Uncanny Valley

by Anna Wiener

  “Our culture is dying,” we said to one another gravely, apocalyptic prophets toasting bagels in the company kitchen. “What should we do about the culture?”

  It wasn’t just the salespeople, of course. The salespeople were both consequence and harbinger. Our culture had been splintering for months. The CEO wouldn’t stop using the word “paranoid.” Our primary investor had funded a direct competitor. This was what investors did, but it still felt personal: Daddy loved us, he just loved us less. We feared it was slash-and-burn season. We feared we’d been hiring our own replacements all along. There was the sense of something looming.

  Still, the weeks ticked past without incident. Every Tuesday afternoon, the emergency-warning siren heralded good news: for our revenue, our investors, our valuation, and, ostensibly, for us.

  * * *

  My meeting had no calendar invite, no warning. On a Friday afternoon, as I was packing up to leave, the CEO summoned me into a conference room.

  “I thought you were an amazing worker at first,” he said, palms on the table, voice slow. “Working late every night, last out of the office. But now I wonder if the work was just too hard for you to begin with.”

  He wanted to know: Was I Down for the Cause? Because if I wasn’t Down for the Cause, then it was time. We could do this amicably. I stared at the four sculptural metal letters perched on a ledge at the end of the conference room: D, F, T, C.

  I told him I was down—of course I was down. I tried not to swivel in my ergonomic chair. I cared deeply about the company, I said. I meant it. It did not occur to me to defend myself, to point out that the quality of my work had not changed. I was good at my job. The meeting was a hit—something to scare me. It worked.

  If I didn’t want to stay at the company, the CEO said, he would personally help me find a new job. Either way, I would not be leading the Support Engineering team. “I’ve decided you aren’t analytical,” he said. “I don’t think we have the same values. I don’t even know what your values are.”

  Of course I’m analytical, I thought. I might not have been a systems thinker, but I could deconstruct to death. I had thought we shared some of the same values, at least on their face: we were similarly disenchanted by corporate hierarchies, we liked underdogs, we both called ourselves feminists. We liked winning.

  Despite my best efforts, I cried twice in the meeting, leaving in the middle to grab tissues from the bathroom, dodging looks of concern from the Engineering cluster. I leaned against the sink and wiped my face with a paper towel, as I had seen every other woman at the company do at one point or another. I thought about my friends back in New York. I thought about how hard I’d worked and how demoralizing it was to be told I had failed. I thought about my values, and I cried even more.

  Back in the conference room, the CEO waited patiently. His face was unchanged when I returned.

  * * *

  In pursuit of higher truths, Ian and I drove up to Mendocino to do ecstasy. Using the home-sharing platform, we booked a guest suite in the home of an older couple who seemed to spend their days shouting at each other across the gulf of their gigantic sunken living room. The suite looked out across a valley: a bowl of fog. The landscape dripped.

  While neither of us had much experience with controlled substances, Ian at least trusted the process. I trusted nothing. I sat on the bathroom sink and read pages of user-generated comments on a web forum dedicated to trip documentation. I looked up the location of the nearest hospital. Then I removed work email from my phone, making it impossible to reach the CEO or anyone else I might regret contacting while artificially flooded with serotonin.

  We took the drugs and drank orange juice. We lay on a couch and listened to the cottony echoes of the older couple in the main house. We put on a Karen Dalton album and rubbed each other’s backs and shared revelations about our families. I told Ian my worst secrets and felt content. I didn’t feel high, or ecstatic—just like myself, but the good parts. Myself, but less anxious, less afraid. I wanted to replicate the experience with everyone I loved. This was my higher calling, I thought: sitting in a beautiful place, talking. I wanted to video-chat all my friends at once.

  Life shone in its simplicity. I thought about the sweep of history, the improbability of convergence. Nothing seemed impossible. I had moved to California to accelerate my career, and now I was living through a historical inflection point, I effused—we were living through a historical inflection point. Ian had put on sweatpants and was stretching, happily, in front of a mirror. This was the new economy, the new way to live, I said—we were on the glimmering edge of a brand-new world, and we were among the people building it. Well, he was among the people building it. But I was helping.

  I didn’t know if I believed everything I was saying, but it felt so good to say it. “Very inspiring,” Ian said, beaming. “You should give a keynote. New career: futurist.”

  The next morning, we drove to a hot spring and floated naked in a sulfuric pool with people whose bodies had begun to betray them. A wooden sauna vibrated with white-haired white people singing Native American folk songs. I wanted to live forever. I wanted to see what happened.

  As we slid back into the city, the afterglow fading into a comedown, we talked about what came next. Ian encouraged me to quit my job. I gave the analytics startup as much space in my life as it asked for, and then some, he said. Work was making me miserable. He reminded me that it wasn’t normal to cry in the office bathroom.

  I explained that I felt a sense of loyalty. I wanted to prove myself to the CEO. I wanted to prove him wrong.

  “He doesn’t care about you,” Ian said. “You’re the smallest problem in his life. You’re allowed to quit. He’ll be fine.”

  It wasn’t the first time Ian had initiated this conversation. It was always well-intentioned, but the unsolicited advice made me bristle, and not only because I refused to admit that he might be right.

  As a software engineer, Ian had never encountered a job market with no space for him; he didn’t know what it felt like not to have mobility, options, not to be desired. He loved what he did and could easily command three times my salary. No company would ever neglect to offer him equity. He was his own safety net.

  I was perhaps still afflicted by the shortsightedness of someone whose skill set was neither unique nor in high demand. A sense of my own disposability had been ingrained since working in the publishing industry, and quitting without a plan was unfathomable. Every month since graduation was accounted for on my résumé. Sabbaticals, for anyone other than a college professor, were a novel concept, and one I could not trust.

  Ian loved me in the way you love someone at the very beginning: he still believed I was the sort of person who wouldn’t allow herself to be treated badly, to be made to feel like shit. Someone righteous, moral. Someone who valued herself. I empathized with his disappointment. I wanted to be that person, too.

  * * *

  Down for the Cause—what was the cause? Our cause was the company, but the company had causes, too. Driving engagement; improving the user experience; reducing friction; enabling digital dependency. We were helping marketing managers A/B test subject-line copy to increase click-throughs from mass emails; helping developers at e-commerce platforms make it harder for users to abandon shopping carts; helping designers tighten the endorphin feedback loop.

  Helping people make better decisions, we had always said. Helping people test their assumptions. Answer tough questions. Eliminate bias. Develop best-of-breed message targeting. Increase conversions. Improve key business metrics. Measure user-adoption strategy. Prioritize impact. Drive ROI. Growth-hack. What gets measured gets managed, I sometimes told customers, quoting a management guru whose writing I had never read.

  The endgame was the same for everyone: Growth at any cost. Scale above all. Disrupt, then dominate.

  At the end of the idea: A world improved by companies improved by data. A world of actionable metrics, in which developers would never stop
optimizing and users would never stop looking at their screens. A world freed of decision-making, the unnecessary friction of human behavior, where everything—whittled down to the fastest, simplest, sleekest version of itself—could be optimized, prioritized, monetized, and controlled.

  * * *

  Unfortunately for me, I liked my inefficient life. I liked listening to the radio and cooking with excessive utensils; slivering onions, detangling wet herbs. Long showers and stoned museum-wandering. I liked riding public transportation: watching strangers talk to their children; watching strangers stare out the window at the sunset, and at photos of the sunset on their phones. I liked taking long walks to purchase onigiri in Japantown, or taking long walks with no destination at all. Folding the laundry. Copying keys. Filling out forms. Phone calls. I even liked the post office, the predictable discontent of bureaucracy. I liked full albums, flipping the record. Long novels with minimal plot; minimalist novels with minimal plot. Engaging with strangers. Getting into it. Closing down the restaurant, having one last drink. I liked grocery shopping: perusing the produce; watching everyone chew in the bulk aisle.

  Warm laundry, radio, waiting for the bus. I could get frustrated, overextended, overwhelmed, uncomfortable. Sometimes I ran late. But these banal inefficiencies—I thought they were luxuries, the mark of the unencumbered. Time to do nothing, to let my mind run anywhere, to be in the world. At the very least, they made me feel human.

  The fetishized life without friction: What was it like? An unending shuttle between meetings and bodily needs? A continuous, productive loop? Charts and data sets. It wasn’t, to me, an aspiration. It was not a prize.

  * * *

  Unwinding over wine and potato chips one evening, the CEO sat beside me at one of the office kitchen tables. “You’ve been with us for a year,” he said. “I ask everyone the same thing. Has this been the longest or the shortest year of your life?”

  Longest, I said. It was knee-jerk, sincere. His eyes narrowed, and he half laughed. At the end of the table, the solutions manager visibly eavesdropped.

  “It’s a trick question,” the CEO said. “The right answer is both.”

  As my annual review rolled around, I found myself on the fence about whether or not to bring up the running list of casual hostilities toward women that added unsolicited texture to the workplace. The company had grown to sixty employees, eight of whom were women: a decent ratio for the industry. But I was idealistic. I thought we could do better.

  Over email, I told my mother about the colleague with the smartwatch app that was just an animated GIF of a woman’s breasts bouncing in perpetuity, and the comments I’d fielded about my weight, my lips, my clothing, my sex life. I told her about the list the influencer kept, ranking the most bangable women in the office.

  It was tricky: I liked my coworkers, and I did my best to dish it back. I didn’t have horror stories yet, and I preferred things stay this way. Compared to other women I’d met, I had it good. But the bar was so, so low.

  My mother had worked for corporate banks when she was my age. I assumed she’d understand. I expected her to respond with words of support and encouragement. I expected her to say, “Yes! You are the change this industry needs.”

  She emailed me back almost immediately. Don’t put complaints about sexism in writing, she wrote. Unless, of course, you have a lawyer at the ready.

  * * *

  I was promoted from Support Engineering into something the industry called Customer Success. I was a customer success manager, a CSM. All of a sudden, I had an acronym and enterprise accounts. I had business cards. The cards had my personal cell phone number on them, and the slogans ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER THAN PAGE VIEWS and I AM DATA DRIVEN—the absence of a hyphen still drove me crazy—but I handed them out to anyone who would take one.

  The Customer Success team was small: just me and a former account manager, a newly minted M.B.A. who dressed in button-down shirts and polished leather brogues. The solutions manager told me that he expected we would make a great team. I agreed—I liked the M.B.A. and his dry, cynical humor. “He’s strategic,” the solutions manager said, beaming. “And you love our customers.”

  Our customers. My inbox and personal voice mail were full of demands from entitled, stubborn unknown men. I thought about all the times over the past year that I had been underestimated, condescended to, dismissed. It was true that I enjoyed translating between the software and the customers. I liked breaking down information, demystifying technical processes, being one of few with this specific expertise. I liked being bossy. But the men—I did not love any of them.

  With the promotion came a bump in equity. I still did not know what the shares were worth, and I was afraid to ask the M.B.A. whether he had been offered more when we were promoted. It seemed safe to assume the answer was yes. After all, his work was seen as strategy, while my work was interpreted as love.

  Still, even without the equity—speculative money, anyway, I reassured myself—I was twenty-six years old and making ninety thousand dollars a year. I went on the internet and purchased a pair of five-hundred-dollar boots that I knew were fashionable in New York but, it turned out, I was embarrassed to wear in San Francisco—they looked so professional. I donated a little to a reproductive-health-care nonprofit. I donated a little to a local organization that provided mobile toilets and showers to homeless people in my neighborhood. I bought a vibrator with a USB port, because it made me feel more technical. I enrolled in a gym with a saltwater pool that I knew I’d never have time to swim in, and booked an appointment with a hypnotherapist recommended by a crowdsourced reviewing platform. I spent two hundred dollars on a single session, hoping to stop biting my nails, during which I accidentally fell asleep and had an unerotic dream about the founder of the social network everyone hated.

  The rest of my money went straight into a savings account. Okay okay okay, I reassured myself, hiding in the server room on bad days, reviewing my bank balance. Escape hatch.

  * * *

  In the spring, the startup released a new feature, a report called Addiction. Addiction graphs displayed the frequency with which individual users engaged, visualized on an hourly basis—like a retention report on steroids. It was an inspired product decision, executed brilliantly by the engineers. Every company wanted to build an app that users were looking at multiple times a day. They wanted to be sticky—stickiest. The Addiction charts quantified and reinforced this anxiety and obsession.

  Our communications director had left for a larger tech company with well-established, family-friendly benefits and policies, and had not been replaced. With her departure, I became the de facto copywriter. When I asked for a raise to reflect the extra work, the request was flatly denied. “You’re doing this because you care,” the solutions manager said—and I must have cared, because I kept doing it.

  To promote Addiction, I ghostwrote an opinion piece for the CEO that described, dryly, the desirability of having people constantly returning to the same apps, multiple times an hour. Addiction allows companies to see how embedded they are into people’s daily lives, I wrote, like it was a good thing. The piece was published on a highly trafficked tech blog under the CEO’s name, and on our company blog under mine.

  The novelty of Addiction was exciting, but the premise made me uneasy. Most of the company was under the age of thirty, and we had been raised on the internet. We all treated technology like it was inevitable, but I was starting to think that there might be other approaches. I already tied myself in dopamine knots all too often: I would email myself a link or note, feel a jolt of excitement at the subsequent notification, then remember I had just triggered it. App addiction wasn’t something I wanted to encourage.

  The branding also vexed me. I knew multiple people who had decamped for pastoral settings to kick dependencies on heroin, cocaine, painkillers, alcohol—and they were the lucky ones. Addiction was a generational epidemic; it was devastating. The Tenderloin was five blocks away from our office
. There had to be higher aspirations. At the very least, there were other words in the English language.

  I brought up my qualms to Kyle. It was like nobody at the company had ever been around someone with even a casual drug habit, I said. It was like substance abuse was an abstract concept, something that they’d only read about in the papers, if any of them bothered to read the news in the first place. It wasn’t just insensitive, but sheltered, embarrassing, offensive. We may as well call our funnel reports Anorexia, I said. Let’s start calling churn rates Suicides.

  Kyle listened patiently while I ranted. He took off his floral cycling cap and rubbed the back of his head. “I hear you,” he said. “The question of addiction is a big thing in gaming. It’s nothing new. But I don’t see any incentive for it to change.” He pushed the miniature skateboard under my desk back and forth with the tip of his sneaker. “We already call our customers ‘users.’”

  * * *

  Being a customer success manager was more interesting than being a support engineer, but the title was so corny and oddly stilted in its pseudo-sincerity that I could not bring myself to say it out loud. This turned out to work to my advantage: when I changed my email signature to read “technical account manager” instead, it actually elicited a response from previously uncommunicative clients—always engineers, always founders, and, still, always men.

  The work was similar to support, but less technical and oriented toward the enterprise: the big boys. We CSMs were custodians of mutually beneficial long-term relationships. I had a roster of accounts, high-paying tech companies and corporations looking to get a taste of the cutting edge. My job was to ensure that these accounts were getting the most from the tool. While this included helping new companies onboard—provided they were paying a certain amount—it was also the friendly way of saying I would be fired if I couldn’t prevent churn.