Uncanny Valley

by Anna Wiener

An app for coupon-clipping enabled an untold number of bored and curious urbanites to pay for services they never knew they needed, and for a while people were mainlining antiwrinkle toxins, taking trapeze lessons, and bleaching their assholes, just because they could do it at a discount.

At home, I wasted time scrolling through the photos and errant musings of people I should have long since forgotten, and exchanged endless, searching emails with friends, in which we swapped inexpert professional and dating advice.

Having conquered the rest of retail, the online superstore had returned to its roots and seemed to be experimenting with various ways to destroy the publishing industry. It had even gone so far as to start its own publishing imprints, which my literary friends scorned and derided as cheesy and shameless. We ignored the fact that we had many reasons to be grateful to the website, as the publishing industry was being kept afloat by bestselling novels about sadomasochism and vampires who fucked, hatched in the incubator of the online superstore’s marketplace for self-published e-books.

It was an indignity to talk about money when our superiors, who ordered poached salmon and glasses of rosé at lunch, seemed to consider low pay a rite of passage, rather than systemic exploitation in which they might feel some solidarity. Solidarity, specifically, with us.

The mark of a hustler, a true entrepreneurial spirit, was creating the job that you wanted and making it look indispensable, even if it was institutionally unnecessary.

I had also been spoiled by the speed and open-mindedness of the tech industry, the optimism and sense of possibility. In publishing, no one I knew was ever celebrating a promotion. Nobody my age was excited about what might come next. Tech, by comparison, promised what so few industries or institutions could, at the time: a future.

Men who wore stability running shoes to nightclubs. Men who said “K” instead of “thousand.”

Because interviewing at the e-book startup had been breezy and comfortable, I expected the same from the analytics company. No one had warned me that in San Francisco and Silicon Valley interviewing was effectively punitive, more like a hazing ritual than an airtight vetting system.

They dressed for work as if embarking on an alpine expedition: high-performance down jackets and foul-weather shells, backpacks with decorative carabiners. They looked ready to gather kindling and build a lean-to, not make sales calls and open pull-requests from climate-controlled open-plan offices. They looked in costume to LARP their weekend selves.

Like a woman who is constantly PMSing, a twenty-three-year-old founder of a crowdfunding platform wrote about the climate. The extension of casual misogyny to weather was creative, but the digital ambassadors didn’t seem to like actual women, either: they whined that the women in San Francisco were fives, not tens, and whined that there weren’t enough of them.

On the couch, two men in suit jackets expounded on opportunities in cannabis. Everyone seemed very comfortable and nobody talked to me. They tilted their wineglasses at the correct angle; they dusted crumbs off their palms with grace. The word I heard the most was “revenue.” Maybe “strategy.”

They looked so much older than we did, in their inoffensive textiles and fake alligator loafers. They looked straight out of another era, like the nineties. I wondered how we looked to them: two round-cheeked slobs in T-shirts and sneakers, eating slices of grilled chicken like teenage miscreants with a stolen credit card. I nudged my backpack under the table, out of view.

Was this what it felt like to hurtle through the world in a state of pure confidence, I wondered, pressing my fingers to my temples—was this what it was like to be a man? The sheer ecstasy of the drop made everything around me feel like part of a running-shoe ad or a luxury car commercial, though I couldn’t imagine driving to EDM, or even online shopping.

felt like too much exposure, too much personhood. I was always unnerved to sign in to the meeting and see my own face floating above the pixelated head of a stranger, blinking back.

didn’t expect to stay longer than a year: I would reinvent myself professionally, I figured, and return to New York with a midlevel managerial title and marketable skills.

Weekends, once I ran out of work, were a challenge. Sometimes I met up with coworkers, but mostly I spent time alone. I felt free, invisible, and very lonely. On warm afternoons, I went to Golden Gate Park and lay in the grass listening to dance music, fantasizing about going out dancing. People threw tennis balls to their dogs in corridors of light, and I felt envious. I watched groups of fitness enthusiasts bobbing up and down and wondered if I was the sort of person who could make friends doing squats.

I took my phone out to dinner.

The CEO and I didn’t always speak each other’s language. I was interested in talking about empathy, a buzzword used to the point of pure abstraction, and teaching the support engineers how to properly use punctuation. He was interested in running complex data analysis on our team’s performance and holding the boys accountable to numbers. I talked about compassionate analytics. He talked about optimizing. I wanted a team of tender hearts. He wanted a team of machines.

Our operations manager, a public defender before she immigrated to the United States, ran payroll, planned events, pinch-hit as a technical recruiter, worked on the interior design, assisted the CEO, and served as our ad hoc Human Resources department.

Funny how baseball makes its way in almost everyday language

I hoped it was worth it. Onscreen, two men dressed like school shooters flapped around a dystopian universe. Our faces looked soft and bloodless in the light.

Ian at least trusted the process. I trusted nothing. I sat on the bathroom sink and read pages of user-generated comments on a web forum dedicated to trip documentation. I looked up the location of the nearest hospital. Then I removed work email from my phone, making it impossible to reach the CEO or anyone else I might regret contacting while artificially flooded with serotonin.

Jasminr

Reading back-scroll made me feel like a creep, but it was a useful research project, a means of discovering whom to avoid and whom to trust.

I liked watching everyone watch themselves while we pretended to watch one another, an act of infinite surveillance. The first ten minutes were almost always spent correcting the videoconference software, during which I became acquainted with my teammates’ home interiors, their color-coded bookcases and wedding photos, their earnest letterpress posters or obscure art. I learned about their hobbies and roommates. I grew fond of their children and pets.

I was reminded of my red skin and passive vanity. If the personalized playlists were full of sad singer-songwriters, I could only blame myself for getting the algorithm depressed.

The internet was a collective howl, an outlet for everyone to prove that they mattered. The full spectrum of human emotion infused social platforms. Grief, joy, anxiety, mundanity flowed.

Aphorisms were in; authors were wired. I would pick up books that had been heavily documented on social media, only to find that the books themselves had a curatorial affect: beautiful descriptions of little substance, arranged in elegant vignettes—gestural text, the equivalent of a rumpled linen bedsheet or a bunch of dahlias placed just so.

All these past selves, marching around like they knew something; casting aspersions on my all-encompassing tech-centric identity; trying to convince me I had made a mistake. This time, I felt lighter. I reported into work from my childhood bedroom, making myself available between six in the morning and early afternoon. I saw college friends, and didn’t try to recruit anyone. I drank coffee with my mother until the coffee ran out or ran cold; visited my grandparents in apartments that hadn’t changed for decades. I tried to clear out the storage space in the basement, unearthing old bomber jackets with hand-sewn patches, undergraduate writing, a jar of peeled potatoes stockpiled fifteen years prior in preparation for Y2K. Banal activities, but they felt so good. I felt myself returning to myself.

but the city I had grown up in no longer existed. There were some holdouts—the cat-smelling bookstore where I had worked during college breaks, certain cultural institutions—but the neighborhoods I had known as a child were now dotted with restaurants playing overdetermined playlists and boutiques trading on a branded locality that I found comical and alienating. The new version of the city was inscrutable, baffling. Who wanted this? Who was it for?

“Why not just leave, find something else you’re excited about?” she asked, as we rumbled across the Williamsburg Bridge, heading toward the restaurant where she worked. Money and health insurance, I said—and the lifestyle. I had never really considered myself someone with a lifestyle, but of course I was, and insofar as I was aware of one now, I liked it. The tech industry was making me a perfect consumer of the world it was creating. It wasn’t just about leisure, the easy access to nice food and private transportation and abundant personal entertainment. It was the work culture, too: what Silicon Valley got right, how it felt to be there. The energy of being surrounded by people who so easily articulated, and satisfied, their desires. The feeling that everything was just within reach.

!

In apartments decorated with the same furniture and painted the same shades of security-deposit white, we placed the same ceramic planters holding the same low-maintenance plants.

Reading wasn’t about mainlining information. The tech industry’s efficiency fetish was so dreary. Don’t encourage your claque, I thought. I took a screenshot of his post, and shared it with a little editorialization: Tech needs to stop trying to ruin everything I love, I sniped.

However, brevity is the soul of wit

“Almost everyone’s going to return empty-handed. Sober, responsible adults aren’t going to quit their jobs and lives to build companies that, in the end, may not even be worth it. It requires, in a visceral way, a sort of self-sacrificing.” Only later did I consider that he might have been trying to tell me something.

Something was stirring, or taking root. People were coming to politics for the first time through their white-collar labor. They were developing theoretical frameworks on the internet; they were beginning to identify with the Worker. They talked about universal basic income over free cocktails at the company bar.

He had grown up poor, he reminded me; he had spent years working on actual assembly lines before teaching himself to code. “It’s not about a means of solidarity or longevity for them. It’s just about personal leverage. When I was exposed to asbestos, nobody doing comp-sci at an Ivy League was showing up to help.” I had not chosen the right audience. I was not prepared for this argument.

This was just the next phase of the artisanal fetish, the engineer said. It was like LARPing, like Burning Man. “It’s a working-class MMOG,” he said, shooting me a withering look. “We are not vulnerable people.”

crushing empty cans of fruit-tinged water, bored out of their minds but unable to walk away from the direct deposits—it was so unimaginative. There was so much potential in Silicon Valley, and so much of it just pooled around ad tech, the spillway of the internet economy.

patriotic stickers and aestheticized coastal corporate feminism,