We are only a few weeks into the New Year and an impeached president has already used drone technology to kill a foreign leader and threaten war using a social media platform. This same president was elected with the help of Russian bots and fraudulent accounts on another social media platform, which was also accused of selling the private data of millions of users to political operatives. At this year’s Golden Globes, a comedian called out the founder of said social media platform and was plenty applauded, though that did not stop his colleagues from posting on yet another social media platform about their red carpet fashion. Rubes like us then liked, shared, followed, tweeted, and linked our reactions, all while solemnly swearing to cut back our screen time. Most of us won’t. Many of us will pose the question on the internet: How did we get here?
The new memoir Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener provides an answer. Now a contributing writer for The New Yorker, Wiener spent most of her twenties as a liberal arts expat working in Silicon Valley start-ups, after having grown disillusioned with the stagnant wages and old-school hierarchies of New York publishing. “Tech,” she writes, “promised what so few industries or institutions could, at the time: a future.” While Wiener went looking for a future, what she found was a dystopia.
It’s tempting to call Uncanny Valley a coming-of-age tale, but what the memoir offers is less about Wiener’s own personal narrative and more of a sociological study on tech-bro, start-up culture. There is something Swiftian about her professional journey, which first takes her to a small e-book company in New York that allows her to “fail up” (her words) then to a rapidly growing analytics start-up before landing in a more established open-source platform enterprise. Each step up the economic chain proves to be more grotesque, as the promise of technology devolves into the threats we understand today, and it becomes clear why: Despite tech leaders’ and workers’ belief that their products are ahistorical, apolitical, and practically atemporal—perpetually relevant and futuristic in their mind—the systems they create are political by design.
Wiener shines when she turns her incisive observations on the many entitled men running amok in Silicon Valley. Anyone who’s paid attention to the tech world in the past decade will recognize the frat mentality, the evolution of the internet troll, the implicit and explicit misogyny and racism that runs rampant in the industry. It’s an engaging summary of every terrible thing you’ve heard about start-ups, from the unnecessary ping-pong table at the expense of an HR department, to the cringe-worthy retreats that are a #MeToo moment waiting to happen, to the absolute cluelessness of some of today’s most brilliant minds, earnestly discussing genetically designed babies as a net positive.
One of the more insightful analyses Wiener makes is on the degradation of language that incubated in the open-office plans of app developers and has now spilled over into the outside world. She obsesses over a missing hyphen in her company’s “I AM DATA DRIVEN” T-shirts, marvels at a coworker who says “LOL” instead of laughing, lists verbs that are now used as nouns, and gawks at emojis as a stand-in for genuine emotion. “[P]eople used a sort of nonlanguage, which was neither beautiful nor especially efficient: a mash-up of business-speak with athletic and wartime metaphors, inflated with self-importance,” she writes. “Calls to action; front lines and trenches; blitzscaling.”
It’s a quirk that proves to be dangerous, not just annoying. It’s easier to obfuscate what the product is when you’re using a bunch of buzzwords instead of saying you’re surveilling customers. It’s easier to say you’re “disrupting” than to truly consider the long-term consequences of your work.
There is also an acute awareness of how Wiener and everyone around her becomes less and less in-tune with their bodies as technology seeps more and more into their daily lives. In the constant strive to optimize productivity something must be sacrificed and that tends to be what many of us appreciate most in life: idle time in the pursuit of pleasure. Bodies are now hacked instead of enjoyed. She realizes at the time that she’ll spend most of her late twenties with her “neck bent at an unnatural angle, staring at a computer.” The uncanny valley of the title is a clever misnomer. We aren’t unsettled by computer-generated humanoids here but humans willingly transforming themselves into workaholic quasi-cyborgs.
Wiener’s desire to return to a life filled with art, music, sensuality, tangible results, and physical exhaustion, and away from avatars, screens, and technocrats, though latent, comes late as a moral conflict. Although we see glimmers of how unattractive other alternatives were—the rigidity of traditional industries, the passive counterculture of artsier scenes, the weakening of civic life—these are missed opportunities to delve deeper into how the lack of a social safety net fueled the industry’s gravitational pull. Wiener is perceptive, inquisitive, and frankly too smart for so much of the bullshit described that it’s still hard to understand why she lasted so long. One wonders how she was so easily seduced. But then again, weren’t we all?
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Does commenting here count as social media? Please say no; my sanity rides so, so heavily on believing this to be the methadone to FB/Twitter/etc which I’ve otherwise been able to quit.
Despite tech leaders’ and workers’ belief that their products are ahistorical, apolitical, and practically atemporal—perpetually relevant and futuristic in their mind—the systems they create are political by design.I often say that “everything is political.” To bloviate about that a bit:When I say “political” people often think I mean “relating to political parties (specifically Democrats and Republicans) and their incessant battling.” But that isn’t it. Politics is, fundamentally, a struggle over the distribution and usage of acquired power.What is acquired power? It’s the opposite of natural power. Natural power is things like strength, speed, good looks, intelligence. Acquired power is power that other people have been convinced to grant to us: authority (I’m the boss because everyone agrees I’m the boss), legal rights (this is my house because our legal system says that this pile of documentation proves it’s my house), and so on.Through this lens, it’s easy to see why everything is thus “political.” Everything we do interacts with our acquired power, or the acquired power others have over us. Most commonly, it interacts with the acquired power that people in the same sociopolitical position as us have. When I do stuff as a white man, I’m taking advantage of the power that white men everywhere have, even though I personally have done very little (if anything) in my life to earn that power. When I create things or make decisions, I’m inevitably doing so in a way that prioritizes and emphasizes the values that I hold, as opposed to the values someone else (say, a black woman) holds. Since I (on average) have more power than a black woman (on average) has, my actions serve to reinforce the values that I hold more effectively than she could. Even if my actions have nothing to do with the modern civic “political process”—e.g. voting, talking to elected officials, explicitly “political” speech—they’re still participating in the system of acquired power that envelops us all.Silicon Valley types who claim their platforms are “apolitical” are usually wrong, not because they’re lying, but because they don’t realize that the things they create inevitably reflect their values. It’s the reason why there’s so many huge, famous apps that cater to people in their 20s with lots of disposable income, and not very many such apps that cater to (say) lower-middle-class black women in their 40s.
Absolutely correct and well said. TX
dside droppin’ science
*turns baseball cap sideways*
“Wiener’s desire to return to a life filled with art, music, sensuality, tangible results, and physical exhaustion, and away from avatars, screens, and technocrats, though latent, comes late as a moral conflict. Although we see glimmers of how unattractive other alternatives were—the rigidity of traditional industries, the passive counterculture of artsier scenes, the weakening of civic life—these are missed opportunities to delve deeper into how the lack of a social safety net fueled the industry’s gravitational pull.”This is always what frustrates me about these accounts. What is the alternative? Manual labor destroys your body. Social work and art dooms you to a life of destitution. Not to mention how with our dying planet, making stuff is more and more seen as a waste of resource. So what do we do? At least tech lets me die of a heart attack before the climate collapse instead of becoming bedridden waiting for the raiders to rape and kill me.
Happy Monday to you too
Manual labor is only dangerous if it’s done unsafely. People can work hard without ruining their bodies, the ruin happens when people are pushed past their endurance level by the demands of the market.
Arts and social work are more valuable than technology, but they generate less revenue because of intentional decisions by the government and by private funding bodies to spend money on other things. Those policies can change to redirect funds toward things of social value. Using the impending apocalypse as a reason to neglect the present would have been embarrassing during the middle ages (likewise a period fixated on the world in decline), and it’s embarrassing now. So basically, the answer to your question is “literally anything besides sit there.”
In the Middle Ages there wasn’t an actual biosphere collapse. The biggest question is “why fight a war that has already been lost”?
No, in the middle ages there was the impending judgment of a vengeful god. Obviously climate change is real, but the belief that people can tell the future is a spiritual belief that we used to prop up with religion and we now prop up with science. Climate change is real, but the consequences of it for the future are, by definition, unknown. Arguing that the future is already written so we should just give up is a spiritual belief that’s just as destructive as climate change denial. It’s also much more insidious, since people can incorrectly invoke “science” to support it and justify their ongoing neglect.
George Orwell wrote about how the wealthy and privileged love to idealize physical labour — until they have to do any of their own. Right now French railway workers are striking because (at least some of them) got to retire at 50 (with pensions), and now the government wants to take that away. While that’s a bit of an anachronism today and seen as a unsustainable perk, the whole reason for it was when it was initiated, people doing physical labour were worn out and broken by that age.
So people decades ago identified a serious problem with their working conditions, and they used collective bargaining to address it (imperfectly, of course)? Yes, my point exactlyThe person I was replying to even acknowledged that 21st century office conditions are unhealthy (the joke about dying of a heart attack). The dangers of office work aren’t nearly as immediate or industry specific as those of railroad work, but they exist. We just have the basically nihilistic idea that labor conditions aren’t worth addressing if they can’t be addressed perfectly and permanently.
You are missing the point that the whole reason why the “retire at 50″ thing is being seen as worth eliminating is that thanks to technology, these jobs are becoming less and less physical. And that’s a good thing! The rather minor issue of modern workers not getting enough exercise in no way compares to the loss of life and limb that was once common.
Now I’m not sure what this conversation is about. The post I replied to made the comment that “manual labor destroys your body.” I’m not arguing that manual labor is great work – it’s not. But it doesn’t have to be dangerous. It’s dangerous for people to do physically taxing work when they’re no longer physically capable, which is something workers can address (imperfectly) with retirement and pensions. “Loss of life and limb” is a separate issue of workplace safety (if you’re killed or dismembered it’s not “retirement”) that can also be addressed (imperfectly) by labor advocacy.It’s great that technology has made the French railway industry safer, but you can’t automate every kind of manual labor. It’s counterproductive to say (like the OP) that manual labor is inherently unsafe, which implies that people can’t affect their working conditions. It’s also counterproductive to pretend that office work is inherently safe, which overlooks the fact that spending years stuck behind a desk causes health problems. Getting back to this actual review, our perceptions of safety and human efficacy are shaped by our use of computers. That is to say, the people who make computers have a lot of influence on our lives, and those people are often not great. At all. The original poster’s assertion that there’s no better alternative to technocratic nihilism is itself simply a product of technocratic nihilism, and it perfectly summarizes the tech industry’s failures of social responsibility and basic imagination.
Funny, I see this “love it or leave it” attitude within the startup world; I’ve had bosses straight up say “I know things are difficult, chaotic and less-than-ideal, so if you’re struggling, let’s find you an exit strategy.” These accounts aren’t meant to say “do something else,” they’re meant to say “if we’re going to do this, we need to do it better.”