Uncanny Valley

by Anna Wiener

I sat atop busted amplifiers and cold radiators in Bushwick practice spaces, paging through back issues of prestige magazines, watching various crushes suck on hand-rolled cigarettes and finger their drumsticks and slide guitars, listening attentively to their noodling in preparation for my feedback to be solicited, though it never was.

Very descriptive

I was very broke. Not poor, never poor. Privileged and downwardly mobile.

Later, once I better understood the industry-wide interest in promoting women in tech—if not up the ranks, then at least in corporate marketing materials—I would allow myself to consider that perhaps I was more important to the aesthetic than critical to the business.

“She’s too interested in learning, not doing,” the CEO typed once into the company chat room. This was an accident—he meant it only for the other two cofounders. We huddled in the conference room and he apologized sincerely, while I looped the words over and over in my head. I had always been interested in learning, and I had always 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.

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.

The accelerator’s slogan was an inspirational exhortation to founders to make things people wanted—not, I noted, needed.

*

A search-engine giant down in Mountain View was famous for its interview brainteasers, and while it had already denounced the practice, finding it useless as an indicator of future job performance, others insisted on enshrining it as tradition: learning from another company’s mistakes took on a new meaning when those mistakes had proved lucrative.

I had no qualms about disrupting extant corporations in the big-data space, no inherited nostalgia or fondness for business. I liked the underdog. I liked the idea of working for two kids younger than I was, who had dropped out of college and were upending the script for success. It was thrilling, in that sense, to see a couple of twentysomethings go up against middle-aged leaders of industry. It looked like they could win.

Noah was warm and loquacious, animated, handsome. He struck me as the kind of person who would invite women over to get stoned and look at art books and listen to Brian Eno, and then actually spend the night doing that.

**

The city’s passive-aggressive, progressive, permissive politics tended to rankle transplants,

Such a weird combination....its actuallypassive agressive underneath a falsey open front

Homeless encampments sprouted in the shadows of luxury developments. People slept and shat and shot up in the train stations, lying beneath advertisements for fast fashion and productivity apps, as waves of commuters stepped delicately around them.

With a combined household income that easily topped four hundred thousand dollars—not including the product manager’s stock—we were not people for whom rent control was intended, but there we were.

Feeling like a child at my parents’ party, I sent myself to my room, locked the door, and changed out of work clothes—baggy sweater, high-waisted jeans—and into a very tight dress.

We ordered salads at a faux-French café in the financial district and sat at a rickety table outside, watching the midday stream of men with briefcases and women in shift dresses. 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.

I still clung, condescendingly, to the conceit that art could be an existential curative. That music or literature was all anyone was ever missing.

Listening to EDM while I worked gave me delusions of grandeur, but it kept me in a rhythm. It was the genre of my generation: the music of video games and computer effects, the music of the twenty-four-hour hustle, the music of proudly selling out. It was decadent and cheaply made, the music of ahistory, or globalization—or maybe nihilism, but fun. It made me feel like I had just railed cocaine, except happy. It made me feel like I was going somewhere.

*

What was it like to be fun, I wondered—what was it like to feel you’d earned this?

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.

Trnction costs and why people work as W2 employees.

Being the only woman on a nontechnical team, providing customer support to software developers, was like immersion therapy for internalized misogyny.

We should have gotten along better than we did, but it seemed impossible to bring our outside interests into work: they felt out of place and a little sad, like an outfit that looks put-together and chic at the beginning of the day but preposterous and overreaching by dusk.

Its her analogies that are insightful and why she acedthe LSATsection..aybe it ws the analogy section she took

The next morning, we drove to a hot spring and floated naked in a sulfuric pool with people whose bodies had begun to betray them.

Ian loved me in the way you love someone at the very beginning: he still believed I was the sort of person who wouldn’t allow herself to be treated badly, to be made to feel like shit. Someone righteous, moral. Someone who valued herself. I empathized with his disappointment. I wanted to be that person, too.

The functions might have been generic—client management, sales, programming—but the context was new. I sat across from engineers and product managers and CTOs, and thought: We’re all just reading from someone else’s script.

I skimmed recruiter emails and job listings like horoscopes, skidding down to the perks: competitive salary, dental and vision, 401(k), free gym membership, catered lunch, bike storage, ski trips to Tahoe, off-sites to Napa, summits in Vegas, beer on tap, craft beer on tap, kombucha on tap, wine tastings, Whiskey Wednesdays, Open Bar Fridays, massage on-site, yoga on-site, pool table, Ping-Pong table, Ping-Pong robot, ball pit, game night, movie night, go-karts, zip line. 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. Sometimes I forgot I wasn’t applying to summer camp.

It wasn’t clear whether I was there for lunch or an interview, which was normal. I was prepared for both and dressed for neither.

Quantification was a vector of control.

I patronized the in-house masseuse and received a cautious, fully clothed back massage, the decadence of which left my body tense with shame.

I made sure to keep my identification badge, which prominently displayed the logo of the open-source startup, over my T-shirt, which prominently displayed the logo of the open-source startup.

Everyone was working on their personal mythologies.

Money, he said, gave him access to San Francisco’s growing network of private spaces, which had become most of the city. Money was a key.

Buy a house before the next IPO, my coworkers joked. It wasn’t a joke because it was funny; it was a joke because the overnight-wealthy were bidding 60 percent over asking on million-dollar starter homes, and paying in cash.

There was a lot of discussion that year, particularly among the entrepreneurial class, about city-building. Everyone was reading The Power Broker—or, at least, reading summaries. Everyone was reading Season of the Witch. Armchair urbanists blogged about Jane Jacobs and discovered Haussmann, Le Corbusier. They

Sometimes, reasoning from first principles was a long and tedious process of returning to the original format. E-commerce sites that hadn’t already burned through their venture funding began opening brick-and-mortar flagships—in-person retail, the first-principles approach revealed, was a smart platform for consumer engagement.

But rationalism could also be a mode of historical disengagement that ignored or absolved massive power imbalances. A popular rationality podcast covered topics such as free will and moral responsibility; cognitive bias; the ethics of vote trading. When the podcast did an episode with an evolutionary psychologist who identified as a transhumanist, bivalvegan classical liberal, she and the host discussed designer babies optimized for attractiveness without once bringing up race or the history of eugenics. Arguing fervently about a world that was not actually the world struck me as vaguely immoral. At best, it was suspiciously flattering to power. I found the subculture astonishing, not least because it flourished among grown adults.

Salespeople followed capital; they washed in on the tide.

Something was stirring, or taking root. People were coming to politics for the first time through their white-collar labor.

Maybe not so different from the early 1900's actually. Startups are the new factory floor.

The accelerator claimed to want people who wanted to beat the system, but a tool for organizing workers was perhaps beating the system too hard.

*

I wanted someone in a position of authority to remind me to apply sunscreen.

All these people, spending their twenties and thirties in open-plan offices on the campuses of the decade’s most valuable public companies, pouring themselves bowls of free cereal from human bird feeders, 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.

*

“I’ve been living like someone in her twenties for over a decade,” a coworker observed one afternoon, as we idled around the office bar. “I’m almost forty. Why am I going to three concerts a week? Wasn’t I supposed to have children?”

“What does this all look like when everyone gets older? When does this stop being fun?” Was it still fun? Was it ever? I had turned twenty-nine that summer, and I was starting to want things I had not wanted when I was twenty-five. I developed the bad habit of swiping through real estate apps thirstily, like I was waiting for a gut-renovated Victorian in Cole Valley to ask me, unsolicited, for my Myers-Briggs type.

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 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.

Welcome to the new boss, same as the old boss.