The first thing to know about Cyberselfish, the chillingly prescient 2000 book about Silicon Valley that its author, Paulina Borsook, says “ruined my life” and caused a 25-year-long “curse” to befall her, is that it’s very, very funny. Cyberselfish, which Borsook cannot stand to name and instead calls “TDB” (short for “that damn book”), is a classic, fish-out-of-water tale of a journalist investigating a strange land. Except, in her case, as a California native, it’s the work of a fish regarding an invasive species that suddenly befouled the tank she’d been swimming in her whole life.

Her observations from the murky milieu of the dawning tech world are as hilarious as they are depressing; early in the book, for instance, Borsook recounts what happened after she wrote a satirical guide for the website Suck.com on dating men in tech. (Do profess Ayn Rand fandom, “don’t tell him about your best friend, the urban planner, who uses HUD money to develop low-income housing.”) After the piece was published, emails cascaded into her inbox.

“Guys were positive that I had been writing about them,” Borsook wrote in Cyberselfish. “Or about someone they knew (I hadn’t written about anyone in particular). Guys wanted to meet me for coffee, as I was obviously their dream girl (it was a joke, guys, and no, thank you). At last! A woman who understands me! No, more modestly, I was just someone who had been paying attention.”

Borsook, an author and poet, began working in Silicon Valley in 1981, first as a technical writer for software companies. As she freelanced for various tech outlets and from her perch as a contributing writer to Wired in its earliest years, she began to piece together, as she put it in Cyberselfish, “a picture of an emergent social and political subculture, one that can seem dangerously naive and, at its worst, downright scary.”

Today, just a glance around will confirm that said subculture is no longer “emergent,” but horribly, frighteningly, society-destroyingly dominant. Fittingly, Cyberselfish will be reissued on September 15 by Tin House, an imprint of the independent publisher Zando. The three-decade plus history of the book traces back through a piece she wrote for this very magazine where she began to lay out its thesis. That essay, also titled “Cyberselfish,” ran in our July/August 1996 issue below a crystal clear subhed: “Silicon Valley, one of the country’s biggest recipients of government largesse, would like to bite the hand that feeds it.”