Uncanny Valley

by Anna Wiener

We didn’t think of ourselves as participating in the surveillance economy. We weren’t thinking about our role in facilitating and normalizing the creation of unregulated, privately held databases on human behavior.

“Don’t forget, we’re on the right side of things,” the solutions manager would say, smiling. “We’re the good guys.”

It was perhaps a symptom of my myopia, my sense of security, that I was not thinking about data collection as one of the moral quandaries of our time. For all the industry’s talk about scale, and changing the world, I was not thinking about the broader implications.

Everyone I knew was stuck in a feedback loop with themselves. Technology companies stood by, ready to become everyone’s library, memory, personality.

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

These conversations didn’t make me feel superior or culturally knowledgeable. They scared me. I would hang up the phone and wonder whether the NSA whistleblower had been the first moral test for my generation of entrepreneurs and tech workers, and we had blown it. I would look across the table into the confused faces of smart, hopeful, well-informed participants in civil society, and think, with dismay: They really don’t know.

What I didn’t realize was that technologists’ excitement about urbanism wasn’t just an enthusiasm for cities, or for building large-scale systems, though these interests were sincere. It was an introductory exercise, a sandbox, a gateway: phase one of settling into newfound political power.

I couldn’t imagine making millions of dollars every year, then choosing to spend my time stirring shit on social media. There was almost a pathos to their internet addiction. Log off, I thought. Just email each other. Then again, if the internet was good for anything, wasn’t it this? Transparency in action; access to the minds of the industry elite.

My obsession with the spiritual, sentimental, and political possibilities of the entrepreneurial class was an ineffectual attempt to alleviate my own guilt about participating in a globally extractive project, but more important, it was a projection: they would become the next power elite. 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.

The young men of Silicon Valley were doing fine. They loved their industry, loved their work, loved solving problems. They had no qualms. They were builders by nature, or so they believed. They saw markets in everything, and only opportunities. They had inexorable faith in their own ideas and their own potential. They were ecstatic about the future. They had power, wealth, and control. The person with the yearning was me.