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One of the most important critics is long-standing Wired contributor Paulina Borsook, who has described herself as the magazine's token "feminist/humanist/skeptic/Luddite."[5] In mid-1996, she published several scathing attacks on what she calls cyberlibertarianism, first in an essay in Mother Jones, and then in a two-part interview by writer David Hudson for the Web-based magazine ReWired: Journal of a Strained Net, a mixture of critique of and ballast for Wired's occasional grandiosity. In both places Borsook argued that the residents of Silicon Valley failed to recognize the extent to which they were beneficiaries of government subsidies.

"Although the technologists I encountered there [on her arrival in Silicon Valley in 1981] were the liberals on social issues I would have expected (pro-choice, as far as abortion; pro-diversity, as far as domestic partner benefits; inclined to sanction the occasional use of recreational drugs), they were violently lacking in compassion, ravingly anti-government, and tremendously opposed to regulation," Borsook writes in her Mother Jones essay.[6] She continues:

These are the inheritors of the greatest government subsidy of technology and expansion in technical education the planet has ever seen; and, like the ungrateful adolescent offspring of immigrants who have made it in the new country, they take for granted the richness of the environment in which they have flourished, and resent the hell out of the constraints that bind them. And, like privileged, spoiled teenagers everywhere, they haven't a clue what their existence would be like without the bounty showered on them. These high-tech libertarians believe the private sector can do everything--but of course, R&D is something that cannot by any short-term measurement meet the test of the marketplace, the libertarians' measure of all things. They decry regulation--except without it, there would be no mechanism to ensure profit from intellectual property, without which entrepreneurs would not get their payoffs, nor would there be equitable marketplaces in which to make their sales.

There is a strong strand of the kind of thinking she describes here, both on the Net and in many Wired articles. But it's far from universal. Barlow, for example, does worry that the Net will tend to create a meritocracy that rewards intelligence disproportionately, and he seems genuinely to care that the Net be opened to as much of the world's diverse population as possible. His one blind spot as a prophet for the future of a truly mass medium is that he hates television to the point of calling it toxic and saying there is no safe level of consumption. Of course, many intellectuals feel the same way and like to boast about how little television they and their children watch; but if you're going to make predictions about what people want, you'd better understand why they like what they like.

If you spend any time writing about technological development, you eventually come to notice that the people inventing this stuff often make assumptions about what people want that have nothing to do with reality. Barlow talks about the Net's leading to the death of the nation-state, a common idea in diplomatic circles, too. Is this likely to happen tomorrow? Will most people cheer if it does, if it means paying directly for schools, garbage collection, law enforcement, and emergency services and removes any safety net that might help people who, for reasons of poverty, unemployment, or disability, can't pay their way? MIT Media Lab director Nicholas Negroponte, on the other hand, dreams (or perhaps hallucinates) about a world in which my house recognizes my touch, news flows from the floor through my body