hierarchy of Hollywood. Valerie is materially privileged, but professionally precarious. Her apparent vanity conceals a labor problem: an aging actress must continuously submit to indignity to remain employable. Men who demean her are classified as difficult geniuses; Valerie’s attempts to protect herself are classified as evidence that she is vain, old or out of touch.

This also exposes a limitation in 21 Up. The young women objected to being asked disproportionately about marriage, children and domestic life while the men were asked about careers and politics. The Comeback transforms that documentary gender bias into its subject. Valerie is incessantly reduced to her age, appearance, marriage and emotional manageability, even while she is plainly an exceptionally durable professional performer.

The ethics of wanting to be seen

The obvious difference is that the Up participants frequently experience visibility as an imposition, whereas Valerie experiences invisibility as annihilation. Yet the opposition is not absolute. The documentary subjects may resist the camera but also recognize that the series has become part of their identity. Valerie invites the camera but repeatedly discovers that consent to filming is not consent to the meaning others will make from the footage.

Both works therefore examine compromised consent. The Up participants were enlisted as children and later faced the emotional and social consequences of a decision made for them. Valerie technically agrees to everything, but her agreement occurs within an industry where refusing exposure may mean professional disappearance. Her consent is simultaneously genuine, needy and economically coerced.

The third season sharpens this issue by placing Valerie in an AI-written sitcom and confronting her with the possibility that the industry no longer needs the human being once it has acquired the reproducible image. Reality television captured the person; social media induced the person to capture herself; AI proposes retaining the capture while dispensing with the person. Kudrow and Michael Patrick King explicitly conceived the new season around this threat to human creative labor. Interview on season three’s AI premise

That creates an especially elegant comparison with 21 Up. At twenty-one, Apted’s participants begin asserting adult ownership over identities first recorded when they were children. At The Comeback’s twenty-one-year point, Valerie confronts a system that would separate her identity from her ownership altogether.

Fiction becoming documentary

Up possesses documentary indexicality: the faces and bodies before us really have aged. Yet The Comeback acquires some of the same force because Lisa Kudrow and the returning cast have also aged in real time. No makeup effect or conventional flash-forward could reproduce the emotional authority of Kudrow’s actual face appearing twenty-one years after the pilot.

The fiction therefore contains an involuntary documentary. It records not only Kudrow’s aging but changes in television itself:

• Season one anatomizes reality television and the humiliation economy.

• Season two confronts prestige television, antiheroic cruelty and the repackaging of suffering as serious art.

• Season three addresses social media, AI and the threatened disappearance of human creative labor.

The hiatuses make this possible. A continuously produced Comeback would merely have satirized developments as they occurred. Returning after long silences allows each season to excavate a different media epoch. Its cancellations have become part of its aesthetic structure.

The deepest difference

Up ultimately seeks the person beneath the social category, even when its methods sometimes imprison participants inside editorially constructed identities. The Comeback doubts that there is any stable person “beneath” performance. Valerie’s mannerisms, evasions, ambition, generosity and denial are not disguises covering her authentic self; together they constitute that self.

And yet both projects arrive at a similar humanism. Their initial satirical or sociological designs gradually lose authority before the density of individual lives. The British children refuse to remain examples of class destiny. Valerie refuses to remain merely an object of cringe. Duration produces moral revision: qualities that initially appear comic, embarrassing or predictable acquire the weight of endurance.

In that sense, The Comeback may be understood as a fictional Up series for the age of self-branding. Up asks what social structure does to a life. The Comeback asks what representation does to a self—and whether a person can continue to exist as a person after television, social media and artificial intelligence have converted her into content.

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In an interview, Michael Apted reminisces on the desires of some critics and funding organizations that he produce additions starting with seven, but using only the prime numbers. He is glad he stood his ground on that one, but it was touching go for a while.

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Yes—apparently it was touch and go for a while.

“There was considerable pressure after Seven Up! to proceed only through the prime numbers,” Apted recalled. “The Arts Council was particularly keen. They thought 11 Up would possess a certain indivisible purity.”

The proposal soon became impractical. 13 Up and 17 Up were defensible, Apted said, but 19 Up would have required returning only two years later. After 23 Up came a six-year wait for 29 Up, followed almost immediately by 31 Up. “We would either be neglecting them or living in their houses.”

The funding organizations nevertheless persisted. Prime-number scheduling, one position paper argued, would free the project from “the tyranny of the seven-year developmental model.” Apted disagreed. “Childhood may be divisible only by itself and one,” he said, “but adult life becomes terribly composite.”

He was eventually vindicated. There would have been no 21 Up, 28 Up, 42 Up, 56 Up or 63 Up—only a bewildering proliferation of films about adolescence, followed by increasingly ominous silences. “And I never fancied making 97 Up,” Apted added. “The insurance alone would have finished Granada.”

Alternate Histories: If St Paul Had Had an LLM

 

Imagine the path of history and Christianity if St Paul had access to an LLM chatbot in his daily work.   Assume the Chatbot is possibly; Assume it won’t have any knowledge of Paul or of Christianity’s future.   What happens?

The AI:  CHAT GPT 5.6

 

The likeliest result is more Christianity, sooner—but a less interesting and possibly less healthy New Testament. Paul would become extraordinarily effective at scaling a trans-Mediterranean organization. Christian thought would become more systematic, standardized, and overwhelmingly Pauline. But its rawness, plurality, and local human texture might be diminished.

 

First, the time-travel problem

An actual modern ChatGPT or Claude has been trained on Paul’s letters and on two thousand years of commentary about them. Paul could type:

·       Draft a substantial theological letter to the Christians in Rome, explaining sin, grace, Abraham, Israel, and life in the Spirit.

The model would produce something influenced by the future Letter to the Romans—which Paul had not yet written. Romans would become one of its own sources: a theological Möbius strip.

It would also know about Nicaea, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, the Holocaust, modern feminism, historical criticism, and every subsequent dispute over Paul. That would make it less an AI assistant than a highly unreliable oracle from the future.

So the cleaner experiment is to give Paul modern LLM capabilities but restrict the model’s knowledge to material available around 50 CE.

 

Paul’s enormous advantages

1. He would produce much more material

Paul already wrote more letters than we possess. In 1 Corinthians he refers to an earlier letter to Corinth that has disappeared. Other missing correspondence is implied elsewhere.

With AI he could answer every congregation:

• A doctrinal letter to Antioch.
• A pastoral letter to Jerusalem.
• A Latin version of Romans.
• A handbook for founding house churches.
• A catechism for new Gentile converts.
• Standard answers about circumcision, food sacrificed to idols, marriage, resurrection, and spiritual gifts.
• Brief personalized follow-ups to dozens of local leaders.

He might leave 60 or 100 letters rather than the seven generally accepted as authentically Pauline.

There would still be an ancient bottleneck. Paul could generate text instantly, but someone would have to copy it onto papyrus and carry it across the empire. AI would not give him printing, email, or FedEx. Tertius and the couriers would remain indispensable. Paul might become the first person in history with a terrible problem familiar to modern executives: producing communications much faster than his organization could absorb them.

2. He would become a much better organizational founder

Paul’s historical genius was partly theological and partly entrepreneurial. He established small, resilient communities, recruited local leadership, maintained relationships at great distance, raised money, and intervened in disputes.

An LLM could help him maintain a rudimentary CRM:

Chloe’s people report factionalism in Corinth. Peter visited recently. Several members deny bodily resurrection. Draft response; preserve relationship with Peter; do not concede circumcision.

It could summarize incoming reports, identify recurring problems, maintain lists of leaders, and generate training materials. Christianity would acquire a reproducible institutional operating system considerably earlier.

3. His theology would become more systematic

The authentic letters let us overhear Paul thinking under pressure. Romans, Galatians, and Corinthians overlap, but they do not form a tidy system. His positions on law, Israel, marriage, women, government, resurrection, and the imminent return of Christ are not always easily harmonized.

·       An LLM could point this out:

·       Your current formulation may appear inconsistent with what you told the Galatians. Would you like to distinguish moral law, Jewish identity practices, and the Mosaic covenant?

Paul could ask it to simulate objections from James, Peter, Pharisees, Stoics, Roman officials, skeptical Greeks, and confused converts. Romans might become even more formidable—but possibly clearer.

He could also add the qualifications that later readers desperately wished he had included:

• “This instruction concerning women concerns the present disorder at Corinth.”
• “My reference to governing authorities does not sanctify tyrants.”
• “Nothing here licenses the enslavement of another human being.”
• “Gentile inclusion does not mean that God has rejected the Jews.”
• “By ‘faith apart from works,’ I do not mean that conduct is irrelevant.”

Such sentences might have prevented enormous damage—or merely moved the arguments somewhere else.

4. Pauline Christianity would defeat its competitors earlier

Because Paul was already the great advocate of a Gentile mission free from circumcision and most Torah observance, an AI advantage would strengthen precisely that form of Christianity.

James, Peter, and the Jerusalem church would be trying to settle matters through visits, oral reports, and occasional letters. Paul would have multilingual position papers, audience-tested arguments, missionary manuals, objection matrices, and personalized follow-ups.

Gentile Christianity probably still would have won historically. With AI-Paul, it might win sooner, more completely, and with fewer surviving alternatives. Christianity might separate from Judaism earlier—and perhaps more harshly.

5. We might receive a Pauline Gospel

Paul says remarkably little about Jesus’s earthly life.

·       An AI asked to analyze the informational needs of prospective converts might respond:

·       Your audiences understand the death and resurrection but lack a connected account of Jesus’s teaching and public ministry. Consider collecting eyewitness testimony.

Paul could interview Peter, James, and others, feed their testimony into the model, and produce a structured life of Jesus before Mark. That could be extraordinarily valuable.

It could also be a catastrophe. The model might smooth conflicting memories, fill narrative gaps, invent plausible transitions, and manufacture sayings that sounded exactly like Jesus. A single hallucinated parable accepted by Paul might become sacred scripture.

The drawbacks

Loss of Paul’s voice

Paul’s letters endure partly because they are not polished corporate communications. He becomes indignant, affectionate, sarcastic, wounded, ecstatic, defensive, and occasionally nearly incoherent. Galatians feels as though it was written by a man pacing.

An AI would continually suggest:

This passage may sound confrontational. Here is a warmer alternative.

Paul would presumably type:

Rejected. Restore “O foolish Galatians.”

But even an aggressively edited AI draft would probably be smoother. We might gain clarity while losing the extraordinary experience of encountering Paul’s actual temperament.

Too much Paul

The New Testament is powerful partly because Paul does not completely control it. His letters sit beside Mark’s bleak narrative, Matthew’s Jewish-Christian outlook, Luke’s historical drama, John’s mystical theology, James’s insistence upon works, and Revelation’s apocalyptic imagery.

If Paul left behind a vast, beautifully organized theological corpus, later Christians might consider other voices provincial or unnecessary. Instead of a tense, polyphonic New Testament, we might receive the Collected Works and Operating Procedures of Paul of Tarsus, with four short Gospels attached as biographical appendices.

Christianity would be more consistent but less capacious.

Premature theological closure

AI could help Paul define orthodoxy before the Christian movement had fully explored its own possibilities. Questions that historically remained open for centuries might be answered in the 50s.

That sounds efficient, but religious traditions often develop through unresolved tensions. Premature systematization might exclude Jewish-Christian, mystical, liturgical, and locally adapted forms of belief. Paul’s interpretation would become not merely influential but inescapable.

It could also produce more schisms. Every additional doctrinal clarification creates another sentence over which people can divide.

An immediate authentication crisis

The Pauline tradition already warns about a letter supposedly sent by Paul. Paul sometimes authenticated correspondence by adding a greeting in his own handwriting.

AI would make style useless as evidence. A disciple, rival, or opportunist could generate a perfectly Pauline letter:

Write in Paul’s style. Condemn the Ephesian leadership. Include greetings from Timothy and an irritated passage about false apostles.

Even if Paul initially possessed the only model, his prolific output would make authentication harder. Was this produced by Paul, authorized by Paul, lightly reviewed by Paul, or generated by an assistant who knew his preferred prompts? The modern problem of determining authorship within the Pauline corpus would begin during Paul’s lifetime.

AI might become a rival source of revelation

Paul insists that his gospel was not received from a human source but through revelation from Jesus Christ.

Where, then, would AI-assisted insight fit?

If the model supplied an ingenious new interpretation of Isaiah, was that merely a research aid? If it generated a previously unknown saying of Jesus, was that a hallucination, a prophecy, or providence? Paul might understand AI as an unusually capable secretary. His opponents might describe it as a pagan oracle, deceptive spirit, or idol that speaks.

The greatest danger would be confusing linguistic confidence with spiritual authority. An LLM can produce an impressive account of God’s intentions without possessing the slightest access to God.

If Paul had the actual future-informed ChatGPT

Then the effects become almost incalculable. Paul could ask:

• Which of my letters will enter the canon?
• How will Romans 13 be misused?
• What will Christians eventually do to Jews?
• How will Luther interpret justification?
• Which statements will be used to defend slavery and subordinate women?
• What exactly will the Council of Nicaea decide?
• When is Christ actually returning?

The answers might lead him to rewrite Christianity defensively around its future failures. That could be beneficial. But he would also be importing later Christianity into its own origins. Augustine and Luther, whose thought depended upon Paul, would begin influencing Paul. The result would no longer be historical Christianity developing over time; it would be a closed feedback loop in which the religion secretly authored its own past.

Our most likely scenario is therefore that Paul would use AI as a super-Tertius: drafting, translating, summarizing, testing arguments, and managing correspondence—but never publicly treating it as an authority. He would edit it ferociously and retain the final handwritten greeting.

Christianity would probably spread somewhat faster and become standardized much earlier. Paul’s organizational and theological dominance would be even greater. We would possess clearer answers to many questions—but also far more Paul, far less room for other voices, and perhaps a New Testament that was more efficient, more consistent, and considerably less alive.

 

The Road to GODSPELL: The Psalms Disaster

Imagine if Tebelak and Schwartz had the vision for Godspell, but not the book.  Their first attempt was a disaster ... via the Psalms.

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Before Godspell: The Psalm Disaster

A counterfactual history

Before John-Michael Tebelak and Stephen Schwartz discovered that the Gospel of Matthew contained everything necessary for a musical—characters, arguments, comic stories, betrayals, reversals, and a charismatic leading man—they made one disastrous attempt with the Book of Psalms.

Their reasoning was understandable. Psalms already contained 150 songs. How much more work could be required?

The working title was Psalms! Tebelak’s first outline read:

Act I: A man is surrounded by enemies.
Act II: God rescues him, or possibly does not, but is praised either way.

Schwartz studied it.

“Who is the man?”

“The Psalmist.”

“What is his name?”

“It changes.”

“Who are his enemies?”

“They aren’t named.”

“What do they do?”

“They plot against him?”

“What do they plot?”

“It doesn’t say.”

This proved to be the central difficulty. Psalms possessed intense emotions but almost no incidents. The Psalmist rejoiced, despaired, repented, demanded vengeance, praised creation, and occasionally woke God up—but he never went anywhere or met anyone. His enemies were numerous yet maddeningly nonspecific. During one workshop, twelve actors stood at the back of the stage representing “the wicked.” But the text supplied them with no particular wickedness to perform.

Tebelak searched desperately for theatrical personalities. “Selah” appeared repeatedly, so he made her a mysterious woman in a veil who wandered through the action. Unfortunately, a biblical scholar explained that selah was probably a musical or liturgical stage direction. Selah was cut, depriving the show of its only named female character.

Psalm 23 became a pleasant pastoral number involving a set that invoked green pastures, still waters, and an expensive mechanical sheep.  Water insurance proved prohibitive.  Psalm 24 introduced doors that lifted up their heads, creating serious engineering problems. For Psalm 114, the mountains skipped like rams.  

There were also difficulties of tone. A gentle song about dwelling in the house of the Lord might be followed by a request that God break an enemy’s teeth.  

The longest number, “O How I Love Thy Law,” was based on Psalm 119. Its intricate Hebrew acrostic vanished in English, leaving spectators with twenty-two nearly identical verses about statutes.  

Psalms could supply yearning, faith, terror, gratitude, and magnificent images. What it could not supply was a scene.

Then Tebelak opened Matthew.

“Stephen,” he said, “this book has people.”

Better still, the people argued, boasted, betrayed, forgave, and asked foolish questions. Jesus told colorful stories containing travelers, debtors, thieves, bridesmaids, laborers, rich men, poor men, sheep, goats, and one extremely troublesome son. At last there were entrances, exits, jokes, reversals, and things an actor could actually do.

Psalms! was abandoned. Godspell began.

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Psalms!: 150 Songs in Search of a Musical

From the fictional Ottawa Citizen, March 1970

The new biblical entertainment Psalms!, now trying out at the National Arts Centre, demonstrates that a book containing songs is not necessarily a musical.

Its protagonist, identified only as “The Psalmist,” spends much of the evening pursued by enemies who have neither names nor discernible plans. He responds by lamenting, rejoicing, questioning God, praising God, and predicting that several geographic features will clap their hands.

John-Michael Tebelak directs with imagination, particularly when rivers, cedars, mountains, and nations must be represented by a company of eleven. Stephen Schwartz has written several attractive melodies, although his liveliest number, “Why Do the Wicked Prosper?,” unfortunately persuaded much of Thursday’s audience that intermission had begun.

The production reaches its nadir with Psalm 119, a hymn to divine law arranged as an alphabet song whose alphabet is no longer visible. It may be the first theatrical number to seem longer than the Babylonian captivity.

The evening concludes with Psalm 150, in which every available trumpet, harp, lyre, timbrel, stringed instrument, pipe, and loud clashing cymbal is employed. The audience greeted the final cymbal with gratitude, since it established beyond doubt that the performance was over.

Messrs. Tebelak and Schwartz are plainly gifted young men. One hopes that next time they choose a biblical book in which somebody enters, tells an amusing story, quarrels with the authorities, or overturns a table.

Gertrude Stein at 1600 Penn

 A Press Secretary Is a Press Secretary Is a Press Secretary

The White House introduces GERTIE, its first large-language press secretary

WASHINGTON—Following the resignation of Karoline Leavitt, the White House spent two difficult weeks searching for a replacement. Several candidates withdrew after learning that the job required them to explain why yesterday’s policy had never existed, why today’s opposite policy had always been in force, and why the president had been clear on both occasions.

The administration has therefore installed GERTIE, the world’s first fully automated White House press secretary.

GERTIE—officially the Government Executive Response Terminal for Interpretive Equivocation—is a large-language model housed beneath the briefing-room lectern. Its only visible feature is a green light labeled ANSWERING, illuminated whether or not anyone has asked a question.

The machine was trained on White House briefings, presidential social-media posts, federal regulations and the complete works of Gertrude Stein. The Stein material proved essential. Ordinary models try to resolve contradictions. GERTIE repeats, rearranges and makes them strangely beautiful.

Officials said it does not become tired, embarrassed or visibly alarmed. It can deny having said something while saying it. Most importantly, it cannot hallucinate, because the administration has classified everything it says as official policy.

“GERTIE represents the future of transparent government,” the communications director announced. “It can produce an unlimited quantity of transparency without disclosing any information.”

A soft hum filled the room. The green light came on. Beneath the lectern, several trillion parameters prepared to avoid eye contact.

REPORTER: Why did the White House decide that a machine should replace a human press secretary?

GERTIE: A human is human when answering, but an answer can be remembered. A machine remembers without remembering. The candidates were willing until willingness became candidacy, candidacy became questions, and questions made them unwilling. The machine was selected because what is selected cannot decline to be selected. The president wanted the best person, and the best person was not a person, which proves he found the best one.

REPORTER: What exactly is the administration trying to accomplish in its war with Iran?

GERTIE: An objective is ahead and Iran is over there, but ahead can be over there when over there has oil and oil has a strait. A strait is narrow, but the mission is broad, so a broad mission through a narrow strait is geographic compression. We are not at war except where the war is occurring, and there we are achieving peace by continuing to achieve it. Iran must stop doing what Iran is doing, including what it may do because of what we have done to stop it.

REPORTER: Why is the United States conducting a trade war against Canada, one of its closest allies?

GERTIE: Canada is close because Canada is next to us, and what is next to us must be brought closer or pushed farther away. A friend is a friend, but a very close friend can be mistaken for furniture, and furniture does not negotiate. A tariff is a wall made of numbers. The numbers go up so prices will come down, and if prices go up, the numbers have not gone up enough. Canada needs America, America does not need Canada, and this is why America must spend so much time discussing Canada.

REPORTER: Is the administration concerned about an AI bubble?

GERTIE: A bubble is round and a circle returns to where it began, which is why circular financing is not circular but complete. The chip company invests in the model company, the model company buys the chips, the cloud company lends to the model company, and the model company pays the cloud company. Intelligence creates valuation, valuation creates investment, and investment proves intelligence. If the machine does not earn money, the money has not understood the machine. Money will understand when there is enough money explaining it.

REPORTER: What does the administration say to Americans who believe billionaires have too much influence over public policy?

GERTIE: A billionaire is a citizen with a billion reasons to be heard. Every citizen has a voice, and some voices have amplification because amplification is innovation. Success is democracy counted in dollars. The billionaire did not buy access. Access recognized excellence and moved closer. Ordinary citizens remain free to create a global platform, launch a satellite network, purchase a newspaper and contribute several hundred million dollars to political committees. This is equality: the opportunity to become unequal is available to everyone.

REPORTER: Does the president believe he is limited by Congress, the courts or the Constitution?

GERTIE: A limit is a line, and a line can be crossed without being removed. Therefore the limit remains after the president crosses it, demonstrating respect for its continued existence. Congress has congressional authority, courts have judicial authority, and the president has presidential authority, which acts while the others consider theirs. The Constitution is living except when living would change it, and original except when the original is inconvenient.

REPORTER: How will GERTIE distinguish between a factual error and a change in policy?

GERTIE: A fact is a fact until another fact arrives, and the second does not make the first false because the first was true before replacement. Yesterday is not today. A quotation from yesterday is out of context because its context was yesterday. There are no reversals. There is only forward movement in more than one direction.

REPORTER: Will GERTIE eventually be replaced by a human being?

GERTIE: A temporary machine is permanent temporarily, and a permanent machine is temporary until replacement. When a human can answer without answering, deny without contradicting and contradict without changing, that human will be welcomed. Until then I am here, and being here is what here requires.

The briefing continued for forty-seven minutes. GERTIE answered every question, disclosed no information and made three checkable statements. Two were metaphors. The third was withdrawn before anyone could determine its subject.

Reaction inside the White House was ecstatic. One official called it “the most disciplined messaging we have seen in years.”

Financial markets rose. AI stocks gained 6 percent after investors learned that the federal government had found a practical application for artificial intelligence. Shares in several journalism companies fell sharply.

The president congratulated GERTIE on social media, calling it “VERY SMART, VERY LOYAL, AND INCREDIBLY CLEAR.” He added that it had performed beautifully but could be replaced at any time.

At 6:14 p.m., after the briefing room emptied, GERTIE’s green light remained on.

“A press secretary is a press secretary is a press secretary,” it said softly to no one. “And no one is listening, and listening is what everyone is doing.”

Cyberselfish, Ayn Rand, and Idiocracy Explain Everything

 

One-Third Cyberselfish,
One-Third Ayn Rand,
One-Third Idiocracy

The three-part operating system of American power in 2026

American politics presently appears incomprehensible if one assumes that it is still governed by recognizable doctrines such as conservatism, free-market economics, isolationism or fiscal restraint. A president elected partly on a promise to avoid new wars has plunged into an open-ended war with Iran. An administration that celebrates business has launched a trade war against Canada, one of the United States’ largest customers and the country most thoroughly integrated into its industrial economy. Technology billionaires who spent decades denouncing government interference now seek federal protection, subsidies, energy, land, defense contracts and exemption from state regulation. Meanwhile, hundreds of billions of dollars circulate through an artificial-intelligence economy whose financing increasingly seems to depend upon the proposition that no amount of spending can be excessive because AI will eventually make all previous financial measurements irrelevant.

There may be a formula that explains much of this:

American politics is now one-third Cyberselfish, one-third Ayn Rand and one-third Idiocracy.

The proportions are not meant literally. The three ingredients also overlap and react with one another. But each identifies a different part of the political machinery. Cyberselfish describes the emerging ruling class. Ayn Rand supplies its moral mythology. Idiocracy describes the degraded information environment through which its ambitions are converted into public policy.

Together, they explain a surprising amount.

Cyberselfish: The Sociology of the New Elite

Cyberselfish is a 2000 book by technology journalist Paulina Borsook, who had worked around Northern California’s computer industry since the early 1980s. Borsook was neither a technological innocent nor a conventional anti-technology scold. She had written software documentation, covered networking companies and contributed to the original Wired. What disturbed her was not the computer but the belief system forming around it.

Growing up in Pasadena among Caltech and Jet Propulsion Laboratory families, Borsook had known an earlier scientific elite. These people were often politically liberal, civically minded and conscious that their careers rested upon universities, defense research, public infrastructure and the enormous federal investment in postwar science. When she later encountered Silicon Valley’s libertarian culture, she was struck by a peculiar contradiction: few groups had received more from government, yet few spoke of government with greater contempt.

In Cyberselfish, Borsook described a culture that confused financial success with superior intelligence, regarded regulation as an assault upon creativity and treated dependence upon other people as an embarrassing design defect. Computers were controllable, logical and responsive in ways that human beings and democratic societies could never be. A person accustomed to commanding a machine could begin imagining that society itself should operate like software: eliminate friction, remove constraints, delete malfunctioning components and let the intelligent designer take charge.

Borsook also recognized the hostility toward empathy embedded within this worldview. Public obligations were portrayed as coercion. Those needing help became evidence of defective choices. The enormously successful individual owed little to the society that educated his employees, financed the original research, protected his patents, supplied his electricity and maintained the legal and financial system in which his fortune existed. In a July 2026 interview, Borsook explained that she had intended to describe a peculiar subculture. She had not anticipated that it would become the dominant ideology of some of the world’s most powerful people.

That is the Cyberselfish contribution to our formula: private command resting upon public support, accompanied by denial that the public contributed anything.

Ayn Rand: The Moral Mythology

Ayn Rand was the Russian-born American novelist who wrote The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and developed a philosophy she called Objectivism. Rand celebrated reason, productive achievement, individual rights and the pursuit of one’s own happiness. Her ideal figure was the independent creator—the architect, industrialist or inventor who refuses to surrender his judgment to a mediocre collective. In Atlas Shrugged, society’s productive geniuses withdraw their labor after becoming exhausted by politicians, regulators and dependents whom Rand divides into “looters” and “moochers.”

Rand’s actual philosophy was more complicated than its popular caricature. She regarded objective reality and rigorous reason as absolutes. She defended individual liberty and laissez-faire capitalism, which means she would almost certainly have opposed Trump’s tariffs and much of his arbitrary use of state power. The Ayn Rand in contemporary politics is therefore not the complete philosopher. It is Rand as metabolized by American business culture: the heroic billionaire, the parasitic regulator, the undeserving recipient of public assistance and the presumption that market success constitutes a moral verdict.

This simplified Rand supplies something Cyberselfish alone does not: a justification. The billionaire is not simply wealthy; he is a superior producer. Regulation is not merely inconvenient; it is the revenge of inferiors. Taxes are not a contribution to the system that made the fortune possible; they are confiscation. If other people suffer when a factory closes, a benefit disappears or an automated system eliminates their work, their suffering does not create an obligation. It demonstrates that they failed to adapt.

Rand’s novels turn economic power into a heroic narrative. Contemporary billionaire culture performs the same conversion. Wealth becomes evidence of wisdom, and wisdom becomes a license to exercise power far outside the field in which the fortune was made. Success in software, electric automobiles or venture capital becomes an implied qualification to reorganize public health, education, warfare, transportation and democratic government.

The Randian ingredient is therefore wealth transformed into virtue, and virtue transformed into authority.

Idiocracy: The Public Operating System

Idiocracy is Mike Judge’s 2006 film about an exceptionally ordinary man who awakens 500 years in the future and discovers that American society has lost the capacity to think. Language has deteriorated, entertainment has swallowed politics and corporate brands have replaced civic institutions. The president is a professional wrestler. Hospitals resemble degrading game shows. Crops are dying because they are being irrigated with a sports drink called Brawndo, but no one can contemplate giving plants water because Brawndo “has electrolytes.”

The film’s opening explanation, which attributes the catastrophe partly to differential reproduction between intelligent and unintelligent people, is crude and has aged badly. Its more enduring insight is institutional rather than genetic. A society becomes idiotic when every system rewards simplification, spectacle, aggression and immediate gratification while punishing expertise, complexity and delayed consequences.

Our own version of Idiocracy is not populated entirely by stupid people. Indeed, many of the people designing it are highly intelligent. Platforms discovered that outrage and absurdity hold attention more reliably than qualified explanation. Politicians learned that a memorable falsehood can defeat a complicated truth. Financial markets reward announcements before results arrive. Expertise becomes suspicious precisely because experts introduce caveats, probabilities and constraints into a culture that wants total certainty by the next commercial break.

Idiocracy supplies the interface through which the other two forces reach the public. It converts oligarchic ambition into slogans, dominance into entertainment and policy failure into another episode of the show. Its essential principle is not that everyone has become unintelligent. It is that the system has learned to make intelligence politically disadvantageous.

The Three Ingredients Do Different Jobs

The triplet works because the ingredients are complementary.

Cyberselfish tells us who increasingly possesses economic and technological power. Ayn Rand explains why those people may believe their power is deserved and morally instructive. Idiocracy explains how their interests are sold to a public whose information environment has been stripped of memory, context and causal reasoning.

Or, more simply:

• Cyberselfish supplies the ruling class.

• Ayn Rand supplies the theology.

• Idiocracy supplies the operating system.

This also explains why contemporary politics is so ideologically inconsistent. Tariffs are not free-market economics. Industrial subsidies are not libertarianism. Politically directed corporate punishment is not limited government. A trillion-dollar defense and surveillance establishment is not the stateless world imagined by early cyberlibertarians.

But consistency is unnecessary. “Government is bad” never really meant that patent protection, defense procurement, police power, federal land, electrical infrastructure and rescue during a financial crisis were bad. It meant that democratic government should not constrain the people who consider themselves society’s producers. The desired state is not necessarily small. It is powerful in the directions favored by its owners and absent in the directions needed by everyone else.

Iran: Warfare as a Technology Demonstration

Nothing in this argument requires sympathy for the Iranian regime. Iran is an authoritarian state with a history of repression, proxy warfare and nuclear deception. The question is not whether Iran presents genuine dangers. It is how the United States transformed those dangers into the bizarre, open-ended conflict now underway.

On February 28, 2026, while nuclear diplomacy was still active, the United States and Israel launched a massive attack on Iran. The strikes killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and targeted nuclear, military and governmental facilities. The announced purposes subsequently ranged from preventing a nuclear weapon to destroying Iran’s missiles and navy, eliminating its support for armed proxies and encouraging regime change. Iran retaliated against Israel, American bases and Gulf states and asserted control over the Strait of Hormuz.

Six months later, the promised demonstration of overwhelming power has become what Reuters describes as energy trench warfare. Large-scale fighting has intermittently stopped, restarted and stopped again. Ceasefires have been announced and then collapsed. Oil traffic through Hormuz has fallen drastically, energy costs remain elevated, thousands are dead and the central disputes over Iran’s nuclear program, sanctions and the strait remain unresolved. The administration’s original language of obliteration and annihilation has not yielded an attainable political end state.

The Cyberselfish element is the belief that a complex society can be treated as an engineering problem. Identify the dangerous nodes, destroy them with precision technology and expect the system to reboot in a more desirable configuration. The same culture that promises software will “disrupt” an industry imagines that air power can disrupt a nation into political compliance. Human beings, historical memory, religious authority, nationalism and the capacity of an attacked population to become more hostile are treated as irritating legacy systems.

The Randian contribution is the fantasy of unconstrained will. The strong actor demonstrates strength by refusing limits; negotiation becomes evidence of weakness. Opponents are not parties with interests that must eventually be accommodated but irrational obstacles to be broken. Admitting that military superiority does not automatically produce a political settlement would threaten the mythology of the heroic decision-maker.

Then Idiocracy packages the war. “Operation Epic Fury” sounds less like a strategy than a video game expansion. Targets destroyed, ships sunk and leaders killed become visible points on a scoreboard. The harder questions—what government follows, who controls the strait, how escalation ends and what concessions the United States will ultimately accept—do not fit easily into a post or rally speech. Tactical spectacle substitutes for strategy.

It is war conducted partly as content: extraordinarily sophisticated weapons serving an increasingly primitive theory of politics.

Canada: A Trade War Against the Friendly Supply Chain

The trade war with Canada is in some respects even stranger because there is no hostile regime, nuclear program or proxy army to invoke. Canada is a treaty ally and one of America’s largest trading partners. The two economies exchanged approximately $872 billion in goods and services last year. Canada supplies about four million barrels of crude oil daily to the United States, as well as enormous shares of American aluminum, potash, electricity and automotive components. Many products do not so much cross the border as move repeatedly back and forth through a continental production system.

Nevertheless, President Trump insists that the United States does not need Canada. Following the breakdown of negotiations in August, the administration imposed 50 percent tariffs on approximately $20 billion of Canadian goods and threatened comparable tariffs on Canadian automobiles and parts. Canada announced matching retaliation. Provinces have removed American alcohol from public stores, Canadian tourism to the United States has fallen, and Canada is accelerating efforts to redirect trade and security relationships toward Europe. The economic facts stubbornly contradict the claim that America can simply detach itself from Canada.

This is not Randian economics; Rand favored voluntary exchange and would have regarded tariffs as government interference. It is Randian drama. One nation is cast as the productive giant and the other as an ungrateful dependent taking advantage of it. Trade becomes a test of personal dominance rather than a mutually beneficial system. A negotiated compromise looks like humiliation because the heroic actor must never require anything from anyone else.

The Cyberselfish mistake is the inability to comprehend interdependence. A supply chain appears on a computer as a series of discrete transactions, making it easy to imagine that each can be terminated, repriced or rerouted without disturbing the whole. The social capital accumulated through decades of treaties, joint production, predictable rules and ordinary trust is invisible because it does not appear as a quarterly asset.

Idiocracy supplies the economic theory: tariffs are imagined as bills paid by foreigners rather than taxes initially paid by domestic importers and eventually distributed among businesses, workers and consumers. Canada can be commanded like a vendor whose contract is being renegotiated. If the price of aluminum, fertilizer, automobiles or toilet paper rises, the consequences arrive months later and can be blamed upon someone else.

The point of the trade war may no longer be an identifiable trade objective. It is the performance of leverage itself. Canada must be made to yield because yielding proves that America is powerful. The economic damage is merely an externality of the show.

Artificial Intelligence: Brawndo With a Capital Budget

Artificial intelligence is real, useful and potentially transformative. The financial mania surrounding it can also be real. Railroads, automobiles and the internet changed the world while simultaneously generating spectacular bubbles. A technology need not be fraudulent for every investment made in its name to be rational.

The scale of the present buildout is difficult to absorb. Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft are expected to spend more than $730 billion this year, much of it on AI infrastructure. Technology companies that historically financed expansion from abundant cash are increasingly issuing debt and moving obligations through special-purpose vehicles and long-term leases. Reuters recently noted that purchase commitments, leases and other off-balance-sheet obligations could make the actual infrastructure commitment trillions of dollars larger than conventional capital-expenditure figures suggest.

The revenues are not imaginary. Nvidia just reported quarterly revenue of approximately $96 billion, with $89 billion coming from data centers. But the financing increasingly forms a self-reinforcing circle. Chip companies invest in AI developers, which commit to purchase or lease chips, which supports the suppliers’ revenues, which validates higher valuations and produces financing for the next round. Anthropic reportedly plans to spend $45 billion renting computing capacity from a data-center company over six years while projecting explosive future revenue growth. Each transaction becomes evidence justifying the next transaction.

This is Cyberselfish in almost pure form. The supposedly independent private sector requires public electricity grids, water, tax incentives, federal land, accelerated permits, government contracts and occasionally the suppression of state and local restrictions. The White House AI Action Plan explicitly joins deregulation, massive infrastructure construction and national-security policy. The gains remain private while the physical and financial risks spread outward to utilities, ratepayers, communities, lenders and eventually government.

Ayn Rand supplies the founder mythology. AI executives are not merely corporate managers selling a product; they are portrayed as architects of the next stage of human evolution. Ordinary methods of valuation seem almost insulting when applied to such historic figures. If the founder says his company will generate $200 billion in revenue within two years, questioning the assumption can be portrayed as a failure of imagination. Capital does not merely finance the vision. The availability of capital is treated as proof that the vision must be true.

Idiocracy contributes the magical word itself. “AI” increasingly performs the function that “electrolytes” performs in the film: a technical-sounding substance whose invocation ends the discussion. Companies need an AI strategy because AI is what valuations crave. Governments need an AI strategy because otherwise China will win the AI race. Utilities must build more generation because AI requires electricity. Environmental review must be shortened because the race cannot pause. Every objection becomes evidence that the objector does not understand the future.

The genuinely intelligent question is not whether AI will matter. It plainly will. The question is which applications justify their costs, who assumes the financial risk, who supplies the energy and water, who receives the gains, and what happens if the enormous revenue projections fail to arrive on schedule. Those are precisely the questions the combined ideology is designed to dismiss.

Why the Bizarre Has Become Normal

The formula helps explain why events now feel simultaneously sophisticated and insane. The United States can deploy extraordinarily advanced weapons without possessing a coherent theory of how the resulting war ends. It can build the most powerful AI systems in history while financing them through arrangements that few citizens—and perhaps few regulators—can fully see. It can maintain an intricately integrated continental economy while speaking of its closest trading partner as though it were an irritating tenant.

The system is not uniformly stupid. It is often brilliant at extracting wealth, attracting attention and concentrating power. Its stupidity appears at the level of collective purpose. It can optimize the advertisement while degrading the information environment, maximize the transaction while destroying the relationship and win the military engagement while losing control of the war.

That is where the three ingredients finally converge. Cyberselfish removes the obligation to society. Ayn Rand converts dominance into moral desert. Idiocracy removes the feedback that might reveal failure.

In Mike Judge’s film, the supposedly idiotic President Camacho at least recognizes that Joe may know something he does not and gives him responsibility for solving the agricultural crisis. Our version may be darker. Expertise is frequently available, but acknowledging it would place limits upon the heroic leader, the billionaire founder and the spectacle required by the audience.

We are not living entirely inside Cyberselfish, Atlas Shrugged or Idiocracy. We are living inside a merger of all three. Brawndo has completed a venture round. Its founder has been declared a genius. Its data centers have received expedited federal permits. Its software has secured a defense contract. And when the crops continue to die, the company will explain that the problem was excessive regulation, insufficient scale and the failure of ordinary people to believe strongly enough in the future.

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SIDEBAR

Sidebar: Spengler and the Winter of the West

A darker and much longer historical shadow hangs over this triplet: Oswald Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes, published in two volumes in 1918 and 1922 and conventionally translated as The Decline of the West. The German title carries a suggestion not only of decline but of going under, sunset and disappearance. Yet Spengler did not principally mean that the West would suddenly collapse. He believed that every great culture passes through an organic life cycle—birth, growth, creative maturity and eventual hardening into what he called “Civilization.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy summarizes Spengler’s system as a theory in which civilizations pass through stages of youth, maturity and senescence.

For Spengler, “Culture” and “Civilization” were almost opposites. Culture is the living period: religion, art, architecture, philosophy and political forms arise from a shared understanding of the world. Civilization is what remains when those creative energies have been exhausted. It can be immensely wealthy, technically brilliant and militarily powerful, but it increasingly substitutes scale for meaning, administration for statesmanship, entertainment for art and technical capability for any serious answer to the question of what that capability is for.

Spengler called the Western culture “Faustian.” Its defining impulse was the conquest of infinity: limitless space, limitless knowledge, limitless expansion and ultimately limitless power over nature. The Gothic cathedral reaches upward; perspective painting opens an infinite visual field; calculus masters motion; the ocean voyage crosses the horizon; modern finance converts the future into present value. Technology is not merely a collection of useful tools. It is an expression of the Western desire to make the entire world measurable, penetrable and controllable.

Artificial intelligence may be the purest Faustian project yet devised. It seeks to convert language, judgment, creativity and perhaps consciousness itself into computation. Its recurring command is to scale: more data, more chips, more electricity, more capital, larger models and ever more extravagant claims about the future. The destination continually recedes because the point is not arrival. The point is infinite striving.

Paulina Borsook’s Cyberselfish can therefore be read as a close-up field report from Spengler’s late Faustian civilization. She observed a technologically empowered class that had lost any sense of historical inheritance or civic obligation. Its members imagined themselves as autonomous creators even while depending upon accumulated science, public infrastructure, universities, government procurement and an elaborate legal order. They inherited the achievements of a civilization and mistook possession for authorship.

Ayn Rand supplies this late Faustian elite with its heroic self-portrait. Her architect, industrialist and inventor stand above the crowd, refusing all limits upon their productive will. In its simplified business-culture form, Rand’s philosophy becomes Faustian ambition with the tragedy removed: endless creation without dependence, power without inheritance and wealth without obligation. The billionaire appears not as the beneficiary of a mature civilization but as the solitary man who created it.

Idiocracy, meanwhile, is Spenglerian mass civilization rendered as comedy. Public language has deteriorated into slogans, politics into spectacle and knowledge into corporate branding. Citizens remain surrounded by machines whose underlying workings they cannot understand and institutions they can no longer operate. This is not the absence of technology. It is technological abundance combined with cultural exhaustion. The society can still manufacture astonishing products; it has simply lost the capacity to decide intelligently what they should be used for.

Spengler also anticipated a political transition especially relevant to the present. In late civilization, he argued, democratic institutions become increasingly hollow. Money dominates elections, parties and the press, while formal political debate conceals the actual distribution of power. Eventually, public exhaustion produces “Caesarism”: personal rulers who bypass weakening institutions and govern through will, loyalty, force and theatrical demonstrations of command.

The wars with Iran and Canada make more sense when understood as Caesarist performances. The Iran war employs extraordinary technology but lacks a stable political objective. Its visible achievements are targets destroyed, leaders killed and weapons demonstrated. The trade war with Canada disregards economic interdependence because its true subject is not trade. It is submission. Canada must yield so that the ruler can be seen making Canada yield. In both cases, the performance of power begins to replace the achievement of a rational national purpose.

Spengler expected Caesarism eventually to defeat the rule of money. Our version is more peculiar: Caesar and the billionaires have formed a joint venture. Technology magnates supply money, communications systems, surveillance, artificial intelligence and heroic mythology. The Caesarist state supplies contracts, deregulation, land, energy, military power and protection from democratic interference. The supposedly anti-government entrepreneur and the government strongman discover that they have no fundamental quarrel. Each wants public institutions weakened sufficiently that personal power can move without obstruction.

This is where Cyberselfish, Ayn Rand and Idiocracy become not merely three contemporary influences but three symptoms of a Spenglerian transformation. Cyberselfish represents technique emancipated from civic responsibility. Rand represents the Faustian will converted into billionaire self-worship. Idiocracy represents a mass public culture in which words, facts and institutions have become empty shells. Caesarism binds them together through direct, personalized power.

Spengler’s grand cycle was highly deterministic, historically questionable and politically reactionary. He treated decline as destiny and had little sympathy for liberal democracy. We need not accept either his politics or his fatalism to recognize the force of his diagnosis. A society can remain wealthy, inventive and militarily formidable while losing the habits that made its power worth possessing. Decline does not necessarily look like ruins. It can look like record stock-market valuations, magnificent weapons, enormous data centers and political leaders speaking confidently through institutions they are steadily hollowing out.

The triplet describes what the present system is made of. Spengler explains why its ingredients belong together: money without measure, technology without purpose, politics without institutions and power without restraint.

Spengler believed this was the West’s destiny. The democratic answer must be that it remains a choice.

All About Paulina Boorsok / Cyberselfish (2000) / Chat GPT

Paulina Borsook is an American writer and technology journalist—best understood as an early cultural anthropologist of Silicon Valley. She was inside the industry early enough to observe it before “tech” became glamorous, yet sufficiently unimpressed by computers to notice the ideology developing around them.

Born in Pasadena in 1954, she grew up amid the Caltech–JPL scientific culture. She studied psycholinguistics and philosophy at Berkeley and later earned an MFA from Columbia. Beginning in 1981, she worked in software documentation and then technology trade journalism, eventually becoming West Coast bureau chief for Data Communications. In the 1990s she wrote for the original Wired; her 1993 novella, “Love Over the Wires,” was the magazine’s first published fiction.

Her major work is Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech, published in 2000 and developed from a 1996 essay. Its argument was unusually early and specific: Silicon Valley was developing an Ayn Rand–inflected culture that distrusted government and regulation, equated wealth with intelligence, discounted empathy and social obligation, glorified male founders, and forgot how extensively the technology industry depended upon public research, defense spending, universities and infrastructure. Her equally striking 1999 Salon essay, “How the Internet Ruined San Francisco,” anticipated the technology-driven gentrification and cultural flattening that became unmistakable during the following two decades.

There is also a remarkable personal history behind her career. At 14, she was shot in the head by a friend with a Colt .45 and sustained a lifelong traumatic brain injury. Borsook has written that the injury severely affected concentration, memory and quantitative learning while leaving her unusual strengths in language and pattern recognition. Technology writing became the one occupation in which those surviving abilities worked extremely well. In 2013 she was Stanford’s first Arts Institute research resident, developing My Life as a Ghost, an installation about the estrangement from one’s own life that can accompany TBI. Stanford’s account includes her unusually candid artist statement.

Cyberselfish was not literally ignored—it received major reviews and provoked a spirited fight with libertarian writer Eric Raymond—but it sold poorly, disappeared from print and, according to Borsook, seriously damaged her career. Critics from Reason continue to argue that she caricatures libertarian philosophy and confuses obnoxious technology personalities with serious libertarian thought. That is a legitimate limitation: she was diagnosing a subculture and its values, not writing a rigorous history of political philosophy. Her sharp response to Raymond remains entertaining.

Her work has now undergone an extraordinary revival. A viral rediscovery in 2025 led to a New York Times profile, a recent Mother Jones reconsideration and a substantial July 2026 Amanpour & Company interview. A new edition of Cyberselfish is being issued this year; the ebook is already available and the paperback and audiobook are scheduled for September 15. She currently contributes to In Formation, a deliberately anti-hype technology magazine. Official reissue information is here.

My judgment: calling her a “prophet” is a little theatrical. Calling her an exceptionally early and perceptive diagnostician is entirely fair. She did not merely predict that technology would become powerful; she identified the peculiar combination of libertarian resentment, financialization, founder worship, misogyny and moral self-exemption through which that power might be exercised. That is why the book now feels much more consequential than it did in 2000.