Uncanny Valley: A Memoir

Wiener describes the influence of venture capital on growing companies as “an intervention, a blunt force” (247), which drives the rapid shifts workplace culture and ethos as companies attempt to scale. At the open-source startup, an infusion of venture capital leads to an organizational makeover that dampens in the playful and freewheeling atmosphere. At the same time, many of Wiener’s peers take an interest in socialism. In conversation with an engineer colleague, Wiener expresses excitement about this political shift among industry employees. The engineer chastises her for this outlook, insisting that white-collar workers have no interest in showing solidarity with the working class.

During lunch with a software developer friend, the developer claims to be responsible for the recent massive leak of personal information about politicians, billionaires, and well-known businesspeople—“an indictment of undemocratic activity perpetrated by the very rich” (253). She responds with a mix of anger and admiration, suddenly hopeful at the thought that someone would put their technical skills to use for a cause other than profit. She wonders if others might be experiencing similar disillusionment, and if that disillusionment could incite change.

The climate of Northern California blurs Wiener’s sense of passing time, but now, turning 29, Wiener starts to develop new desires and curiosities—about real estate and having children. She and Ian attend Patrick’s birthday party at a horse camp in Muir Woods; when they arrive, they find no horses but a small group of Patrick’s computer scientist friends grilling salmon. Wiener listens to the mostly technical, esoteric conversation around her and feels reminded that she is an “outlier” in Patrick’s group of friends, fond pursuing ideological debates while embarrassed to share that she works in customer support. After singing “Happy Birthday,” the group unexpectedly disperses, leaving Ian and Wiener alone with her tent, the only pair who’d expected to camp out. Although it feels absurd to stay, Ian has had too much to drink, so they plant their tent and settle in.

Wiener reflects with angst on her friendship with Patrick. For Wiener, the differences between herself and powerful figures like him make her question her worth. Ian reminds her that she may have something these others don’t. Wiener admits that for the sake of security and acceptance, she sublimates the part of herself that differs from these men, “the part that was emotional, impractical, ambivalent, inconvenient—the part of me that wanted to know everyone’s feelings, that wanted to be moved” (280). Her habit of idealizing CEOs and founders serves to alleviate her own guilt about participating in a morally compromised, “globally extractive” project. In a moment of fuller realization, she admits that unlike her, these men, the object of her projections, are content: “They had power, wealth, and control. The person with the yearning was me” (262).

The final chapter details Wiener’s experience of the 2016 presidential election. She acknowledges her previous complacency and the frantic, “last-ditch, Hail Mary pass at civic participation” (263) undertaken in her industry to prevent Donald Trump from winning. She meets Patrick for dinner, hoping for an optimistic opinion, but he admits only that the situation looks dire. At the same dinner, Patrick takes a business call and signs some paperwork which Wiener later learns has made him one of the youngest self-made billionaires.

Wiener drives to Reno to canvass with friends in the suburbs of Nevada, feeling out of place the entire time, noting the decals of ridesharing apps on most of the cars in a working-class neighborhood. Canvassing on Election Day, she scrolls through social media to see friends, celebrities and venture capitalists sporting “I Voted” stickers, touting their optimism, while Nevadan voters give her little confirmation of these hopes: “Women stood behind screen doors and looked at us, with our clipboards and patriotic stickers and aestheticized coastal corporate feminism, and simply shook their heads” (268). Wiener and her friends stop to check their phones, leaning against their rental car, as the polls close, and the book ends on an ominous note as night falls.

In the aftermath of Trump’s election, Wiener and her peers struggle to cope and indulge in various forms of self-care and escapism, a sort of “deep and irresponsible magical thinking” (269). Message boards and social media feeds recommend ways to resist and ways to prepare for a Trump presidency, often with the solution being more technology. On the Terms of Service team, Wiener and her colleagues struggle to manage an influx of Nazi iconography, and racist rhetoric, feeling underqualified for the scale of the job. Community regulation, social responsibility—effectively, the work of government—seems to have fallen to the tech industry, in the absence of leadership in the White House. Wiener believes at first that the election will change the tech industry and force a reckoning, “the end of our generational Gold Rush, an unsustainable age of excess” (271), but watches the growth of the ecosystem proceeds as normal.

Wiener reaches her limit and leaves her job in early 2018, in an anticlimactic move entailing a one-minute exit interview by video and a series of 404 messages as her access to internal platforms is revoked: “A whole world, zippered up—easy come, easy go” (272). She empties her savings account to buy as much stock as she can; this pays off shortly afterward when Microsoft acquires the open-source startup, leaving her with $200,000. The same spring, she learns that the CEO of the mobile analytics company has stepped down, needing a break. In characteristic empathetic fashion, Wiener wonders what the exit means for him. Months later, wandering through the Mission, she sees the CEO at lunch with a friend, looking “happy, relaxed, older.” She turns and walks away, sure that he hasn’t seen her.