"Certain Unflattering Truths" about the scumbag-infested "data analytics" industry

[Razer]

They suck you up like military recruiters, while you're desperately
fucked by kolleg debt, then suck your mind and one and only soul out
while you sux their cox for cash.

Uncanny Valley: A Memoir by Anna Wiener. MCD, 288 pages.

At the end of October, I left an archetypal tech job at a secretive and
controversial big data analytics start-up, with whom I signed an NDA
more binding than my marriage vows. Sixteen months prior, the company
had divined my profile out of the algorithmic ether of LinkedIn, during
a period in my life when the sight of my student loan repayment date
would send me into days-long cycles of incapacitating self-pity. This
was also, incidentally, a time when I had finally begun to do the kind
of writing I found meaningful and interesting. But the work, like my
debt repayments, felt slow, hard, and uncertain; it required patience
and faith in the long game, two qualities which I’d never needed to
cultivate before. I was growing restless; I was getting bored. I felt
far from the action. I wanted my life—as Anna Wiener writes in her
incisive new memoir Uncanny Valley—to “pick up momentum, go faster.”

When the tech world rang the bell, my subconscious—hungry, ambitious,
curious—answered. It was the equivalent of setting down a long book to
pick up your phone when its screen flashes white, then forgetting about
the book entirely. The salary was transformative: after five years of
Sisyphean payments which had barely covered interest, my student debt
vanished in nine months flat. Every aspect of my life was subsidized by
unseen venture capitalists, whose faith in my employer’s eventual
profitability resulted in a sugar-daddy generosity: my rent, my errands,
my meals, the spin classes I needed when those meals caused me to gain
fifteen pounds. On days when the work felt exhausting or demeaning, I’d
slip into a meeting room, check my bank balance, and feel a sense of
embarrassingly intense relief. On days when I found myself worrying over
“ethical grey areas,” the kitchen staff (always women, almost always
women of color, almost certainly the company’s most diverse team) would
roll through each floor with a three-tier dessert cart, proffering
petits fours or miniature Croques Monsieur or honey-drizzled figs:
parodic emblems of the Antoinette-ish wealth the Valley’s procession of
IPOs seemed to promise.

When I left, I left with conviction, a story for another time. In the
weeks after, I sat waiting for my dopamine levels to rise back to
normal, for my energy to stabilize, for my sense of clarity and purpose
to return. Instead, I found myself lethargic and listless, reaching for
something I couldn’t name. I didn’t miss the perks, and I didn’t really
miss the work itself. I did miss my co-workers, but we still lived in
the same city. I inevitably missed the paycheck, but I’d known what I
was giving up.

What I really missed—what I felt cut off from—was what I thought I had
successfully resisted. The startup, like most tech companies, like most
technology itself, had done an impeccable job of transplanting its
employees’ sense of purpose. Without realizing it, I had outsourced an
entire part of my brain. I thought I’d been detached and observant, an
anthropologist among true believers, but a small, central part of me had
believed too, and that part was now wandering the desert in a torn
startup T-shirt, meekly repeating phrases like “Solve the world’s
hardest problems” and “Execute the mission,” thirsty for purpose.

It was in this frame of mind that I picked up Uncanny Valley. Like many
millennials who’d watched tech transform from “a fun way to flirt with
your crush after school” to “an unregulated behemoth undermining
democracy and perpetuating global inequality,” I had devoured Anna
Wiener’s short story by the same title in n+1 more than three years
prior, feverishly sending the link to everyone I knew at the time.
Later, I’d send it to some of my tech coworkers over the internal
company chatroom, usually receiving a meek :thumbs-up: emoji in return.

    What I really missed—what I felt cut off from—was what I thought I
had successfully resisted.

Having lived in Silicon Valley for four years—as a student at what
Wiener describes, in her arms-length, no-names style as a “private
university in Palo Alto”—and having been tech-adjacent (then
tech-subsumed, then tech-sponsored) ever since, I longed for writing
that could effectively capture the unimaginative hedonism and
fundamental sociopathy of the current tech boom: its insistence on
alienating us from everything worth having, only to sell it back to us
stripped down and restructured according to the values (and, worse,
aesthetics) of ahistorical libertarian vampires, whose kink for giving
billions of dollars to unqualified frat boys with underdog complexes had
resulted in the disruption-beyond-recognition of subtlety and flirtation
and dining and travel and journalism and democracy and one of America’s
great counter-cultural cities, among other things I had loved
absentmindedly, as though they could be taken for granted, before I
realized how quickly they would be brought to their knees.

Wiener’s “lightly fictionalized” account in n+1 was what I had hungered
for: it was acerbic and funny and incredibly bleak. She zeroed in on the
dissociative feeling that tech elicits in its more conscientious
employees and users: the self-alienating way you can recognize that a
company or a product or an experience is ridiculous and even dangerous,
but still be partially seduced by it, still yield. Where other writing
about tech had fallen squarely on either side of the line of
hyper-dystopian cheesiness (Dave Eggers’s The Circle) or fawning myopia
(Alexandra Wolfe’s Valley of the Gods), Wiener’s writing cut like acid
and burned like liquor. I wanted to see the Valley doused.

The long-awaited book-length adaptation of that original story—no more
light fictionalization; it’s a memoir—delivers on the promise of its
first incarnation in almost every way. Inherently timely, it aims for
timelessness and achieves it. Its style is of a part with the dry,
affectless writing of the period that Wiener seeks to capture but goes
beyond the Sally Rooney-Tao Lin axis to deliver something sharper and
more complete. Uncanny Valley is a quest narrative for the “privileged
and downwardly mobile” millennial, a quest without a clear purpose.
Wiener, as she presents herself, has no real goals and is motivated by
the vague, Pavlovian cues of the upper-middle class: a desire for work
that offers a sense of purpose, the gloss of prestige, and the assurance
of monetary well-being, or as she puts it, work that is “intellectually
engaging . . . alongside smart, curious people.” She leaves a thankless,
underpaid literary job for an early-stage e-book startup in New York.
When she is gently let go after a trial period, her hunger for the
startup world is piqued, and she finds herself blown west into the gold
rush of the Valley.

That Wiener manages to make her passive observation of this easy
drifting so compulsively readable is a testament to both her skill as a
writer and the distinct absurdity of her subject matter. I tore through
Uncanny Valley, riveted by the wit and precision of Wiener’s
observations: employees “[flank] the CEO in a semicircle like children
at a progressive kindergarten”; Hacker News (unnamed but easily
identifiable) serves as “the raw male id of the industry, a Greek chorus
of the perpetually online”; a pair of unworn Allbirds, the dorky,
excessively comfortable woolen shoe beloved by Bay Area venture
capitalists (the brand again unnamed by Wiener), sit in her apartment as
“a monument to the end of sensuousness.” Discussing tech bros’ obsession
with the concept of “achieving flow”—a trance-like state of working,
usually coding—Wiener writes, “I loved that they used this terminology.
It sounded so menstrual.” Later, across a few masterful pages, she nails
the feeling of mindless, ephemeral internet surfing: “Just me and my id,
hanging out, clicking.” Whatever unseen surveillance cameras took in my
facial expressions while I was reading Uncanny Valley on public transit
will have found me squinting, laughing, manically underlining whole
paragraphs, and sighing loudly with equal parts weariness and recognition.

    Wiener, as she presents herself, has no real goals and is motivated
by the vague, Pavlovian cues of the upper-middle class.

It is clear, early on, that Uncanny Valley has no narrative arc but
time; still, I wanted to see where we would arrive. Blurbs and reviews
have compared Wiener’s writing to that of Joan Didion, in particular the
latter’s account of California in the 1960s, Slouching Towards
Bethlehem. But Didion’s depiction was one of plainly observed horror,
the journalist watching at a remove, notepad in hand. Wiener, on the
other hand, approaches her subject matter not as a detached journalist
but as a willing participant.

Perhaps a more apt comparison would be Christopher Isherwood’s
fictionalized account of Weimar Germany, Goodbye to Berlin. There is a
sense, in both books, that the narrators have detached in order to
process all they are seeing; a double-edged proximity which offers
clarity of vision at the cost of complicity in something ominous and
inevitable, arriving just beyond the book’s end. “Psychologists might
refer to this as dissociation; I considered it the sociological
approach,” Wiener writes toward the end of Uncanny Valley. In the
memorable closing scene from her n+1 story, which makes its way into the
book-length memoir, Wiener scans photographs and video from her former
employer’s over-the-top holiday party, looking for her face in the
crowd, even though she knows she hasn’t been part of the company for
over a year. Isherwood’s book ends with his narrator watching the faces
of people walking up and down the Kleiststrasse, observing that they
have “an air of curious familiarity, of striking resemblance to
something one remembers as normal and pleasant in the past—like a very
good photograph.”

When we read Isherwood, we have the benefit of hindsight; we know how
history plays out. Wiener’s task is trickier. We’re barely beyond the
moment her book seeks to immortalize. Perhaps this is why moments of
Uncanny Valley—whose title seems to allude to nothing within the text
itself, and instead to the feeling you get while reading it—can feel
irresolute, as though the author is walking a very fine line, taking
care not to offend the more powerful residents of the city she still
calls home. It’s clear that Wiener is canny enough to see behind the
curtain, but it can seem, at times, like she still wants to believe in
the Wizard.

Describing her work at a data analytics startup, Wiener writes of her
colleagues’ and bosses’ reaction to Snowden’s whistleblowing that:

    The sole moral quandary in our space that we acknowledged outright
was the question of whether or not to sell data to advertisers. This was
something we did not do, and we were righteous about it. We were just a
neutral platform, a conduit.

I kept returning to that last line as I worked my way through Uncanny
Valley for a first, then a second, then a third time. Each time, I felt
teased by Wiener’s occasional snark, wishing it cut deeper. For anyone
who misses Valleywag, there is some coy skewering of the industry
throughout, though it can feel, at times, like that skewering is being
done with the dull side of a sharp knife. The pared-back tone which
gives Wiener’s memoir its stylistic strength betrays a forgivable
weakness at the heart of her project: at times, Wiener seems too eager
to stick close to the line of neutrality, to present Uncanny Valley as a
conduit itself. In one memorable scene, she talks with an arrogant
amateur urbanist at a party, who reveals his plan to set up an
experimental, “blank-slate” city of shipping containers in developing
countries. “I wished I was drunker,” Wiener writes, “so that I could get
mean.” I also wished she had gotten drunker. I wished she had gotten
mean. Both in the moment and in retrospect, something holds her back.

Wiener’s tongue-biting tendency is clearest in the book’s final quarter.
Through a good-natured Twitter disagreement over whether or not books
should, like everything else in the Valley, be optimized for efficiency,
Wiener unexpectedly befriends a billionaire named Patrick—easily
identifiable as Patrick Collison, wunderkind CEO of Stripe—and the duo
strike up a friendship over a series of elaborate, overly-sensual meals.
Wiener is aware that she tolerates behavior from Patrick which she
wouldn’t tolerate in other friendships, with non-billionaire, non-CEOs.
“It was easy to interrogate everyone’s relationship to power but my
own,” she writes, but in her dynamic with Patrick, it doesn’t seem like
she’s attempting much by way of interrogation at all.

    At times, Wiener seems too eager to stick close to the line of
neutrality, to present Uncanny Valley as a conduit itself.

Early on, Wiener traces her “industry origin story” to her tendency to
“respond well to negging,” and this quality seems true of her
throughout: she writes from the vantage point of someone eager to be
liked, eager to take part—with the restraint of someone who feels lucky
to be there at all. Though Wiener acknowledges that the emotional labor
and “soft skills” she brings to the table are as valuable as her peers’
technical abilities, she also continues to call herself “useless,” and
perpetually grants engineers and barely legal CEOs undeserved authority.
When her boyfriend rightly tells her, “I think you’re underestimating
what you might have that they don’t,” she sweetly evades the compliment
(“You?”) and lets the point drop.

At so many moments, Wiener gets within a finger’s distance of speaking
truth to power and then—points us in another direction, or ends the
chapter, or describes a bread basket. Of course, speaking truth to power
isn’t her project; if it were, this would be a completely different
book. But there is something unnerving about a memoir that so
brilliantly captures the mood and neuroses of San Francisco in the 2010s
yet seems somehow still respectful, occasionally reverent. Even as
Wiener critiques the Valley, there is a part of her that is protective
of it, a part of her still in its thrall. The strongest ethical concerns
in Uncanny Valley are voiced not by Wiener but by her activist
ex-hookup, who seems to delight in mansplaining the moral quandaries of
Wiener’s job to her. Again, Wiener opts to be the conduit, marking down
his arguments without taking them on as her own. Toward the end of the
memoir, Wiener begins to contemplate the value of unionizing in tech,
but abruptly ends this line of inquiry when a colleague from a
disadvantaged background points out, “We are not vulnerable people.”
Fair enough, but the value of unionizing in tech is hardly to bargain
for more lavish snacks and fitness offerings. Again, Wiener swerves away
from the overtly political; here, it feels like a missed opportunity.

Any honest memoir of the 2010s in San Francisco is, in some sense, a
memoir of loss: the get-rich-quick manufacture of millionaires has come
at the cost of reckless destruction, the ripple effects of which were
felt nationwide during the 2016 election, where Wiener ends her tale.
But Uncanny Valley isn’t particularly elegiac: we are shown so little of
the world outside of tech, the one being lost. My favorite section of
Uncanny Valley is Wiener’s litany of beloved inefficiencies, a moving,
paragraph-long tribute to the world of touch and scent and appetite and
slowness, ending with “Warm laundry, radio, waiting for the bus,” that
is set in contrast to the Valley’s vision of a world where everything
“could be optimized, prioritized, monetized, and controlled.” Is it
greedy that I wanted more by way of a defense for the sensuous world?
Outside of her relationship, we are given so few glances of Wiener’s
pre- and sub-Valley life, her non-working personhood. It’s true that
while working at startups, your inner self is more or less transplanted
by your working self—your value add. But it can be hard, in Uncanny
Valley as in our day-to-day lives, to track what is being lost, cut out,
sacrificed.

I’ve come to the view this as part of the project of the book itself: to
leave us unsettled by how its narrator, like all of us, remains somewhat
in the Valley’s mindset, if not its pocket. This entanglement is a
feature of the system that works, as she notes, precisely as designed.
In the end, for all the generosity she extends to those around her,
Wiener is unsparing with herself: “Certain unflattering truths: I had
felt unassailable behind the walls of power. Society was shifting, and I
felt safer inside the empire, inside the machine. It was preferable to
be on the side that did the watching than the side being watched.”
Wiener has written an indispensable chronicle of this era in tech, the
consequences of which we will all reckon with as the next decade
unfolds. Still, given the Valley’s unmatched ability to avoid any sense
of guilt as the world around it burns, there is no doubt in my mind that
while Uncanny Valley will be read widely and voraciously throughout the
empire, Wiener’s readers—techno-skeptics and technologists alike—will be
able to recognize themselves without feeling indicted.

But surely someone, somewhere, eventually, will need to feel indicted.
At some point, we’re going to need the sharp end of the knife."
https://thebaffler.com/latest/certain-unflattering-truths-schaffer

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