Uncanny Valley

by Anna Wiener

Everyone was sorting out a way to live. Some of the women instituted systems of gender reparations with their male partners. Staunch atheists bought tarot decks and fretted over how best to infuse them with powerful energy; they discussed rising signs and compared astrological birth charts. They went to outposts in Mendocino to supervise each other through sustained, high-dose LSD trips, intended to reveal their inner children to their adult selves.

  They journaled, and discussed their journaling. They went on retreats to technology-liberation summer camps, where they locked up their smartphones and traded their legal names for pseudonyms invoking animals, berries, meteorological phenomena. They traveled to cliffside silent-meditation plantations, and wandered around for days afterward, inarticulate and asocial. Some spread the word about a famous leadership and self-help program. When I looked it up, I discovered that it was widely regarded as a cult.

  It seemed like half of the new-school old-schoolers spent the bulk of their spare time on overstuffed secondhand couches, drinking tea and processing. Processing was a daily routine, a group activity. People consulted one another on their romantic entanglements, their financial problems, their hemorrhoids. Everyone was always checking in.

  I struggled to assimilate. I tried ecstatic dance, but spent most of the time on the sidelines, adjusting my socks. I participated in massage chains, fully clothed. I asked a graphically untalented animal-rights activist to paint my face at a party, and danced on the edges, trying to force my mind out of my body. I attended a spa-themed party at a communal house and wandered the grounds in a robe, avoiding the hot tub—a sous vide bath of genitalia.

  Processing as a hobby made me feel an affinity for the cool, impersonal bullshit of business culture. Radical honesty often looked to me like a collapse of the barrier between subjectivity and objectivity. It could look like cruelty. But it also seemed to work.

  I did not want to judge them. I admired their collectivity, which seemed to me wholesome and intimate. The trust among friends was familial, openhearted, optimistic. There was true community. The future was blurred and the present was unstable. Life was characterized, to varying degrees, by persistent precariousness. Everyone was doing what they could to keep a toehold on the city, to keep a part of the culture sacrosanct; to build what they believed would be a better world.

  * * *

  At a birthday party north of the Panhandle, Noah’s roommate, Ian, sat down beside me and struck up a conversation. I felt, all of a sudden, very beautiful and interesting. Never in my life had I pulled a man across a crowded room. Later, I would learn that this was just Ian’s approach to social gatherings: as a software engineer who hung out almost exclusively with people who had majored in the humanities, he was sensitive to outsiders, predisposed to seek out and engage the person who looked most bored at a party. I had been sitting alone on the couch, not talking to anyone, trying to keep my feet from tapping to the tropical house playing out of someone’s phone, and staring at the bookcase: programming manuals, books about ethical polyamory. His was an easy kindness.

  Ian was soft-spoken and whistled, lightly, when he pronounced the letter S. He had static-electricity hair and a sweet, narrow smile. He asked questions and then asked follow-up questions, a novelty. It took a while for me to steer the conversation over to him. What do you do, I asked, like the East Coast careerist I was. He worked in robotics, he said, but didn’t feel like talking about it at a party. A man who worked in tech who didn’t want to talk about tech: very endearing.

  Our trajectories had been asymptotic, we discovered. Ian and I had friends in common—mostly editors and writers in Brooklyn, whom he knew from college. His band had played a show in the basement of my sophomore dorm. I had even been in his apartment, I remembered, on a detour during a particularly boozy Solutions team outing. He’d been home that night, he said, cooking dinner in the back. The more we compared notes, the stranger it seemed that we had not yet met. I wanted to put my hands in his hair.

  We wandered into the kitchen together, in pursuit of fresh beverages. A cluster of people sat on the linoleum, drinking wine out of jam jars. “What is your most or least favorite trait inherited from your parents?” one of them was asking, with great solemnity. A man wearing a fleece onesie with attached slippers leaned forward, placing his chin in his palms. “Resilience,” he said. Everyone nodded. “And do you feel like they see that in you?” someone else inquired.

  Nightmare, I thought. I eyed the back door. The prospect of engaging in therapeutic maieutics with a group of strangers was stressful. I could not fathom interrogating my relationship with my parents as a form of socializing. I felt uptight, conservative, repressed, corporate by comparison—but I also felt okay with that. Ian grabbed two cans of beer and nodded toward the hall.

  Back in the living room, people were beginning to mobilize for karaoke: wetting down the hookah charcoal, collecting empties, wrapping road-beers in handkerchiefs and recycled paper. Ian and I continued talking as the party paraded toward Japantown. I felt calm around him, at home. Winding through Alamo Square Park, he gently took my hand and put it in his jacket pocket, holding it there as we walked.

  * * *

  Noah and Ian lived on the second floor of a former fire station in the Mission, on a block-long street wedged between two main drags that represented, in near-Dickensian fashion, the city’s socioeconomic cleft. In one direction was a chaotic plaza at Mission and Sixteenth—a convocation of commuters, rose vendors, homeless people, addicts, prostitutes, pigeons, and soft-eyed drunks—that opened onto a bustling avenue of doughnut shops, Mexican bakeries, fish markets, Pentecostal churches, dollar stores, holes-in-the-wall stuffed with boxes of cleats, mobile grills exhaling sausage and onion, smoke shops, unfussy restaurants, and hair salons with hand-painted signage. In the other direction was Valencia Street, a living diorama of late-stage gentrification: third-wave-coffee shops selling paleo lattes, juice bars hawking turmeric shots, waifish Australians clutching branded paper bags from spartan boutiques.

  The apartment was cozy and welcoming, full of strange artifacts: an upright piano with the hammers exposed, a headless mannequin covered in hand-drawn hieroglyphs. In the bathroom, a small line of half-melted havdalah candles lined the edge of the tub. The third roommate was a medical resident who kept impossible hours, appearing only occasionally to make generous pots of oatmeal or host men’s circles in the living room. It seemed like the sort of place where the roommates would share towels, laying claim to whichever smelled least like mildew, and it was. I loved being there.

  That fall, Noah was experimenting with larger-format communal living and had sublet his room to start a collective in Berkeley. During our lunch breaks, he spoke with gravity about chore charts, synchronized calendars, vegetable beds, house meetings. His bedroom was a toolshed, converted illegally, outside of which his younger brother cultivated mushrooms. I was relieved not to worry about running into him in the Mission apartment, one or both of us pattering around half-naked, collapsing an already eroded barrier between work and life.

  Ian didn’t own a bed frame or a duvet cover, and the bedroom walls were painted an eye-popping primary blue—but he was color-blind, and I liked sleeping low to the ground. Small collections of psychologically revealing objects dotted the room: acorn boughs, cassette tapes, postcards, a toolbox full of electronic components. In the mornings, we would lie in bed and watch the light move across the wall, and I would feel, below the level of the desk and the night table and the bookcase, underwater. At the last possible minute, we would throw on clothes and helmets, hoist our bikes down the stairs, and part ways at the building’s front gate, wheeling carefully around pools of broken glass.

  * * *

  Ian worked at a small robotics studio that operated out of a large warehouse in Potrero Hill. The studio was full of machine tools, fabrication experiments, props, and soundstages. Two employees ran a small brewing operation from a side room. In the main space were human-sized robotic arms, typically used on a
ssembly lines, which Ian and a small team programmed to do camerawork for films and commercials. The films were beautiful, intimate and sweeping at once.

  Earlier that year, the studio had been acquired by the search-engine giant. One of the founders had been sent a set of three-hundred-thousand-dollar speakers as a welcome gift; when a pallet of electric skateboards arrived at the studio, Ian and his coworkers knew the deal had closed. The acquisition was part of a multibillion-dollar shopping spree, in service of a new robotics division named after an android from an eighties sci-fi film. The newly acquired engineers and inventors, hundreds of them, would be tasked with building the autonomous, streamlined, physical future.

  For some, getting acquired by the search-engine giant was a Silicon Valley endgame—a fantasy realized. Ian felt fortunate, but he was ambivalent about the transition. There was a reason he had never sought employment at any of the larger tech conglomerates, a reason he preferred the smaller scale. He had relished being part of an organization where engineers were outnumbered by artists, architects, designers, and filmmakers.

  Still, he seemed cautiously excited. The search-engine giant had acquired an impressive spectrum of robotics companies. “I feel like we have a chance to participate in a project that could really leave its mark on the field,” he said one evening, as we cooked dinner in my kitchen. “It feels like we’re going to have a seat at the table for something really big.”

  How big? I wanted to know. There were public rumors about what the robotics suite was working on, but Ian was forbidden from speaking about their projects. He refused to confirm my guesses. Was he working on the autonomous cars? I had so many questions. Was it the search-and-rescue robots? The delivery drones? Was there a space shuttle? How soon would we see humanoids? How scared should the rest of us be?

  “Everyone always asks me that,” he said, frowning. “Not scared. Really.” More, I said—say more. In a city where bars and coffee shops and parties were trade-secret word clouds, this was a regionally specific litmus test. But even when we were blindingly drunk, or sliding around the Hirst shower, Ian kept company secrets. It was easy to trust him.

  * * *

  In late fall, Ian brought me to a party at the offices of a clandestine hardware startup operating out of an ivy-clad brick warehouse in Berkeley. Drones buzzed over a crowd of young professionals wearing sensible footwear and fleece vests. A child scuttled underfoot. I felt overdressed in a publishing-era silk blouse.

  After making the rounds, Ian disappeared with a coworker to investigate a prototype line of self-assembling modular furniture, leaving me in a circle with a half dozen other roboticists. I sipped on a beer and waited for someone to notice me. Instead, the men discussed work projects using secret code names. They discussed their graduate research. One had spent seven years trying to teach robots to tie different kinds of knots, like Boy Scouts. I asked if he was studying robotics at one of the universities in the Bay Area. No, he said, looking me up and down—he was a professor.

  Talk turned to self-driving cars. One of the engineers mentioned a recent Take Your Child to Work Day, where the autonomous-car unit had asked visiting children to jump and dance and roll around in front of the sensors. The technology was world-class, but it still needed to train on nonadults. It was an incredibly exciting moment for transportation, he said: the hurdles they faced weren’t technical, but cultural. The biggest obstacle was public opinion.

  How plausible were autonomous cars, really, I asked loudly. I had finished my beer and I was bored. I wanted attention, some acknowledgment. I wanted to make sure everyone knew I wasn’t just some engineer’s girlfriend who stood around at parties waiting for him to finish geeking out—though of course that’s exactly what I was doing.

  I was skeptical, I told the men. The media hype seemed more than overblown: self-driving cars were part of a future vision that seemed not just unlikely, but beyond fantasy. Hadn’t we just established that the cars didn’t even know how to identify children? The group turned toward me. The scout-leader professor looked amused.

  “What did you say you do?” one of the men asked. I explained that I worked at a mobile analytics company, hoping they would assume I was an engineer. “Ah,” he said generously, “and what do you do there?” Customer support, I said. The men glanced at each other. “Don’t worry about it,” the professor said. He turned back to the others.

  On the train home, tucked into a cloth-covered seat that smelled faintly of musk and urine, I leaned into Ian and recounted the interaction. What unfettered sexists, I said. How dare they be so dismissive, just because I was a woman—just because I did customer support and was considered nontechnical. Their lives were no better than my life. Their opinions were no more valid than mine.

  Ian cringed and pulled me closer. “You’re not going to like this,” he said, “but you were trying to talk shit about self-driving cars with some of the first engineers to ever build one.”

  One evening, a group of us stayed late to watch a science fiction movie about hackers who discover that society is a simulated reality. It was the CEO’s favorite film, he’d once mentioned: it was one of the first times he had seen a hacker represented in popular culture. We’d all heard the CEO wax rhapsodic about his escapades as a teenager, the freedom he felt breaking into multiplayer games and pranking his online rivals. Noah was impressed by this, but it sounded to me like normal behavior for a bored kid in a desert suburb with access to the family computer. The movie had come out the year he turned eleven.

  The screening was my idea. I was always trying to be everyone’s girlfriend, sister, mother. The solutions manager had criticized me recently, during a check-in, for being a pleaser. I resented him for saying this, because it was true.

  We gathered on the couches in the center of the office, around a flat-screen television. The television was hooked up to a laptop, and most days, the engineers fed it content, silently streaming nature documentaries and recordings of strangers playing video games. Beers circulated. The CEO sat with his laptop open, working while he watched.

  The film was a transparent riff on Plato’s Cave, or so the internet said—I had never read Plato. It was also a delicious allegory for techno-libertarianism, and probably LSD. It was easy to see why the movie appealed. Canonically, what hackers accessed was the ability to surveil without consent. I knew the genuine thrill of watching a cross-section of society flow through a system, seeing the high-level, bird’s-eye view—the full map, the traffic, the stream of data pouring down the screen. The movie didn’t just make hackers look sexy. It glamorized circumvention, the outcast’s righteous pursuit of truth, the outsider’s superiority and omniscience.

  I looked over at the CEO. How was this person my boss? He was just a kid. I knew he was a first-generation American, a child of Indian immigrants. He mentioned, not infrequently, his parents’ hope that he would finish his undergraduate degree. I wondered what he thought about his liberal arts employees looking for affirmation and meaning in work; if he found me spoiled and annoying. I wondered if he thought about his employees much at all. I wondered whether I’d ever understand what he had at stake, or even what he wanted.

  I hoped it was worth it. Onscreen, two men dressed like school shooters flapped around a dystopian universe. Our faces looked soft and bloodless in the light.

  * * *

  In moments of unusual and incisive cruelty, the men on the Solutions team joked that the CEO had used the company to engineer his own social group. He had filled the office with socially adept, good-looking men his own age. They were convinced he still had a chip on his shoulder from high school—not that any of us had ever heard him talk about his high school experience. For all we knew, he could have been prom king.

  Much as we tried, we were not the CEO’s friends. We were his subordinates. He shut down our ideas and belittled us in private meetings; dangled responsibility and prestige, only to retract them inexplicably. He was not above giving employees the silent treatment. He mic
romanaged, was vindictive, made us feel inessential and inadequate. We regularly brought him customer feedback, like dogs mouthing tennis balls, and he regularly ignored us.

  Several of my teammates’ partners had issued moratoriums on CEO-centric conversation. He was expensive to work for: at least three of my coworkers met with therapists on a weekly basis to talk through their relationships with him. It went without saying that he wasn’t returning the compliment.

  Some of us hypothesized that the CEO’s dream was for the company to be entirely self-service. “I bet he would rather have thousands and thousands of customers paying us a hundred and fifty dollars a month than deal with a million-dollar customer,” a sales engineer said. “Million-dollar customers matter. When you have a million-dollar customer, you have to listen to them.”

  Like me, the men on the Solutions team wanted nothing more than to stand in the CEO’s light. Even if we rarely saw it, he had a great smile; it was thrilling to make him laugh, to crack the veneer. We’d seen him happy. We knew he had good friends, many of whom had been founders in his cohort at the startup accelerator. We’d all celebrated the company’s fifth birthday on the roof deck of his apartment building, where he fed cake to the technical cofounder as the technical cofounder fed him. We were fascinated by his psychology. We wanted to figure him out.

  “If I had to guess,” a sales engineer said over drinks one evening, “he had a childhood where people were not particularly nice to him. I wouldn’t have been nice to him. But because he never felt included, he’s really distrusting of people’s motivations, and really defensive of whatever authority he’s able to gain.”

  “I don’t think he likes seeing people suffer,” an account manager said, “but he knows producing suffering in people is productive.”