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# 2025-03-11 - Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener | |
A friend recommended this book, and i checked it out from the local | |
library. During the time period this book is set in, i was | |
enthusiastic about startup culture and startups. I deeply enjoyed | |
this author's writing style. She calls herself a millennial but | |
conveys a healthy dose of generation X skepticism. I can relate to | |
her sense of being in the middle of things and yet still feeling like | |
an outsider. | |
What follows are excerpts and spoilers that i found interesting. | |
# Chapter 1 | |
Depending on whom you ask, it was either the apex, the inflection | |
point, or the beginning of the end for Silicon Valley's startup | |
scene--what cynics call a bubble, optimists called the future, and my | |
future coworkers, high on the fumes of a world-historical potential, | |
breathlessly called the ecosystem. A social network everyone said | |
they hated but no one could stop logging in to went public at a | |
valuation of one-hundred off billion dollars, it's grinning founder | |
ringing the opening bell over video chat, a death knell for | |
affordable rent in San Francisco. | |
It was a year of new optimism: the optimism of no hurdles, no limits, | |
no bad ideas. The optimism of capital, power, and opportunity. | |
It was the dawn of the era of the unicorns: startups valued by their | |
investors, at over a billion dollars. | |
My freelance work, proofreading and copyediting manuscripts for a | |
small press, was also waning in volume, because I had recently broken | |
up with the editor who assigned it to me. The relationship had been | |
stressful, but reliably consuming: the editor, several years my | |
senior, had talked about marriage but wouldn't stop cheating. These | |
infidelities were revealed after he borrowed my laptop for a weekend | |
and returned it without logging out of his accounts, where I read a | |
series of romantic and brooding private messages he exchanged with a | |
voluptuous folk singer via the social network everyone hated. This | |
year, I hated it extra. | |
# Chapter 2 | |
I joined the e-book startup at the beginning of 2013, after a series | |
of ambiguous and casual interviews. | |
For the first time in my career, I had some expertise. The men asked | |
for my opinions--on the app's reading experience, on the quality of | |
the inventory, on how best to ingratiate ourselves with online | |
reading communities--and listened for the answers. Despite | |
misunderstanding the technical infrastructure and having little | |
insight into strategy, I felt useful. It was thrilling to watch the | |
moving parts of a business come together; to feel that I could | |
contribute. | |
Later, once I better understood the industry-wide interest in | |
promoting women in tech--if not in 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. | |
What I also did not understand at the time was that the founders had | |
all hoped I would make my own job, without deliberate instruction. | |
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. | |
"She's too interested in learning, not doing," the CEO typed once | |
into the company chat room. This was an accident... 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." | |
In an effort to self-educate, I read blog posts about the startup | |
mentality and did my best to imitate it. | |
After several long and heartfelt emails and another painful | |
one-on-one huddle in the conference room, it was clear that there was | |
no way I could stay. This was not the right moment in the company's | |
journey, they said, for someone like me to get up to speed. The | |
areas where I could add value would not be active for some time. | |
# Chapter 3 | |
There weren't any jobs, my friends said, unless you wanted to work | |
for a tech company. It went without saying that none of them did. | |
When I traveled to San Francisco in the spring, to interview for a | |
customer-support position at a data analytics startup, I didn't | |
mention it to any of my ex-Bay Area friends. I dreaded how they | |
would react if they knew I was angling for a job in the tech | |
industry, that I had even a shred of interest in joining the people | |
on whom they blamed their displacement--the people who had ruined | |
their fun. | |
The interview had been arranged with the help of the e-book startup's | |
CEO, who advise that big data was a hot space. | |
I was not particularly excited about customer support, but it was an | |
entry-level job that required no programming knowledge. As a | |
sociology major with a background in literary fiction and three | |
months of experience in snack procurement, I assumed that I was not | |
in a position to be picky. The e-book startup's cofounders had been | |
adamant that customer support was a temporary state. If I hustled, | |
all three of them agreed, I would quickly find myself in a more | |
interesting, autonomous, impressive role. | |
[The company offered her the job.] The offer included medical and | |
dental coverage, a four-thousand-dollar relocation stipend, and a | |
starting salary of sixty-five thousand dollars a year. The manager | |
informed me that the salary was above market and nonnegotiable. | |
[A friend asked "What is that? Do you care about it? And customer | |
support--aren't you worried it'll be soul ruining?"] | |
I was worried about a lot of things... But I wasn't too worried | |
about my soul. | |
Out of self-protection, I stuck to the narrative that I was moving | |
across the country just to try something new. | |
It was easier, in any case, to fabricate a romantic narrative than | |
admit that I was ambitious--that I wanted my life to pick up | |
momentum, go faster. | |
# Chapter 4 | |
The solutions manager assigned me an onboarding buddy, Noah, a | |
curly-haired twenty-six-year-old with a forearm tattoo in Sanskrit | |
and a wardrobe of workman's jackets and soft fleeces. 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. I had gone to college with men like this: men who would | |
comfortably sit on the floor with their backs against the bed, men | |
who self-identified as feminists and would never make the first move. | |
I could immediately picture him making a seitan stir-fry, suggesting | |
a hike in the rain. Showing up in an emergency and thinking he knew | |
exactly what to do. Noah spoke in absolutes and in the language of | |
psychoanalysis, offering definitive narratives for everyone, | |
everything. | |
# Chapter 5 | |
The city's passive-aggressive, progressive, permissive politics | |
tended to rankle transplants, but tech's self-appointed | |
representatives weren't for everyone, either. Every three months a | |
different engineer or aspiring entrepreneur, new to the city, would | |
post a screed on a blogging platform with no revenue model. He would | |
excoriate the poor for clinging to rent control and driving up condo | |
prices, or excoriate the tent cities by the freeway for being an | |
eyesore. He would suggest monetizing homeless people by turning them | |
into Wi-Fi hotspots. He would lambaste the weak local sports teams, | |
the abundance of bicyclists, the fog. "Like a woman who is | |
constantly PMSing," a twenty-three-year-old founder of a crowdfunding | |
platform wrote about the climate. The extension of casual misogyny | |
to weather was creative, but the digital ambassadors didn't seem to | |
like actual women, either: they whined that the women in San | |
Francisco were fives, not tens, and whined that there weren't enough | |
of them. | |
Homeless encampments sprouted in the shadows of luxury developments. | |
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. As a New Yorker, I had thought I was prepared. I | |
thought I'd seen it all. I felt humbled and naïve--and guilty, all | |
the time. | |
# Chapter 6 | |
As part of the onboarding process, the operations manager set me up | |
on lunch dates with coworkers from across the company. | |
The startup hosted a monthly salon for the data curious, a catered | |
happy hour with presentations from product managers and engineers, | |
sourced from our customer list... | |
The men roamed in clusters, like college freshmen during orientation | |
week. ... There was not a coursing undercurrent of peculiar sexual | |
energy, or any sexual energy at all; everything was straightforward, | |
up front. The attendees were clear about what they wanted, which was | |
for their companies to grow. | |
"I want you to eventually lead Support," the CEO aid, leaning in. | |
"We need more women in leadership roles." I basked in his attention. | |
... 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 that I would do whatever he needed. | |
# Chapter 7 | |
Every Tuesday, at exactly noon, over a hundred synchronized sirens | |
wailed across San Francisco, a test of the city's emergency warning | |
system. The sirens also signaled, at the analytics startup, that it | |
was time for our weekly all-hands. | |
Down for the Cause: the phrase was in our job listings and our | |
internal communications. It meant putting the company first, and it | |
was the highest form of praise. The holy grail was being thanked by | |
the CEO in person--or, better yet, in the company chat room--for | |
being DFTC. | |
For years, the catchphrase had been "So easy, your mother could use | |
it," but this had grown uncouth and politically incorrect, to be used | |
only in meetings where women weren't present, of which there were | |
plenty. | |
One evening, over dinner, the CEO encouraged me to expand my scope: | |
learn how to code, start doing work outside of my job description. | |
"Make it so that they'll have no option but to promote you," he | |
advised. Who was "they," I wondered--wasn't "they" him? He told me | |
he would personally promote me to solutions architect if I could | |
build a networked, two-player game of checkers. | |
I was not excited to be in control of the machine. I did not achieve | |
flow. There was nothing I needed or desired from software. There | |
was nothing I wanted to hack or build. I didn't need to outsource | |
another part of my life to an app, and I never played checkers. The | |
part of my brain that took some pleasure in coding also thrived on | |
obsessive-compulsive behavior and perfectionism. It wasn't the part | |
of my brain that I wanted to nurture. | |
# Chapter 8 | |
Besides, I had never lived alone before, and now had 275 square feet | |
to myself. It felt like total privacy. The door locked in four | |
places. | |
The neighborhood had incubated the sixties counterculture and nearly | |
fifty years later nobody seemed willing to give that identity up. | |
Visitors from all over the world arrived as if on a pilgrimage, | |
looking for something that may never have existed. | |
My single coworkers were all on multiple dating apps, and encouraged | |
me to follow suit. But I found myself newly cautious, leery of | |
giving away too much intimate data. ... I never knew with whom I | |
was sharing my information. | |
# Chapter 9 | |
In midsummer, news broke that a National Security Agency contractor | |
had leaked classified information about the US government's enormous, | |
tentacled surveillance programs. | |
The part of the story that captured my attention was a minor detail, | |
practically a sidebar. It was revealed that lower-level employees at | |
the NSA, including contractors, had access to the same databases and | |
queries as their high-level superiors. Agents spied on their family | |
members and love interests, nemeses and friends. It was by all | |
accounts, a nightmare scenario. But it wasn't that hard to imagine. | |
At the analytics startup, we never once talked about the | |
whistleblower, not even during happy hour. ... We didn't think of | |
ourselves as participating in the surveillance economy. We weren't | |
thinking about our role in facilitating and normalizing the creation | |
of unregulated, privately held databases on human behavior. ... | |
Besides, if we didn't do it, someone else would. | |
The sole moral quandary in our space that we acknowledged outright was | |
the question of whether or not to sell data to advertisers. That was | |
something we did not do, and we were righteous about it. | |
* * * | |
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. | |
* * * | |
It didn't take long to see that in Silicon Valley, non-engineers were | |
pressed to prove their value. | |
* * * | |
One morning, a meeting was dropped mysteriously onto our calendars. | |
At the designated time, we shuffled into a conference room, shrugging. | |
On the other side of the table, the solutions manager paced back and | |
forth, but he was smiling. He asked us to write down the names of | |
the five smartest people we knew, and my coworkers dutifully obliged. | |
Smart in exactly what way, I wondered, capping and uncapping my pen. | |
I wrote five names down: a sculptor, a writer, a physicist, two | |
graduate students. I looked at the list and thought about how much I | |
missed them, how bad I'd been at returning phone calls and emails. | |
"Okay," the solutions manager said. "Now tell me, why don't they | |
work here?" | |
Why didn't my smartest friends work there? It was hard to confront, | |
but not because it was complicated. | |
My friends wouldn't have found the work fulfilling or meaningful. | |
They weren't interested in other businesses' business metrics. They | |
didn't care for tech and, for the most part, they weren't motivated | |
by money, not yet. Those who were motivated by money could make more | |
of it doing something else: finance, medicine, law, consulting. They | |
already did. | |
Startup culture was not for them. They would have taken one look at | |
the company website and balked. | |
# Chapter 11 | |
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. | |
I struggled to assimilate. | |
Processing as a hobby made me feel an affinity for the cool, | |
impersonal bullshit of business culture. Radical honesty often | |
looked to me like a collapse of the barrier between subjectivity and | |
objectivity. It could look like cruelty. But it also seemed to work. | |
I did not want to judge them. I admired their collectivity, which | |
seemed to me wholesome and intimate. The trust among friends was | |
familial, openhearted, optimistic. There was true community. | |
# Chapter 13 | |
Being the only woman on a nontechnical team, providing customer | |
support to software developers, was like immersion therapy for | |
internalized misogyny. I liked men--I had a brother. I had a | |
boyfriend. But men were everywhere: the customers, my teammates, my | |
boss, his boss. I was always fixing things for them, tiptoeing round | |
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. | |
From time to time, the women in the office would go out to a nearby | |
wine bar with fake fireplaces and plates of sweating charcuterie, and | |
try to drink it out. I enjoyed these outings, even if they bore the | |
metallic taste of duty--less a support network than a mutual | |
acknowledgment. | |
I stopped wearing dresses, to stanch a recruiter's stream of strange | |
and unsettling compliments about my legs, which he spoke about as if | |
I were a piece of furniture. | |
Sexism, misogyny, and objectification did not define the | |
workplace--but they were everywhere. Like wallpaper, like air. | |
The Account Management team brought on a man who spoke in inscrutable | |
jargon and maintained a robust fleet of social media accounts; he had | |
thousands of followers, and behaved as if he were an influencer. He | |
was constantly changing his job title on a web site where people | |
voluntarily posted their own résumés, giving himself promotions to | |
positions that did not exist. | |
The influencer brought a scooter into the office and rolled around | |
barking into a wireless headset about growth hacking: "value prop, | |
first-mover advantage, proactive technology, parallelization. | |
Leading-edge solutions. Holy grail." | |
One afternoon, he rolled up to my desk. "I love dating Jewish | |
women," he said. "You're so sensual." | |
I brought the comment up to the solutions manager during one of our | |
perambulating one-on-one check-ins. I wasn't trying to get anyone in | |
trouble, I said, as we walked past a sandwich shop effusing | |
artificial bread scent, and the comment was not in and of itself so | |
offensive--but I had to think about the influencer's sexual | |
proclivities in the middle of my workday, and I wanted not to do that. | |
The solutions manager seemed embarrassed. "I'm sorry that happened," | |
he said, staring at the sidewalk. "But you know him. That's just | |
who he is." | |
# Chapter 14 | |
[The author introduces the idea of the annual company ski trip in | |
Tahoe.] | |
I also resented that it seemed as if we had no choice: it was not | |
DFTC to skip out on the off-site. This made it feel like mandatory | |
vacation, mandatory fun. | |
The startup had booked a row of condominiums at a resort in South | |
Tahoe, up against the lake. The housing groups had been preassigned, | |
without employee consultation. There was one person I hoped not to | |
bunk with: several weeks prior, I had split a cab with one of the men | |
from the Solutions team, en route to our mutual neighborhood after a | |
late night spent drinking at work. During the ride, his hand had | |
slipped up the back of my shirt, and, when I shoved it away, down the | |
waistband of my pants. I kept the conversation going, pushing his | |
hands away, sliding toward the window. | |
# Chapter 15 | |
"If the reports are accurate, the veil between ad tech and state | |
surveillance is very thin." | |
* * * | |
"The worst part," Parker said, "is that the technology is getting | |
worse every day. It's getting less secure, less autonomous, more | |
centralized, more surveilled. Every single tech company is pushing on | |
one of those axes, in the wrong direction." | |
# Chapter 16 | |
The startup was moving into the enterprise. We were selling to major | |
corporations in and outside of the tech sector. We were selling to | |
the United States government. We were becoming accountable. | |
The company was growing. | |
As early employees, we were dangerous. We had experienced an early, | |
more autonomous, unsustainable iteration of the company. We had | |
known it before there were rules. We knew too much about how things | |
worked, and harbored nostalgia and affection for the way things were. | |
We didn't want to outgrow the company, but the company was | |
outgrowing us. | |
* * * | |
My meeting had no calendar invite, no warning. On a Friday | |
afternoon, as I was packing up to leave, the CEO summoned me into a | |
conference room. | |
"I thought you were an amazing worker at first," he said, palms on | |
the table, voice slow. "Working late every night, last out of the | |
office. But now I wonder if the work was just too hard for you to | |
begin with." | |
He wanted to know: Was I Down for the Cause? Because if I wasn't | |
Down for the Cause, then it was time. We could do this amicably. | |
I told him I was down--of course I was down. | |
If I didn't want to stay at the company, the CEO said, he would | |
personally help me find a new job. Either way, I would not be | |
leading the Support Engineering team. "I've decided you aren't | |
analytical," he said. "I don't think we have the same values. I | |
don't even know what your values are." | |
Despite my best efforts, I cried twice in the meeting, leaving in the | |
middle to grab tissues from the bathroom, dodging looks of concern | |
from the Engineering cluster. | |
# Chapter 17 | |
As my annual review rolled around, I found myself on the fence about | |
whether or not to bring up the running list of casual hostilities | |
toward woman that added unsolicited texture to the workplace. | |
Over email, I told my mother about the colleague with the smartwatch | |
app that was just an animated GIF of a woman's breasts bouncing in | |
perpetuity, and the comments I'd fielded about my weight, my lips, my | |
clothing, my sex life. I told her about the list the influencer | |
kept, ranking the most bangable women in the office. | |
She emailed me back almost immediately: "Don't put complaints about | |
sexism in writing," she wrote. "Unless, of course, you have a | |
lawyer at the ready." | |
* * * | |
I was promoted from Support Engineering into something the industry | |
called Customer Success. I was a customer success manager, a CSM. | |
Our customers. My inbox and personal voice mail were full of demands | |
from entitled, stubborn unknown men. I thought of all the times over | |
the past year that I had been underestimated, condescended to, | |
dismissed. | |
* * * | |
Being a customer success manager was more interesting than being a | |
support engineer, but the title was so corny and oddly stilted in its | |
pseudo-sincerity that I could not bring myself to say it out loud. | |
This turned out to work to my advantage: when I changed my email | |
signature to read "technical account manager" instead, it actually | |
elicited a response from previously uncommunicative clients--always | |
engineers, always founders, and, still, always men. | |
I didn't know that customer success managers at other companies were | |
usually young women who somehow didn't look dowdy in floral prints | |
and never left the house with wet hair, whose socks always matched, | |
who didn't make too many jokes, who always knew the answers. ... | |
Women to whom saying no was impossible. | |
It was easy to say no to me. I was always picking lint off my own | |
chest, trying to skate by on good humor. When I met with customers, | |
I acted like I was cosplaying a 1980s business manager. | |
# Chapter 18 | |
There was, of course, a red flag. That spring, the startup had been | |
implicated in a highly publicized gender discrimination scandal. The | |
first woman on the engineering team--a developer and designer, a | |
woman of color, and an advocate for diversity in tech--had posted a | |
series of grievances to the microblogging platform. The startup, she | |
claimed, was a boys' club, a sexist institution, down to the core: | |
colleagues condescended to her, reverted and erased her code, and | |
created a hostile work environment. She described a company culture | |
where women were disrespected and intimidated. | |
The developer's posts went viral: The story wound its way up into the | |
national media. The startup conducted an investigation. An | |
implicated founder stepped down, and another moved to France. | |
All of this made me leery, but I also wondered, privately, if there | |
might be some benefit to joining an organization immediately after | |
this sort of blowup. | |
* * * | |
[The author interviewed and then received an offer.] | |
"We're expecting big things from you, ourselves, and for the | |
company," read the offer letter, with condescension I found only | |
vaguely objectionable. "You should be justifiably proud." I was, | |
and I wasn't. Mostly, I was burned out. | |
What I wanted in a workplace was simple. I wanted to trust my | |
manager. To receive fair and equal compensation. To not feel | |
weirdly bullied by a twenty-five-year-old. To put some faith in a | |
system--any system would do--for accountability. To take it all much | |
less personally, and not to get too close. | |
# Chapter 21 | |
The engineers all read a heavily moderated message board, a news | |
aggregator and discussion site run by the seed accelerator in | |
Mountain View. The message board was frequented by entrepreneurs, | |
tech workers, computer science majors, libertarians, and the people | |
who lived to fight with them. People whose default conversational | |
mode was debate. Mostly men. Men on both sides of the seawall; men | |
all the way down. | |
It wasn't for me, but I read it anyway. It struck me as the raw male | |
id of the industry, a Greek chorus of the perpetually online. | |
* * * | |
I flew to Phoenix for an annual conference of women in computing. | |
Everyone I knew in tech had a story, first or secondhand. That week, | |
I heard new ones: the woman who had been offered an engineering job, | |
only to see the offer revoked when she tried to negotiate a higher | |
salary; the woman who had been told, to her face, that she was not a | |
culture fit. The woman demoted after maternity leave. The woman who | |
had been raped by a "10X" engineer, then pushed out of the company | |
after reporting to HR. The woman who had been slipped GHB by a | |
friend of her CEO. We had all been told, at some point or another, | |
that diversity initiatives were discriminatory against white men; | |
that there were more men in engineering because men were innately | |
more talented. Women kept personal incident logs. They kept | |
spreadsheets. They kept tabs. Some were beginning to step forward | |
and speak about their experiences openly. It felt like the start of | |
a sea of change. | |
Not everyone was excited by the public conversation. | |
During the conference's keynote speech, the CEO of a highly litigious | |
Seattle-based software conglomerate encouraged women to refrain from | |
asking for raises. "It's not really about asking for the raise, but | |
knowing and having faith that the system will give you the right | |
raises as you go along," he said. "That might be one of the | |
additional superpowers that, quite frankly, women who don't ask for | |
raises have." Better, he offered, to trust karma. | |
* * * | |
To my knowledge, our company had just two black employees. | |
# Chapter 27 | |
Friends hosted a rave in the Sacramento Delta, billed as a radical | |
self-reliance event. "The land is dry and needs your sweat," read | |
the invitation. "We are itching to fill the farm with joyful, hungry | |
bodies." ... To prepare, I packed a pair of black harem pants, a | |
small vaporizer, a novel, and The Artist's Way. "I don't think | |
people read at raves," Ian said, eyeing my tote bag, but he let it go. | |
In the late afternoon, a man and woman emerged from the woods, | |
dressed in white, loose linen. They announced that there would be a | |
ritual. They were regal in face paint, pink from the sun. Everyone | |
lined up, passing a joint from front to back, and marched down to the | |
creek, where they disrobed. Our leaders, still partly clothed, waded | |
into the water and took turns dipping everyone backward, like a | |
baptism. The linen floated to the surface, like scum. No way, I | |
whispered to Ian. Too goyish. I hung back and kept my suit on, | |
joining once the ritual was over. | |
The naked bodies bobbed downstream. They clambered up to the edge of | |
the creek and communed with the livestock on the other side, and lay | |
out to dry in the drooping sun. Cans of beer floated in the creek. | |
I felt a familiar loneliness, participating in something bigger than | |
myself and still feeling apart from it. | |
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. | |
# Chapter 28 | |
At work, corners of the open-source platform were growing | |
increasingly vicious and bizarre. | |
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 had. | |
* * * | |
In the spring, a far-right publication ran a blog post about the VP | |
of Social Impact, zeroing in on her critique of diversity-in-tech | |
initiatives that tended to disproportionately benefit white women. | |
The post ran with a collage of octopus-cats, under the headline | |
ANTI-WHITE AGENDA REVEALED. | |
The article sparked a furor in the comments section, accumulating | |
hundreds of responses. The publication's readers made conspiratorial | |
statements about Marxism and Hollywood, liberal victimhood, reverse | |
racism, and the globalist agenda. They published panicked | |
micro-essays about the Federalist Papers and North Venezuela, and the | |
cultural extermination of the West. It was a cacophony of dog | |
whistles. | |
The comments section burst. Menacing vitriol about my coworkers | |
spread across social media. The Sales line rang with rabid callers. | |
The publication seemed to have mobilized a faction that was hell-bent | |
on amplifying far-right ideas under the guise of political debate, | |
using any available channel. By the end of the day, the VP, the CEO, | |
and a handful of outspoken employees had become targets of a vicious | |
internet harassment campaign. It was not the first time this had | |
happened to coworkers--it was, to my knowledge, already the third | |
instance this year. | |
The campaign was a barrage: it persisted for days. Some of the | |
threats were specific enough that the company hired security escorts. | |
HQ had an uneasy air. A threatening note was found taped to the door | |
of the employee entrance. | |
I mentioned to a coworker how striking it was that all internet | |
harassment now seemed to follow a playbook: the methods of the | |
far-right commentariat were remarkably similar to what we had seen, | |
eighteen months prior, from the troll bloc targeting women in gaming. | |
It was like an entire generation had developed its political identity | |
online, using the style and tone of internet forums. | |
Is this just how things are now? I asked. It was bizarre to me that | |
two different groups would have the same rhetorical and tactical | |
strategies. | |
My coworker was a connoisseur of online forums and bulletin boards. | |
He looked at me askance. "Oh, my sweet summer child," he said. | |
"They are absolutely the same people." | |
# Chapter 29 | |
San Francisco had tipped into a full-blown housing crisis. Whenever | |
the media reported that a new tech company had filed an S-1 with the | |
SEC, people started comparing notes on tenants' rights. 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. | |
* * * | |
City-building was a natural interest for well-capitalized people | |
whose employees could hardly afford to live in the Bay Area and whose | |
corporate patrons and VC hypebeasts instilled the belief that startup | |
founders could not just change the world, but should be the ones to | |
save it. It was a testing ground for the efficacy of a | |
first-principles approach to living. | |
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. | |
What I didn't realize was that technologists; excitement about | |
urbanism wasn't just an enthusiasm for cities, or for building | |
large-scale systems, though these interests were sincere. It was an | |
introductory exercise, a sandbox, a gateway: phase one of settling | |
into newfound political power. | |
# Chapter 30 | |
The venture capitalists were discussing a universal basic income, and | |
I couldn't look away. They were concerned about the unlocked | |
economic potential of the urban poor. ... They wanted to see | |
automation and artificial intelligence jump-start a renaissance: the | |
machines would do the work so the rest of us, rendered useless, could | |
focus on our art. | |
I'd believe in an AI renaissance as soon as venture capitalists | |
started enrolling in pottery classes; as soon as they were automated | |
out of a job. | |
* * * | |
The intellectual culture of Silicon Valley was internet culture: | |
thought-leadership, thought experiments. Message-board | |
intellectualism. | |
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. | |
* * * | |
The rationalist swept her hair behind one ear. Contrarianism was | |
underrated, she said. The intellectual contributions were, on net, | |
positive. It was difficult to judge, in the present moment, which | |
ideas would hold water; thus, better to err n the side of more | |
debate, rather than less. "As an example, think of the | |
abolitionists," she said. I asked what the abolitionists had to do | |
with libertarian contrarianism. "Well," she said, "sometimes | |
minority opinions lead to positive and widespread adoption, and are | |
good." | |
As a neutral statement, this was hard to disagree with. Some | |
minority opinions did lead to positive change. I wanted to give her | |
the benefit of the doubt. But we weren't talking about a neutral | |
statement. We were talking about history. | |
I... ventured that the abolition of slavery was perhaps not a | |
minority position. Slaves themselves were surely abolitionists, I | |
said. Just because no one was polling them didn't mean they did not | |
exist. I was trying to be lighthearted. I was trying to be kind. I | |
was trying not to embarrass both of us, though that ship might | |
already have sailed. | |
The rationalist turned to look wistfully at the other partygoers, now | |
gathered in the living room and happily instructing a | |
virtual-assistant speaker to play workout music. She sighed. | |
"Okay," she said. "But, for the sake of argument, what if we limit | |
our sample to white people?" | |
# Chapter 33 | |
When it started to look like perhaps we were wrong--perhaps the | |
United States presidency might actually go to a realestate developer | |
who had once played the part of a successful businessman on reality | |
television--everyone came up with a last-ditch, Hail Mary pass at | |
civic participation. | |
In the grand tradition of affluent white American living in coastal | |
cities in times of political crisis and social upheaval, I had turned | |
inward. | |
author: Wiener, Anna, 1987- | |
detail: gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/Uncanny_Valley_(memoir) | |
LOC: HC107.C2 H5335 | |
tags: biography,book,non-fiction | |
title: Uncanny Valley | |
# Tags | |
biography | |
book | |
non-fiction |