Uncanny Valley

by Anna Wiener

Down for the Cause—what was the cause? Our cause was the company, but the company had causes, too. Driving engagement; improving the user experience; reducing friction; enabling digital dependency. We were helping marketing managers A/B test subject-line copy to increase click-throughs from mass emails; helping developers at e-commerce platforms make it harder for users to abandon shopping carts; helping designers tighten the endorphin feedback loop. Helping people make better decisions, we had always said. Helping people test their assumptions. Answer tough questions. Eliminate bias. Develop best-of-breed message targeting. Increase conversions. Improve key business metrics. Measure user-adoption strategy. Prioritize impact. Drive ROI. Growth-hack. What gets measured gets managed, I sometimes told customers, quoting a management guru whose writing I had never read. The endgame was the same for everyone: Growth at any cost. Scale above all. Disrupt, then dominate. 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.