Uncanny Valley

by Anna Wiener

“Meritocracy”: a word that had originated in social satire and was adopted in sincerity by an industry that could be its own best caricature. It was the operating philosophy for companies that flirted with administering IQ tests to prospective and existing employees; for startups full of men who looked strikingly similar to the CEO; for investors undisturbed by the allocation of 96 percent of venture capital to men; for billionaires who still believed they were underdogs because their wealth was bound up in equity.

Often, I would catch myself examining a stranger’s acai bowl; or watching frantic videos of abdominal routines that I lacked the core muscles to imitate; or zooming in on a photograph of a wine cellar in Aspen; or watching an aerial video of hands assembling a tiny, intricate bowl of udon noodle soup, and wonder what I was doing with myself. My brain had become a trash vortex, representations upon representations. Then again, I hadn’t known what a wine cellar was supposed to look like. I careened across the internet like a drunk, tabbing: small-space decoration ideas; author interviews; videos of cake frosting; Renaissance paintings with feminist captions. Cats eating lemons. Ducks eating peas. Rube Goldberg machines, Soul Train episodes, 1970s tennis matches, Borscht Belt comedy. Stadium concerts from before I was born. Marriage proposals and post-deployment reunions and gender reveals: moments of bracing intimacy between people I did not know, and never would.

Why did it feel so taboo, I asked, to approach work the way most people did, as a trade of my time and labor for money? Why did we have to pretend it was all so fun?

Homogeneity was a small price to pay for the erasure of decision fatigue. It liberated our minds to pursue other endeavors, like work.

Lol ouch

San Francisco was going through a culinary renaissance, a competitive effort to capture the attention of young money. Chefs were not competing with each other so much as against the apathy inspired by upscale office cafeterias, fast casual, and delivery apps. To differentiate themselves, they spun the dial all the way up, treating fried anchovies like luxury items and meting out slices of sourdough bread like manna from heaven. The food was demented: cheese courses hidden beneath table candles and revealed, perfectly softened, at the end of the meal; whole quail baked into loaves of bread. It was high-intensity, sensory overload: smoked corn-husk chawanmushi, pickled French fries, green beans and cherries enrobed in burrata. Food that the chef mandated be eaten by hand. Food that was social media famous. Food that wanted to be.

I still clung to the belief that I could find meaning and fulfillment in work—the result of over two decades of educational affirmation, parental encouragement, socioeconomic privilege, and generational mythology.

Tech, for the most part, wasn’t progress. It was just business.

I wanted to believe that as generations turned over, those coming into economic and political power would build a different, better, more expansive world, and not just for people like themselves. Later, I would mourn these conceits. Not only because this version of the future was constitutionally impossible—such arbitrary and unaccountable power was, after all, the problem—but also because I was repeating myself. I was looking for stories; I should have seen a system.