Sara’s Reviews > Uncanny Valley > Status Update

"Billionaires were the mark of a sick society. They shouldn't exist. There was no moral structure in which such a vast accumulation of wealth should be acceptable."

"Arguing fervently about a world that was not actually the world struck me as vaguely immoral."

"I couldn't imagine making millions of dollars every year, then choosing to spend my time stirring shit of social media."

"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."

"I tried to summarize the frantic, self-important work culture in Silicon Valley, how everyone was optimizing their bodies for longer lives, which could then be spent productively; how it was frowned upon to acknowledge that a tech job was a transaction rather than a noble mission or a seat on a rocket ship."

"My brain had become a trash vortex, representations upon representations."

"Compared to other women I'd met, I had it good. But the bar was so, so low."

"There was too much space to demonstrate vulnerability, personhood."

"I was always fixing things for them, tiptoeing around their vanities, cheering them up. Affirming, dodging, confiding, collaborating. Advocating for their career advancement; ordering them pizza. My job had placed me, a self-identified feminist, in a position of ceaseless, professionalized deference to the male ego."

"I felt like a piece of software myself, a bot: instead of being an artificial intelligence, I was an intelligent artifice, an empathetic text snippet or a warm voice, giving instructions, listening comfortingly."