Uncanny Valley

by Anna Wiener

Business was a way for men to talk about their feelings. The internet was choked with blindly ambitious and professionally inexperienced men giving each other anecdote-based instruction and bullet-point advice.

lol

The men whom the CEO seemed to admire were the same men whom all the other men in the ecosystem admired: entrepreneurs, investors, one another. Chief among them was a founder of the seed accelerator, an English computer scientist who was the startup ecosystem’s closest thing to an intellectual. An aphorism generator who blogged prolifically, his rhetorical style was cool, rational, and unemotional. He pontificated, at length, on intellectual conformity. He was prone to making favorable comparisons between startup founders and great men of history: Milton, Picasso, Galileo. I didn’t doubt his business insight, but I didn’t know why he seemed to believe it qualified him as an expert on anything—everything—else.

haha

Life shone in its simplicity. I thought about the sweep of history, the improbability of convergence. Nothing seemed impossible. I had moved to California to accelerate my career, and now I was living through a historical inflection point, I effused—we were living through a historical inflection point.

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.

Unfortunately for me, I liked my inefficient life. I liked listening to the radio and cooking with excessive utensils; slivering onions, detangling wet herbs. Long showers and stoned museum-wandering. I liked riding public transportation: watching strangers talk to their children; watching strangers stare out the window at the sunset, and at photos of the sunset on their phones. I liked taking long walks to purchase onigiri in Japantown, or taking long walks with no destination at all. Folding the laundry. Copying keys. Filling out forms. Phone calls. I even liked the post office, the predictable discontent of bureaucracy. I liked full albums, flipping the record. Long novels with minimal plot; minimalist novels with minimal plot. Engaging with strangers. Getting into it. Closing down the restaurant, having one last drink. I liked grocery shopping: perusing the produce; watching everyone chew in the bulk aisle. Warm laundry, radio, waiting for the bus. 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, to be in the world. At the very least, they made me feel human. The fetishized life without friction: What was it like? An unending shuttle between meetings and bodily needs? A continuous, productive loop? Charts and data sets. It wasn’t, to me, an aspiration. It was not a prize.

I started agreeing with this for the first time at past 22.5 years old

I swam in relief. Watching the city, wrapped in Ian’s jacket, I did not see that I was in good company: an entire culture had been seduced. I understood my blind faith in ambitious, aggressive, arrogant young men from America’s soft suburbs as a personal pathology, but it wasn’t personal at all. It had become a global affliction.

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.

it does not serve u

It seemed more likely that biohacking was just another mode of self-help, like business blogging. Tech culture provided endless outlets for men to pursue activities coded as female—including, apparently, body manipulation. I could see how tracking personal metrics offered a sense of progress and momentum, measurable self-betterment. Leaderboards and fitness apps encouraged community through competition. Quantification was a vector of control. Self-improvement appealed to me, too. I could stand to exercise more often, and be more mindful of salt. I wanted to be more open and thoughtful, more attentive and available to family, friends, Ian. I wanted to stop hiding discomfort, sadness, and anger behind humor. I wanted a therapist to laugh at my jokes and tell me I was well-adjusted. I wanted to better understand my own desires, what I wanted; to find a purpose. But nonmedical monitoring of heart rate variability, sleep latency, glucose levels, ketones—none of this was self-knowledge. It was just metadata.

great analysis

I knew, even as I was moving through them, that I would look back on my late twenties as a period when I was lucky to live in one of the most beautiful cities in the country, unburdened by debt, untethered from a workplace, obligated to zero dependents, in love, freer and healthier and with more potential than ever before and anytime thereafter—and spent almost all my waking hours with my neck bent at an unnatural angle, staring into a computer. And I knew, even then, that I would regret it.

It wasn’t just me. 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.

Information and temporality collided. Amber alerts hovered above neighborhood notices about package theft and raccoons in the recycling. Animated GIFs of nineties rappers slid above ASMR videos; corporate recognitions of terrorist attacks and school shootings were smashed between in-depth discussions of reality television and viral recipes for chicken thighs. Accounts representing national organizations defending civil liberties campaigned for human-rights issues on top of indie musicians vying for sponsorship from anthropomorphized denim brands. Everything was simultaneously happening in real time and preserved for posterity, in perpetuity.

Often, I would catch myself examining a stranger’s acai bowl; or watching frantic videos of abdominal routines that I lacked the core muscles to imitate; or zooming in on a photograph of a wine cellar in Aspen; or watching an aerial video of hands assembling a tiny, intricate bowl of udon noodle soup, and wonder what I was doing with myself. My brain had become a trash vortex, representations upon representations. Then again, I hadn’t known what a wine cellar was supposed to look like. I careened across the internet like a drunk, tabbing: small-space decoration ideas; author interviews; videos of cake frosting; Renaissance paintings with feminist captions. Cats eating lemons. Ducks eating peas. Rube Goldberg machines, Soul Train episodes, 1970s tennis matches, Borsch...

I searched for answers, excuses, context, conclusions: Define: technocracy. California ideology. Jeffersonian democracy. Electronic agora. Ebola. State slogans. New dark mole. Tanuki. Feminist porn. Feminist porn not annoying. What is canned ham? How old too old law school? Best law schools. Law schools rolling admissions. Islamic State. Silk pajamas. Elbow moisturizer. Unshrink wool sweater. What is mukbang. Define: pathos. Define: superstructure. “Jobless recovery.” White noise Arctic ice cracking. Cuba tourism. How to massage your own shoulder. Text neck. Vitamin D deficiency. Homemade silverfish trap. Rent calculator. The Big One when. Hypnosis nail biting. Hong Kong protests. Dishwasher video inside. Ferguson indictment. Satellite images of my parents’ childhood homes. The names of my ex-boyfriends’ bands. The time I could expect the sun to set that evening.

Sometimes I would worry about my internet habits and force myself away from the computer, to read a magazine or a book. Contemporary literature offered no respite: I would find prose cluttered with data points, tenuous historical connections, detail so finely tuned it could only have been extracted from a feverish night of search-engine queries. Aphorisms were in; authors were wired. I would pick up books that had been heavily documented on social media, only to find that the books themselves had a curatorial affect: beautiful descriptions of little substance, arranged in elegant vignettes—gestural text, the equivalent of a rumpled linen bedsheet or a bunch of dahlias placed just so. Oh, I would think, turning the page. This author is addicted to the internet, too.

I 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.

I went to New York. On previous trips home, when I was still working at the analytics startup, the city had felt fraught with paths not taken. All these past selves, marching around like they knew something; casting aspersions on my all-encompassing tech-centric identity; trying to convince me I had made a mistake. This time, I felt lighter. I reported into work from my childhood bedroom, making myself available between six in the morning and early afternoon. I saw college friends, and didn’t try to recruit anyone. I drank coffee with my mother until the coffee ran out or ran cold; visited my grandparents in apartments that hadn’t changed for decades. I tried to clear out the storage space in the basement, unearthing old bomber jackets with hand-sewn patches, undergraduate writing, a jar of peeled potatoes stockpiled fifteen years prior in preparation for Y2K. Banal activities, but they felt so good. I felt myself returning to myself.

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.

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

I was mad. Mad that tech entrepreneurs like him seemed constitutionally unable to resist cannibalizing music, books, subcultures—whatever made life interesting. Reading wasn’t about mainlining information. The tech industry’s efficiency fetish was so dreary. Don’t encourage your claque, I thought. I took a screenshot of his post, and shared it with a little editorialization: Tech needs to stop trying to ruin everything I love, I sniped.

Optimist in which way, I wondered. In the Candide way, the Jeffersonian way, or the Oscar Wilde way? I looked up Oscar Wilde optimism quote—“The basis of optimism is sheer terror”—and felt affirmed. I looked up “fallibilist” and found myself on a website about philosophy and medieval mathematical truths.

The men debated the role of equity in the ecosystem, the incentives for making fuck-you money. It’s about independence, one of the men wrote. It’s about the freedom to take a personal risk. When I thought risk, I didn’t think about money, mine or anyone else’s. Risk was white jeans on my period, coffee on an airplane, hitchhiking, the pull-out method. But the men weren’t talking to, or about, me; they never were. It’s about leverage, posted a self-described top performer. It lets me grab our executives and board by the balls. Fuck-you money: it was a catchphrase, a motivation, a lifestyle.

My own psychic burden was that I could command a six-figure salary, yet I did not know how to do anything. Whatever I learned to do in my late twenties, I learned from online tutorials: how to remove mold from a windowsill; slow-cook fish; straighten a cowlick; self-administer a breast exam. Whenever I wrenched a piece of self-assembly furniture into place, or reinforced a loose button, I experienced an unfamiliar and antiquated type of satisfaction. I went so far as to buy a sewing machine, like I was looking for ways to shame myself. I wasn’t alone. Half the programmers I knew between the ages of twenty-two and forty, mostly men, were discovering that their fingers were multipurpose. “It feels so good to do something with my hands,” they said, before launching into monologues about woodworking or home-brewing or baking sourdough.

Sometimes it felt as if everyone had watched a highlight reel of people enacting freedom in the sixties and seventies—casual nudism, gleeful promiscuity, communal living, communal eating, communal bathing. There had been some talk of buying group land up near Mendocino. There had been some talk of shared childcare, even though no one had children. It struck me as a performance from an imperfect past, a reenactment. The pursuit of liberation, some pure joy.

I wondered if all this was perhaps just a form of resistance. Technology was gnawing into relationships, community, identity, the commons. Maybe nostalgia was just an instinctual response to the sense that materiality was disappearing from the world. I wanted to find my own way to hedge against it, my own form of collective. Beneath me, the earth was hard and cold. It vibrated, perpetually, to the bass line.

Still, I had long since stopped doing public work under my own name. For all external correspondence, I used male pseudonyms. Thankfully, we never had to use the phone. I did this in part because the work could be sensitive, with the potential to upset people whose digital currency was cruelty; I wasn’t the only person on the team using a fake name. But using male pseudonyms wasn’t just useful for defusing or de-escalating tense exchanges. It was useful for even the most harmless support requests. I was most effective when I removed myself. Men, I saw, simply responded differently to men. My male pseudonyms had more authority than I did.

this is seared into my brain and buttressed by my own experiences as a woman on the internet (in the world) :/

First-principles thinking: Aristotelian physics, but for the management-science set. Technologists broke down infrastructure and institutions, examined the parts, and redesigned systems their way. College dropouts re-architected the university, skinning it down to online trade schools. Venture capitalists unbundled the subprime mortgage crisis, funding startups offering home loans. Multiple founders raised money to build communal living spaces in neighborhoods where people were getting evicted for living in communal living spaces.

There was always something a little off about these spaces—something a little crooked. It was unsettling to find dust on the shelves; strange to see living plants. The stores shared a certain ephemerality, a certain sterility, a certain snap-to-grid style. They seemed to emerge overnight, anchors in physical space: white walls and rounded fonts and bleacher seating, matte simulacra of the world they had replaced.

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. There was no better way to know which venture capitalists wrung their hands over the impact of identity politics on productivity, or how applying Stoic practices to life in Woodside was going. How else to know which members of the venture class defended megalomaniac founders as entrepreneurs who couldn’t scale, or mistook criticism as harassment and perceived themselves as victims of digital mobs? How else to understand the deliberately amplified identities, ideologies, and investment strategies of the people transforming society—the people I was helping make rich?

The intellectual culture of Silicon Valley was internet culture: thought-leadership, thought experiments. Message-board intellectualism. There were economists and rationalists; effective altruists, accelerationists, neoprimitivists, millennialists, objectivists, survivalists, archeofuturists, monarchists, futarchists. Neoreactionaries, seasteaders, biohackers, extropians, Bayesians, Hayekians. Tongue-in-cheek and deadly serious. Witting and unwitting. It did leave something to be desired.

Northern California did not offer a natural human experience of the passage of time. I was confused by the abundance of postcolonial, non-native flora. I was always eating expired yogurts. I was always actively trying to recall the season. I hadn’t seen rain in three years. It was no wonder San Francisco was referred to as a city of Peter Pans; no wonder so many people tried to live in the perpetual present. It was easy to forget that anyone was getting older, or that anyone ever would.

I would devote my time and energy to a corporation, and hope that it was reciprocal. I would make decisions based on the market that were rewarded by the market, and feel important, because I would feel right. I liked feeling right; I loved feeling right. Unfortunately, I also wanted to feel good. I wanted to find a way, while I could, to engage with my own life.

For a long time, I harbored the belief that there was a yearning at the heart of entrepreneurial ambition, a tender dimension that no one wanted to acknowledge. Some spiritual aspect beneath the in-office yoga classes and meditation apps and selective Stoicism and circular thought-leading. How else to explain the rituals and congregations, the conferences and off-sites, the corporate revival meetings, startup fealty and fanaticism—the gospel of work, modernized and optimized? I was committed to the idea of vulnerability.

All these boys, wandering around, nimble and paranoid and prone to extremes, pushing against the world until they found the parts that would bend to them. I assumed they had people to impress, parents to please, siblings to rival, rivals to beat. I assumed their true desires were relatable: community, or intimacy, to simply be loved and understood. I knew that building sy...

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 generation...

Later, I would mourn these conceits. Not only because this version of the future was constitutionally impossible—such arbitrary and unaccountable power was, after all, the problem—but also because I was repeating myse...

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 abo...

We were too old to use innocence as an excuse. Hubris, maybe. Indifference, preoccupation. Idealism. A certain complacency endemic to people for whom things had, in recent years, turned out okay. We had assumed it would all blow over. We had just been so busy with work, lately.

I thought we had it in the bag. I saw Silicon Valley as an unstoppable train; I had bought into tech’s self-flattering grandiosity, and trusted things would turn around in its favor. I didn’t know who was more delusional: the entrepreneurial class, for thinking they could change the trajectory of history—or me, for believing them.

Later, I would wonder if I had missed it because I was more of a product of the tech industry—with its context aversion, and emphasis on speed and scale, its overwhelming myopia—than I wanted to admit. Or maybe it was personal; maybe I wasn’t analytical. Maybe I wasn’t a systems thinker.

I wanted the optimistic perspective on what might happen, I said. What did he have for me? I was so used to him pushing a counternarrative, cheering me up, making the future feel new. He was so productive, so effective. Surely he had ideas about solutions. Patrick looked down at his hands. “I really don’t know,” he said. “It’s quite dire.”

Life in the attention economy had made me oblivious. My social media feeds overflowed with feminist slogans, iconography, and products: ceramic vases shaped like naked breasts, baby onesies that read THE FUTURE IS FEMALE. This had been my internet for months. It did not transfer to suburban Nevada. Women stood behind screen doors and looked at us, with our clipboards and patriotic stickers and aestheticized coastal corporate feminism, and simply shook their heads. At the curve of a cul-de-sac, in an affluent neighborhood of compact SUVs and ornate landscaping, we leaned against our rental car, bent over our phones. I unpinned the uterus and put it in my pocket. It had all seemed possible. It had seemed real. As if in slow motion, I felt the force of the swerve. The polls were closing. The air was beginning to cool.

I thought, for a while, that everything would change. I thought that the party was over. I thought the industry was in for a reckoning, that it was the beginning of the end, that what I had experienced in San Francisco was the final stage of a prelapsarian era, the end of our generational Gold Rush, an unsustainable age of excess.

Certain unflattering truths: I had felt unassailable behind the walls of power. Society was shifting, and I felt safer inside the empire, inside the machine. It was preferable to be on the side that did the watching than on the side being watched.