Uncanny Valley: A Memoir

Wiener describes the heavy-handed rhetorical style of tech leaders, who couch their legitimate insights in overconfident nonsense. She runs into the CEO on her lunch break and finds him reading a book written in this style, open to a chapter called “Preparing to Fire an Executive.” Later, she meets her former colleague Noah for a drink, and she finds him relieved to be out of the company, and more skeptical of its work and its mission than before. He calls the startup a surveillance company, which challenges her passive acceptance of its data collection practices: “I didn’t know how to respond. […] For all the industry’s talk about scale and changing the world […] I was hardly thinking about the world at all” (128). She attends a symphony concert with an old friend and digital rights activist, Parker. During intermission Parker frets about the state of the industry, the lack of real security in its products and its leaders’ apathy towards their role in the larger world. When Wiener nervously asks his opinion on whether she works at a surveillance company, he responds by saying “I thought you’d never ask,” seeming to confirm the fear that Noah sparked (129). 

As the company grows, an influx of highly paid salespeople overtakes the office. Wiener and her fellow early employees lament changes in the company culture and their shrinking autonomy. The CEO calls Wiener into a private meeting and questions the quality of her work and her commitment to the company’s mission. He shows her little compassion when, she must leave the meeting twice in tears. To relieve mounting stress at work, she and Ian take a weekend trip and take ecstasy together. While high, they relax and connect more deeply, and Wiener feels a sense of relief and hazy optimism about working in tech. On their return to the city, Ian encourages Wiener to think about leaving her job, but Wiener wants to stay and prove herself.

Her narration ruminates on the meaning of the CEO’s phrase “Down for the Cause,” cycling through various missions articulated by her coworkers, her company, the industry. Her musing culminates in an imagined mission to create a world organized by data: “freed of decision-making, the unnecessary friction of human behavior, where everything […] could be optimized, prioritized, monetized, and controlled” (136). Wiener bristles against this vision; she treasures the inefficiencies, banalities, and diversions of her life. Later, the CEO passes her in the office kitchen and asks if her year at the company so far has been the shortest or longest of her life. She blurts that it’s the longest, and the CEO responds that “the right answer is both” (137), highlighting the way Wiener still doesn’t fit in. 

Preparing for her annual review, Wiener weighs whether to bring up incidents of sexism she’s experienced in her workplace. She receives a promotion from the solutions team to a new team called “Customer Success” alongside a male MBA hired after her. Her manager explains the promotion of the MBA as strategy-driven, while Wiener is promoted because she “loves [their] customers,” an inaccurate and oddly gendered assessment of her skills. She receives a raise and increased equity, which justifies staying despite growing unhappiness. Soon afterward, the startup releases a new feature called “Addiction,” used to chart individual users’ frequency of engagement with a platform. While the startups’ customers enthusiastically use this feature to maximize user engagement, Wiener feels misgivings about the feature.

Compulsive, unbounded technology use is already a problem for her, and the celebratory branding of this as “Addiction” feels insensitive and disturbing. Still, she forges ahead in her new position; as a customer success manager she meets the startup’s customer companies at their offices to ensure they derive adequate value from the analytics product. Through these meetings, she sees that her startup’s work resembles that of large corporations that she previously thought: less revolutionary, less world-changing, motivated by profit. Wiener realizes that she and her coworkers are “just reading from someone else’s script” (144).

Wiener searches for a new job, “[skimming] recruiter emails and job listings like horoscopes, skidding down to the perks” (145). After witnessing the volatility of other companies through their data, she seeks a company that is more stable. A friend at a well-regarded startup that made “software for software engineers, to help them build more software” (147)—the open-source platform GitHub—offers to bring her in. Though the company is recovering from a recent gender discrimination scandal, Wiener cautiously takes an interview. The office’s extravagant lobby contains a replica of the Oval Office, and a cartoon logo of an octopus-cat hybrid; the office itself is empty, as many employees work remotely. Surprised to find that she likes this environment, Wiener accepts the company’s offer.

She gives her notice at the analytics company and has an uncomfortable parting conversation with the CEO. After he apologizes for making her cry, she shrugs it off: “I reassured him that it was fine. This was a lie, but not for his benefit. I needed to believe it much more than he did” (153). She surrenders her work laptop and notices the lightness of her backpack as she bikes away. Picnicking that night with Ian in Berkeley, she looks out at the foggy city and realizes how immersed she had been: “I had trusted them to tell me who I was, what mattered, how to live. […] I thought they knew something I did not know” (154). She feels relief looking out at San Francisco, while her narration acknowledges that her deceptive seduction by tech and its reckless young leaders wasn’t a personal misstep, but a vast and expanding global phenomenon.