Uncanny Valley: A Memoir

Ian’s robotics company moves south to Mountain View as part of its acquisition. Wiener describes the many linguistic and aesthetic touches employed to emphasize the company as a fun and whimsical place to work, as well as the many perks Ian receives. The search-engine giant, an outsized industry success and “a world-historical summit of engineering talent” also appears, to Wiener, from the outside, to be struggling, “suffering from a certain degree of sclerosis” (217), as its core business is digital advertising, not hardware. The long commute deprives Ian of personal time and that he returns home each day exhausted. Wiener meditates on the “psychic burden” of technology workers, particularly those working in software, building immaterial tools vulnerable to erasure.

Wiener considers that despite her high salary, she has few life skills, and is prone to forgetting her own embodied existence. She meets Patrick for dinner and gives voice to anxieties about the industry. He coolly debates back that the environment of Silicon Valley—imperfect, sometimes impractical and problematic, rife with financial and moral failures—is necessary for innovation. He emphasizes that serious, pragmatic individuals won’t sacrifice stability and take risks required to innovate. Wiener’s narration indicates that Patrick “might have been trying to tell me something” (221): perhaps that on the personal level, if Wiener wishes to change or innovate within her own life, she may have to contemplate such a sacrifice or bold action.

Wiener and Ian take a trip to the Sacramento Delta to participate in a rave on a farm. Watching the rave-goers building a dome, preparing food, and participating in an absurd baptismal ritual in a creek, Wiener stands on the sidelines, feeling “a familiar loneliness, participating in something bigger than myself and still feeling apart from it” (223). Industry talk dominates, even on the farm. With economic precarity exhausting many in San Francisco’s non-technical workforce, many of Noah and Ian’s artistic friends have taken positions in the tech industry: “[T]he ecosystem found a way to absorb those with college degrees and fluency in middle-class social cues” (224). As night falls, Wiener details with rich visual description the rave-goers’ various attempts at transcendence, reminiscent of sixties counterculture: “It struck me as a performance from an imperfect past, a reenactment. The pursuit of liberation, some pure joy” (225). Wiener contemplates the ways these activities, however imperfect, constitute a resistance to tech’s encroachment into human relationships and collective life. She longs for a form of resistance that feels true to her.

Wiener’s peers outside the industry remark upon on the way their data is being collected by tech companies and reflected relentlessly by advertisers. She considers the ways many members of her generation are still naïve to their own exploitation. Her work on the Terms of Service team grows more intense and complex as intimations of violence proliferate on the platform. She notices that using a male pseudonym in correspondence with users garners more respect and authority than her actual identity had. Ruminating on the aspirations and pitfalls of social media, Wiener describes the hubris of its founders and advocates, who see authoritarian governments as poorly matched for their advanced, populist-oriented technologies.

The aesthetics of the platforms don’t seem to her revolutionary; they are “stiff, flat, gray, blue. Hard-edged, but trying hard to be friendly. Built by programmers with programmers in mind, for and by people with a penchant for infrastructure” (229). While abuse of these platforms is characterized as an exception to the norm, Wiener asserts that in fact, abuses are “structurally inevitable.” The open-source startup’s diversity efforts appear in a far-right news story that triggers a vicious and coordinated harassment campaign against the startup itself. She mentions to a coworker the similarity of the attacks to those in the Gamergate incidents 18 months prior, wondering if it is the same people; her coworker replies that of course it is, again emphasizing Wiener’s naïveté in regards to the darker side of tech culture.

In sweeping language reminiscent of her opening, Wiener describes the housing crisis created by Silicon Valley both inside and beyond San Francisco. New housing developments distinguish themselves with smart technologies and private amenities, creating cloistered communities apart from larger civic life. Outside Wiener’s apartment, a truck backs into a tea tree, killing it, and it is replaced with a locked portable toilet, which she hears homeless people attempting to break into each night. Wiener attends a party where city-building—a new hobby of the entrepreneurial class—is a topic of conversation. She meets a man who eagerly describes the possibilities of making cities “smarter” and fixing the problems of urban areas by starting with a “blank slate.” He expresses interest in building such a “blank slate” city in Central America, modeling it on a startup. He mentions the capital needed for a project is relatively small: “just” $15 million.

Wiener describes with dismay the way in which entitled entrepreneurial thinkers from Silicon Valley would have a natural interest in city-building, and how particularly ill-equipped they may be to build a livable, sustainable city. When a seed accelerator announces its own city-building initiative—helmed by the former CEO of a humor website and the founder of a shuttered on-demand housekeeping platform—Wiener marvels at the audacity of the venture. She realizes that these projects are not only driven by curiosity and enthusiasm, but also function as a way for technologists to wield their growing influence: “It was an introductory exercise, a sandbox, a gateway: phase one of settling into newfound political power” (240).