Uncanny Valley

by Anna Wiener

I asked where the first blank-slate city would be, expecting him to say somewhere in California—outside of Sacramento, maybe, somewhere within commuting distance that would release some of the pressure from San Francisco. Central America, he said. Maybe El Salvador. “Somewhere with people who want to work hard, and don’t want to have to deal with crime,” he explained. I stared, with great interest, at the bottom of my beer bottle. “The idea is to follow lean-startup methodology. The city will start small, like an early startup that has to cater to the first hundred users, rather than the first million.” I asked how he planned to scale up, and regretted it as soon as he gave me the answer: shipping containers. To live in? I asked. What about community? People didn’t come from nowhere. What about the local economy? I was starting to get mad. I was starting to show my cards. “Ideally, it would be a special economic zone,” he said. “You know Shenzhen?” I knew Shenzhen: a high-gloss, highly surveilled city where rapid economic growth encouraged both luxury development and child-labor abuses; a citizenry partaking of modernity and progress, under dictatorial control. An epiphenomenon of authoritarian capitalism. Did he know Shenzhen? I wished I was drunker, so that I could get mean. I asked what the seed round was, intending it as a joke. They were just bootstrapping, he said. Paying mostly out of pocket—the team was still small. They just needed to raise fifteen million dollars.