When Paulina Borsook and I first met last December, she was in the middle of what she called “this resuscitation effort.” It had happened quickly, without her realizing it. Social media posts praised technology critics such as Gil Duran, while readers revived Borsook’s work as evidence that some people had understood where Silicon Valley was heading.

“Instead of centering on those who missed the boat—and who still don’t seem to get it—let’s focus on the work of Paulina Borsook, who saw everything clearly and tried to warn us 25 years ago,” Duran wrote in a widely shared post on Bluesky, responding to a 2025 WIRED essay by Stephen Levy.

Borsook was being called a prophet. Although her ideas were not widely appreciated at the time, they seemed especially relevant now. Had she not written years ago about “testosterone-addicted guys with a chip on their shoulder and too much time on their hands” in the manosphere? Hadn’t she reclaimed the Luddites as “early unskilled labor protesters” when “Luddite” was still commonly used as an insult? And hadn’t she objected when Sand Hill Road theorists flirted with eugenics?

A small revival grew around her work, even though Borsook had said little about it. The New York Times called her the “author who dared to criticize Silicon Valley”—the same description a friend had once given her. “The universe isn’t done with you yet.”

Paulina Borsook’s book finds a new publisher

The publisher was eager to reissue the book. That December, five publishers submitted bids to her agent. Eventually, Borsook agreed to a new edition published by Tin House, with a foreword by Duran in mid-September.

After years in the wilderness, the offer felt like validation. Things were finally getting better.

“It really broke my heart in so many ways,” Borsook said while waiting for her order at a restaurant. Her thoughts returned to 2001, when she had wondered what had happened to her career. Had she written something wrong? Had she been blacklisted? Was what happened to her as common as sexism?

“I really hate playing that card,” she said. “But I have a question.” Even after all these years, she still could not understand what had happened. In some ways, the happy events of the previous few months had left her more confused. She repeated the same thought several times: “I don’t know what to think of myself anymore.”

She charmed me within a few hours—a common experience, I later learned, among people in Borsook’s orbit. When I dropped her off that afternoon, I half-jokingly promised to find the man who had ruined her career.

The technology story behind Paulina Borsook’s career

Okay, but first I have to talk about Dick Pick. That was his name: Richard A. Pick. This was the 1960s, when no one would have laughed at you for walking around with a name like that—even if you were a serial cheater like Dick Pick.

Pick was a software developer for a military contractor during the Vietnam War. According to the story, the Army needed a way to track spare parts for Lockheed’s Cheyenne attack helicopters. Pick and his business partner, Don Nelson, developed a database operating system for the task.

They named it the General Information Retrieval Language System, or GIRLS. Like many innovations supported by defense funding, GIRLS soon moved into commercial use. The operating system eventually became known as PICK, and that was the name that brought it to Paulina Borsook’s attention when she worked for a small software company in Marin County.

How Borsook learned to understand technology

Before becoming one of early Silicon Valley’s sharpest media observers, Borsook first learned how to explain technology. She did so in the early 1980s, working with so-called minicomputers that were actually large enough to be implanted.

The company was called Construction Information Systems. Borsook wrote technical documentation explaining how its software worked in the plainest language she could manage.