Uncanny Valley: A Memoir

Wiener ruminates on the ways in which the culture of Silicon Valley invades daily life through company logos, billboards, and advertisements promoting job opportunities at startups. She also notes the many disruptions and contortions of everyday language as the vernacular of the internet makes its way into spoken conversation. Wiener parses the ways in which the rhetoric she hears in her field verges on the absurd: “People 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” (93). She closes the chapter with an anecdote of a “field trip” one morning with her coworkers to see the analytics company’s newly unveiled billboard advertisement. She takes a group photo with her coworkers that she sends to her parents, to whom she has not spoken in a long time. 

Noah, Wiener’s onboarding buddy, introduces her to his friends, a community of artists, musicians, social workers, and others outside the tech industry. The community reminds Wiener of an older, bygone counterculture, and she feels slightly wary of their performative rebellion. At a party, she meets Noah’s roommate, Ian, with whom she immediately feels at home. When she tires of the party, he takes her home to his apartment, and they begin dating. She describes in rich detail the eccentric objects and lived-in atmosphere of Ian’s apartment. The robotics studio where Ian works, recently acquired by a “search-engine giant”—Google—does work that excites him, though he keeps it confidential, which appears to be a mark of good character: “Even when were blindingly drunk, […] Ian kept company secrets. It was easy to trust him” (101).

Ian brings her to a party where she inserts herself into a conversation among engineers about the potential of self-driving cars. The engineers, all men, speak excitedly about the possibilities; Wiener expresses blunt skepticism, and is somewhat pointedly ignored. Railing against this interaction on the way home with Ian, he reluctantly tells her that she was “trying to talk shit about self-driving cars with some of the first engineers to ever build one” (103), concluding the chapter in another moment of social alienation for Wiener. 

Wiener develops skepticism about the CEO’s authority and maturity. His management style alienates and stresses his subordinates: “He shut down our ideas and belittled us in private meetings […] He micromanaged, was vindictive, made us feel essential and inadequate” (106). Still, despite their conscious unhappiness with his leadership, Wiener’s colleagues long to be in his favor. Wiener admits her own reluctance to see him in this negative, truthful light, describing rationalizations and justifications she uses to forgive his cruelties. When Noah lobbies the CEO to receive a raise, greater equity, and increased responsibility, he is abruptly fired, which shocks Wiener and her colleagues and deals a blow to the overall morale.

In a meeting, the CEO tells the employees that if they disagree with his decision, they can hand in their resignation. He asks each person individually if they disagree; Wiener, like all her coworkers, lies and says no, she does not disagree. That night she and her coworkers go to a bar together to process their unease, fear, and growing discontent at work: “We were coming up for air. We were lucky and in thrall and then, unseen to us, we had become bureaucrats, punching at our computers, making other people—some kids—unfathomably rich” (111). They attempt to make sense of the CEO’s actions, deciding he is driven not by money, but power—and they admit that they want power, too, which is why they stay. They leave the bar and eight hours later reunite at work, wearily carrying on. 

Wiener realizes that her role as a support person causes her to compromise, suppress, or deny her core values and beliefs: “My job had placed me, a self-identified feminist, in a position of ceaseless, professionalized deference to the male ego” (113). She seeks a reprieve from this painful truth by connecting to the other women in the office, but most of the attempts fall short. Advice from friends to “inhabit [her] sexual power” don’t solve the problem either; what Wiener desires is collegial respect, not domination, but she fears being seen as “the feminist killjoy.”

Nevertheless, this is what she becomes in her own estimation, as she begins to call out the company’s ubiquitous sexism: “Sexism, misogyny, and objectification did not define the workplace—but they were everywhere. Like wallpaper, like air” (115). A powerful new hire invades her personal space one day to inform her that he loves to date Jewish women, saying “You’re so sensual” (116). In a one-on-one meeting Wiener relays the experience to her manager, who offers an apologetic but insufficient response, saying that this is “just who he is,” with no further offer of help or guidance.