Wiener - Uncanny Valley

Author: Anna Wiener

Review:

What does it mean to work in Silicon Valley post-2010? What does it mean to work in a world where the evolution of all aspects of life had been privileged, accelerated, and even "Optimized"? I disliked the term optimized, like Anna's observations too, I used to love it (and to an extent today, I still use that term in my life, as I manage different To-Do list, and optimizing strategies of delegation and GTD). I used to love the world of silicon valley and their holistic everything. How going down the streets of SF, I saw a techno-utopia rather than dystopia. I read the last chapter of this book sitting in the heated room of my company, on the massage chairs that my bosses put in for funsies. I love working in my work environment. I like a lot of things I do as a data analyst that covers the flow of traffic and how to find points of contention in our data-driven company. But the discontent and my relationship to the technopolitical world that we live in right now means that I have to be critical of everything that I do, everything that I write, many aspects of my life since most of them are on the internet.

This book isn't a revolution, or in theory, it's not a revolution in memoir, but it is a must-read for those who are coming into the adolescent world of the current technopoly. It's a tremendous holistic insight into the nature of technological change for the iGeneration (born post 1998ish), and Millenials, and even those who inspire or aspire into viral fame. It's a sad, yet revelatory insight into what the postmodern thinkers have projected, but actualized, and what how that effects us today. What I see in the online space is different than the real world, and yet I don't know what's real or not anymore. I no longer understand the power of Twitter trends as truth, compared to the racist incident that I had a few weeks before reading this book. When I said, wait, this guy was racist to me (saying that I looked like Randall Park), and yet, on the online world, this would never happen to me. I know where to go online, and however, in the physical meat spaced world, I had no idea most of the time.

A great read and a must-read for those growing up that aspire into silicon valley. An excellent read for me, because with all due respect, as a male, I can traverse into those tech worlds.

Reading Stats:

• 1/20/20 - 1/22/20

• Reading Level: Freshmen Level College

• Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

• Publication Date: 2020

Quotes and Notes:

• Pivoting meant they were worried about runway. Pivoting meant they were a cautionary tale. Only the two cofounders were left, tucked off to the side. Everyone else had been let go once funding ran out.
• The CEO did not acknowledge that the reason millennials might be interested in experiences—like the experience of renting things they could never own—was related to student loan debt, or the recession, or the plummeting market value of cultural products in an age of digital distribution. There were no crises in this vision of the future. There were only opportunities.
• I began to wonder why it was, exactly, that they had hired me. I had been operating under the vain premise that it was because I knew something about books: I could be a bridge between the old and new guards. I had fancied myself a translator; I had fancied myself essential. Later, once I better understood the industry-wide interest in promoting women in tech—if not up 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.
• “We host full-time,” he said. “I guess you could say we work for a startup, too.” -- Could I? He and his wife had both quit their day jobs, in the nonprofit sector, to provide the trappings of an authentic urban experience—different enough to be interesting, -- They slept in the basement. They weren’t employees. They were part of the product.
• When asked how he would spend the new funding, the CEO made his priorities clear: he would pay the first hundred employees far above market, he said, and spoil current employees to retain them. This was the language of customer acquisition
• I was selling out. In reality, I was not paying attention: those who understood our cultural moment saw that selling out—corporate positions, partnerships, sponsors—would become our generation’s premier aspiration, the best way to get paid.
• Good interface design was like magic, or religion: it cultivated the mass suspension of disbelief.
• Anything an app or website’s users did—tap a button, -- stored, aggregated, and analyzed in those beautiful dashboards. Whenever I explained it to friends, I sounded like a podcast ad.
• Data could be segmented by anything an app collected—age, gender, political affiliation, hair color, dietary restrictions, body weight, income bracket, favorite movies, education, kinks, proclivities—plus some IP-based defaults, like country, city, cell phone carrier, device type, and a unique device identification code.
• The culture these inhabitants sought and fostered was lifestyle. They engaged with their new home by rating it. Crowdsourced reviewing apps provided opportunities to assign anything a grade: dim sum, playgrounds, hiking trails. Founders went out to eat and confirmed that the food tasted exactly how other reviewers promised it would; they posted redundant photographs of plated appetizers and meticulous restaurant-scapes. They pursued authenticity without realizing that the most authentic thing about the city was, at this moment in time, them.
• Even so, the enemy of a successful startup was complacency. To combat this, the CEO liked to instill fear. He was not a formidable physical presence—he had gelled, spiky hair; he was slight; he often wore a green jacket indoors, presumably to fight the chill—but he could scare the hell out of us. He spoke in military terms. “We are at war,” he would say, standing in front of us with his arms crossed and his jaw tensed. Across the world, Syria and Iraq and Israel raged. We were at war with competitors, for market share. We would look down at our bottles of kombucha or orange juice and nod along gravely.
• there was always an opportunity to accelerate straight into management, like skipping a grade, skipping three. We dressed however we wanted. We were forgiven our quirks. As long as we were productive, we could be ourselves. Work had wedged its way into our identities. We were the company; the company was us. Small failures and major successes were equally reflective of our personal inadequacies or individual brilliance. Momentum was intoxicating, as was the feeling that we were all indispensable.
• Listening to EDM while I worked gave me delusions of grandeur, but it kept me in a rhythm. It was the genre of my generation: the music of video games and computer effects, the music of the twenty-four-hour hustle, the music of proudly selling out. It was decadent and cheaply made, the music of ahistory, or globalization—or maybe nihilism, but fun. It made me feel like I had just railed cocaine, except happy. It made me feel like I was going somewhere.
• He asked us to write down the names of the five smartest people we knew, and my coworkers dutifully obliged. --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. I wondered how I’d stopped making time for the things and people I held dear. I felt blood rush to my cheeks. “Okay,” the solutions manager said. “Now tell me, why don’t they work here?”
• Everyone was sorting out a way to live. Some of the women instituted systems of gender reparations with their male partners. Staunch atheists bought tarot decks and fretted over how best to infuse them with powerful energy; they discussed rising signs and compared astrological birth charts. They went to outposts in Mendocino to supervise each other through sustained, high-dose LSD trips, intended to reveal their inner children to their adult selves.
• 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.
• Much as we tried, we were not the CEO’s friends. We were his subordinates. He shut down our ideas and belittled us in private meetings; dangled responsibility and prestige, only to retract them inexplicably. He was not above giving employees the silent treatment. He micromanaged, was vindictive, made us feel inessential and inadequate. We regularly brought him customer feedback, like dogs mouthing tennis balls, and he regularly ignored us.
• I felt very protective of the CEO—or, at least, of my idea of him. For a long time, I would harbor a free-floating sympathy for people I imagined hadn’t had the opportunity to experience their youth the way I had. He never had space to fuck up. He’d been under pressure—and a certain degree of surveillance—from venture capitalists and journalists and industry peers since he was twenty. At the age when I was getting drunk with friends on bottles of three-dollar merlot and stumbling into concerts, splitting clove cigarettes and going to slam-poetry open mics, he was worrying about headcount, reading up on unit economics. I was exploring my sexuality; he was comparing health insurance providers and running security audits. Now, at twenty-five, he was responsible for other adults’ livelihoods. Some of my coworkers had families, even if they tried not to talk too much about their children in the office. Surely, he felt that weight.
• 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 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 wanted to avoid, at all costs, being the feminist killjoy. -- 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. A chair without a brain. A table with shapely legs. -- Sexism, misogyny, and objectification did not define the workplace—but they were everywhere. Like wallpaper, like air.
• 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. It was garbage language to my ears, but customers loved him. I couldn’t believe that it worked.
• I also resented that it seemed as if we had no choice: -- to skip out on the off-site. This made it feel like mandatory vacation, mandatory fun. Though it was a reward, a treat, the company trip was scheduled for a three-day holiday weekend, what others in the workforce might have considered personal time.
• Despite the family-friendliness, however, we lacked the natural ease of blood relatives choosing to vacation together. The housing groups had been preassigned, without employee consultation. I liked some of my coworkers better than others, but was largely indifferent to the sleeping arrangements. There was one person I hoped not to bunk with
• The CEO came in and announced that he was flipping the script: to allow the support team some leisure time, the engineers were to do our job instead. We’d spent the morning on the road and the day on the mountain, and the queue of customer tickets stretched out for hours. Already, most of us were drinking. Some had been drinking all afternoon. Though it wasn’t clear if we were working as we partied or partying as we worked, the scene in the condo was one of good-natured frustration as the engineers struggled to explain their own product to our users.
• didn’t know how to respond. I didn’t want to correct him. It was perhaps a symptom of my myopia, my sense of security, that I was not thinking about data collection as one of the moral quandaries of our time. For all the industry’s talk about scale, and changing the world, I was not thinking about the broader implications. I was hardly thinking about the world at all.
• As a software engineer, Ian had never encountered a job market with no space for him; he didn’t know what it felt like not to have mobility, options, not to be desired. He loved what he did and could easily command three times my salary. No company would ever neglect to offer him equity. He was his own safety net.
• 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.
• 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.
• At the very least, I figured, employees would be talking about sexism openly. Sexism had to be part of the internal conversation. I’d read Foucault, a million years ago: discourse was probably still power. Surely, in the fallout, women would have a place at the table.
• This was peak venture capital, the other side of the ecosystem. The company appeared to be spending its hundred million dollars in venture funding the way any reasonable person would expect founders in their twenties to spend someone else’s money: lavishly. I didn’t need to compare the office to the austere, fluorescent-lit tundra of the analytics startup, or even to Ian’s cool, industrial-chic robotics warehouse, to appreciate the novelty of the work space. It was a fever dream, a fantasy, a playground. It was embarrassing, too giddy; more than a little much.
• For nearly two years, I had been seduced by the confidence of young men. They made it look so simple, knowing what you wanted and getting it. I had been ready to believe in them, eager to organize my life around their principles. -- 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.
• To ensure that all employees were on equal footing regardless of geography, the majority of business was conducted in text. -- All internal communications and projects were visible across the organization. Due to the nature of the product, every version of every file was preserved. The entire company could practically be reverse engineered.
• But also—it was complicated. “On the one hand, if we have a problem with sexism or sexual harassment, then that problem needs to be addressed,” a teammate told me. “On the other hand, this hurt everyone.” I asked what she meant, and she pushed her hair to the side. “I don’t know if the company will ever recover from this,” she said. “And, to put things bluntly, she wasn’t the only one with equity.”
• Our relationships, fostered through software, did not immediately map onto physical reality. We were all more awkward in person than in the company chat rooms and over video, where conversation flowed.
• I had always considered hacking an inherently political activity, insofar as I thought about hacking at all, but it seemed the identity had been co-opted and neutralized by the industry. Hacking apparently no longer meant circumventing the state or speaking truth to power; it just meant writing code. Maybe would-be hackers just became engineers at top tech corporations instead, where they had easier access to any information they wanted.
• “Flat structure, except for pay and responsibilities,” said an internal tools developer, rolling her eyes. “It’s probably easier to be a furry at this company than a woman.” -- Can’t get sexually harassed when you work remotely, we joked, though of course we were wrong.
• The browser was sick with user-generated opinions and misinformation. I was in a million places at once. My mind pooled with strangers’ ideas, each joke or observation or damning polemic as distracting and ephemeral as the next.
• 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.
• It was the work culture, too: what Silicon Valley got right, how it felt to be there. The energy of being surrounded by people who so easily articulated, and satisfied, their desires. The feeling that everything was just within reach.
• On any given night in America, exhausted parents and New Year’s–resolution cooks were unpacking identical cardboard boxes shipped by meal-prep startups, disposing of identical piles of plastic packaging, and sitting down to identical dishes. Homogeneity was a small price to pay for the erasure of decision fatigue. It liberated our minds to pursue other endeavors, like work.
• 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;
• 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.
• 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.
• I wasn’t sure why anyone should be so eager to hand the keys to society over to people whose primary qualification was curiosity. I wasn’t eager to go to bat for older industries or institutions, but there was something to be said for history, context, deliberation. There was something to be said for expertise.