Uncanny Valley

by Anna Wiener

Artificial intelligence and virtual reality were coming into vogue, again. Self-driving cars were considered inevitable. Everything was moving to mobile. Everything was up in the cloud. The cloud was an unmarked data center in the middle of Texas or Cork or Bavaria, but nobody cared. Everyone trusted it anyway.

had a fragile but agreeable life: a job as an assistant at a small literary agency in Manhattan; a smattering of beloved friends on whom I exercised my social anxiety, primarily by avoiding them.

background, like fraternity brothers posing for a graduation shot. All three wore button-down shirts; they looked like they had just shared a good chuckle. They looked so at ease, so convincing. They looked like the sort of men who used electric toothbrushes and never shopped at thrift stores, who followed the stock

I was very broke. Not poor, never poor. Privileged and downwardly mobile. Like many of my peers, I could afford to work in publishing because I had a safety net. I had graduated college debt-free, by no accomplishment of my own: my parents and grandparents had saved for my tuition since I was a blur on the sonogram. I

My desires were generic. I wanted to find my place in the world, and be independent, useful, and good. I wanted to make money, because I wanted to feel affirmed, confident, and valued. I wanted to be taken seriously. Mostly, I didn’t want anyone to worry about me.

Was it all that different from the online superstore, and wouldn’t the app’s success come at the expense of the literary culture and community? I didn’t have a good response to most of these concerns. Mostly, I tried not to think about them. Smug and self-congratulatory, I translated most

I felt useful. It was thrilling to watch the moving parts of a business come together; to

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. This was an existential strategy for the tech industry itself, and it did not come naturally to me.

been rewarded for it; learning was what I did best. I wasn’t used to having the sort of professional license and latitude that the founders were given. I lacked their confidence, their entitlement. I did not know about startup maxims to experiment and “own” things. I had never heard the common tech incantation Ask forgiveness, not permission.

travel patterns of celebrities and politicians. Even the social network everyone hated had its own version of God Mode: early employees had been granted access to users’ private activity and passwords. Permissioning was effectively a rite of passage. It was a concession to the demands of growth.

had long been a haven for hippies and queers, artists and activists, Burners and leather daddies, the disenfranchised and the weird. It also had a historically corrupt government, and a housing market built atop racist urban-renewal policies—real estate values had benefited as much from redlining as from discriminatory zoning practices and midcentury internment camps—but these narratives, along with the reality that an entire generation had been prematurely lost to AIDS, undercut its reputation as a mecca for the free and freakish, people on the fringe. The city, trapped in nostalgia for its own mythology, stuck in a hallucination of a halcyon past, had not quite caught up to the newfound momentum of tech’s dark triad: capital, power, and a bland, overcorrected, heterosexual masculinity.

They pursued authenticity without realizing that the most authentic thing about the city was, at this moment in time, them.

The commuters wore corporate identification badges clipped to their belt loops or draped on top of their jackets, like children trying not to get lost in a mall. They stood in line for the shuttles with their backpacks and reusable coffee cups; some slung bags of dirty laundry over their shoulders. They looked tired, resigned, sheepish. Mostly, they looked at their phones.

This concentration of public pain was new to me, unsettling. I had never seen such a shameful juxtaposition of blatant suffering and affluent idealism. It was a well-publicized disparity, but one I had underestimated.

drink, I let the ice melt, and then I drank that, too. I didn’t think to mention that if he wanted more women in leadership roles, perhaps we should start by hiring more women. I didn’t note that even if we did hire more women, there were elements of our office culture that women might find uncomfortable. Instead, I told him I would do whatever he needed.

They talked about achieving flow, a sustained state of mental absorption and joyful focus, like a runner’s high

Maybe mutual desire for friends wasn’t enough for a friendship.

The CEO and solutions manager agreed we needed more women on Support, but they didn’t hire any. Instead, we built out a small cadre of overqualified millennial men fleeing law, finance, education, and dorm-room entrepreneurship.

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.

What was anyone ever talking about? People said things like “co-execute” and “upleveling”; they used “ask” and “attach” and “fail” as nouns. They joked about “adulting.”

It seemed like half of the new-school old-schoolers spent the bulk of their spare time on overstuffed secondhand couches, drinking tea and processing. Processing was a daily routine, a group activity. People consulted one another on their romantic entanglements, their financial problems, their hemorrhoids. Everyone was always checking in.

Now, at twenty-five, he was responsible for other adults’ livelihoods. Some of my coworkers had families, even if they tried not to talk too much about their children in the office. Surely, he felt that weight.

Like Jonathan- at 26 or 27 in 2007.

I was perhaps still afflicted by the shortsightedness of someone whose skill set was neither unique nor in high demand. A sense of my own disposability had been ingrained since working in the publishing industry, and

At the end of the idea: A world improved by companies improved by data. A world of actionable metrics, in which developers would never stop optimizing and users would never stop looking at their screens. A world freed of decision-making, the unnecessary friction of human behavior, where everything—whittled down to the fastest, simplest, sleekest version of itself—could be optimized, prioritized, monetized, and controlled.

It's Happened. Thanks, Silicon Valley.

At the end of the idea: A world improved by companies improved by data. A world of actionable metrics, in which developers would never stop optimizing and users would never stop looking at their screens. A world freed of decision-making, the unnecessary friction of human behavior, where everything—whittled down to the fastest, simplest, sleekest version of itself—could be optimized, prioritized, monetized, and controlled.

Ah- the synopsis.

I liked my inefficient life.

I could get frustrated, overextended, overwhelmed, uncomfortable. Sometimes I ran late. But these banal inefficiencies—I thought they were luxuries, the mark of the unencumbered. Time to do nothing, to let my mind run anywhere,

Job listings were an excellent place to get sprayed with HR’s idea of fun and a twenty-three-year-old’s idea of work-life balance.

There was something a little bit sad about body optimization, I thought, after accidentally spending an afternoon on nootropics in the bathroom with my eyelids taped, watching makeup tutorials and attempting to perfect a dramatic cat-eye. The goal was productivity, not pleasure. And to what end—whom did it serve? Perhaps gunning for high output in one’s twenties was a way to compress the peak-of-life productive years, tee up an early retirement with a still-youthful body, but it seemed brazen to play God with time.

I liked the specific intimacy of video: everyone breathing, sniffling, chewing gum, forgetting to mute the microphone before clearing their congestion. I liked the banter, the frozen mid-sentence faces, the surprise of seeing an animal emerging from under a desk. 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 had no conception of what it would be like as a woman in tech whose skill set was respected. I was disappointed to learn that it wasn’t too dissimilar from being a woman whose skill set wasn’t.

The browser was sick with user-generated opinions and misinformation. I was in a million places at once. My mind pooled with strangers’ ideas, each joke or observation or damning polemic as distracting and ephemeral as the next.

Everyone I knew was stuck in a feedback loop with themselves. Technology companies stood by, ready to become everyone’s library, memory, personality. I read whatever the other nodes in my social networks were reading. I listened to whatever music the algorithm told me to. Wherever I traveled on the internet, I saw my own data reflected back at me: if a jade face-roller stalked me from news site to news site, 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 platforms, designed to accommodate and harvest infinite data, inspired an infinite scroll. They encouraged a cultural impulse to fill all spare time with someone else’s thoughts. 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. People were saying nothing, and saying it all the time. Strangers swapped confidences with other strangers in return for unaccredited psychological advice. They shared stories of private infidelities and public incontinence; photos of their bedroom interiors; photos, faded and cherished, of long-dead family members; photos of their miscarriages. People were giving themselves away at every opportunity.

Everything was simultaneously happening in real time and preserved for posterity, in perpetuity.

refreshed the newspaper. I refreshed social media. I refreshed the heavily moderated message board. I scrolled and scrolled and scrolled. In any case. Time passed, inevitably and unmemorably, in this manner.

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.

Efficiency, the central value of software, was the consumer innovation of a generation. Silicon Valley might have promoted a style of individualism, but scale bred homogeneity. Venture-funded, online-only, direct-to-consumer retailers had hired chatty copywriters to speak to the affluent and overextended, and we appeared to be listening.

was reminded of the gulf between us: Patrick was running a company, and I processed copyright takedowns and held users’ hands through account lockouts. I’d trolled him on the internet, and he’d taken the time to buy me lunch. He was the picture of grace, and I was lowly, unfocused, a rando with no goals. I wondered what kind of boss he was.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw one of the company’s lawyers eating a miniature candy bar and looking peacefully stoned.

I envied Ian, who was trained to think in terms of hardware, the embodied world. He stared at a computer all day, too, but the laws of physics still applied. His relationship to the internet was different from mine: he didn’t have accounts on any of the social networks, was unfamiliar with memes and unattuned to the minutiae of other people’s lives. He didn’t stand up at the end of the day and think, as I did: Oh, right—a body.

It was still the era of the social web. Everyone in the pool. Alone, together. Social networks, claimed the social networks’ founders, were tools for connection and the free circulation of information. Social would build communities and break down barriers. Pay no attention to that ad tech behind the curtain: social would make people kinder, fairer, more empathetic. Social was a public utility for a global economy that was rapidly becoming borderless, unbounded—or would be, if anyone in Silicon Valley could figure out how to win China.

No one wanted to admit that abuses were structurally inevitable: indicators that the systems—optimized for stickiness and amplification, endless engagement—were not only healthy, but working exactly as designed.

I felt ashamed about my own class privilege, everything I took for granted. My closest brush with manual labor was breaking down cardboard boxes in the basement of an independent bookstore. I retrieved additional seltzer waters for us, tangerine flavor. We made uneasy jokes about what a tech workers’ union would strike for: ergonomic keyboards, a more inclusive office dog policy. I couldn’t elevate the mood. Neither of us could let it go. “People need unions to feel safe,” the engineer said. “What would a union protect any of us from? Uncomfortable conversations?”

Though I did not want what Patrick and his friends wanted, there was still something appealing to me about the lives they had chosen. I envied their focus, their commitment, their ability to know what they wanted, and to say it out loud—the same things I always envied. They were all so accomplished, and athletic. It didn’t help that I hardly understood what most of them did, I just knew they were good at it.

My reasons for deflecting and deferring were pragmatic—money, social affirmation, a sense of stability—but they were also personal. 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. Unlike the men, I didn’t know how to articulate what I wanted. Safer, then, to join a group that told itself, and the world, that it was superior: a hedge against uncertainty, isolation, insecurity. These motivations were not aging well. In reality, there was nothing superior about those whom I was trying to impress. Most were smart and nice and ambitious, but so were a lot of people. The novelty was burning off; the industry’s pervasive idealism was increasingly dubious. Tech, for the most part, wasn’t progress. It was just business.

I could see myself writing blog posts on my own personal business philosophy: How to Squander Opportunity. How Not to Negotiate. How to Cry in Front of Your Boss. I would work twice as hard as my male counterparts to be taken half as seriously. I would devote my time and energy to a corporation, and hope that it was reciprocal.

I was always looking for the emotional narrative, the psychological explanation, the personal history. Some exculpatory story on which to train my sympathy. It wasn’t so simple as wanting to believe that adulthood was a psychic untangling of adolescence, willful revisionist history. 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.

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.

Hubris, maybe. Indifference, preoccupation. Idealism. A certain complacency endemic to people for whom things had, in recent years, turned out okay.