The offers had come in earlier that day. Paulina Borsook, 72, allowed herself a flash of excitement before returning to the question of what had ruined her life.

“I don’t know what to make of it,” she said as we drove to lunch. I’d picked Borsook up outside her home near Oakland, California, a basement unit that she calls “Ice Station Zebra” on account of the cold and the color scheme and the isolation. At least that’s how I was encouraged to picture it. Borsook didn’t want me to come inside, lest I pull the old magazine hack’s scam of investing the decor with symbolic significance. She wrote enough stories of this kind in her heyday, back when she was landing bylines in WIRED and the like, to know how the game gets played. Later, she explained over email: “this place i ended up in reflects me not at all. i lost all i owned when i couldnt pay for storage and this place is the best i could find that worked with my disabilities. so i feel it REALLY doesnt reflect me/my taste/my preferences. shame and aversion.”

What had happened to Paulina Borsook? The question was haunting her, even on a day when she’d gotten such good news. It’s haunted her for a quarter-century now. ” It was smart at a moment when the whole of the tech industry had gone dumb, and it was funny where Silicon Valley was at its most self-serious. Cyberselfish got warm, if occasionally baffled, reviews.

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