Uncanny Valley

by Anna Wiener

  I swiped to a photograph of what could only be the pre-dinner floor show: an acrobat in a leotard kneeling on a pedestal, her legs contorted, her feet grasping a bow and arrow, poised to release. Her target was a stuffed heart, printed with the company logo. I scrolled past animated photo-booth GIFs of strangers kissing and mugging for the camera, and I recognized their pride, I empathized with their sense of accomplishment—it had been one hell of a year, but they had made it, and they had won. I felt gently ill, a callback to the childhood nausea of being left out.

  I kept scrolling until I landed on a video of the after-party, which looked like it had been filmed in a club or at an expensive bar mitzvah, save for the startup’s logo projected onto the wall. Flashing colored lights illuminated men in disassembled suits and women in cocktail dresses, all of them bouncing up and down, waving glow sticks and lightsabers to a background of electronic dance music. They’ve gone pro, I thought. The company had recently raised an additional sixty-five million dollars. They had a war chest. They were bound for hypergrowth. They were sparing no expense.

  Last night was epic! read a comment from someone I’d never met. Over a year had passed since I left. I caught myself searching for my own face anyway.

  At the beginning of the new year, Ian’s robotics studio moved down to Mountain View, to merge with the search-engine giant’s clandestine research-and-development facility. The facility, housed in what had once been California’s first indoor mall, was called the moonshot factory. Straight-faced, immodest. Employees were asked to use the phrase on their email signatures and professional résumés; their director went by Captain of Moonshots. I still didn’t know what Ian actually worked on, although sometimes I learned from the news: papers of record had reporters covering the search-engine giant as a dedicated beat, like a foreign government, a new kind of nation.

  From time to time, the company also distributed T-shirts printed with internal code names—further clues. What is “Hi-Lo”? I asked, when Ian showed up wearing a company shirt that looked like it had come from a prog-rock concert. He couldn’t say. I told him this was deeply annoying: if things were at the promotional T-shirt phase, employees should be able to talk about their work. “Well, sure,” he said. “But isn’t that part of the fun?”

  The company was fun. It was fun—it was fun!—and it wanted everyone, especially employees and prospective employees, to know. Engineers zipped across the mall on bikes and scooters. The Captain of Moonshots was always on Rollerblades, gliding between commitments, reducing inefficiency and boosting his heart rate. Ian attended a picnic with a quadruped military robot, as if a mule-sized piece of metal that could open doors by itself were a normal dining companion. The company threw a Día de los Muertos party, with Mexican food, a mariachi band, and a candlelit altar that paid tribute to products killed before launch. It hosted a multiday off-site at a former Boy Scout camp in the redwoods—a heavy-handed metaphor, I thought.

  The search-engine giant offered perks that landed somewhere between the collegiate and the feudal. Ian got checkups at the health center and returned home with condoms the color of the company’s logo, printed with the words I’M FEELING LUCKY. Employees were offered a roster of physical-education opportunities—not just Rollerblading—and Ian started attending intensive functional fitness classes during his lunch hour. He began lifting, bulking, quantifying; I began finding protein bar wrappers in the lint trap. “I’m worried I’m becoming a brogrammer,” he said, pulling up an app to show me his stats. I was not worried about Ian becoming a brogrammer—I was more concerned about him seeing his colleagues naked in the communal locker room. It all seemed so intimate. He reassured me that it was a big company.

  The parent corporation, which employed some seventy thousand people, was a world-historical summit of engineering talent—a limitless resource to explore, an organizational marvel—but it looked, from the outside, like it was suffering from a certain degree of sclerosis. It was the best big company to work for, Ian sometimes said, but the core business was still digital advertising, not hardware.

  As executives shuffled and reshuffled the acquisitions, it began to seem as if the moonshot factory had vacuumed up some of the more innovative companies in robotics, then put them on the back burner for several years. Later, we would read in the news about a number of sexual harassment charges against the men Ian referred to as his super-bosses. These offered at least a few useful explanations for institutional stagnancy. The super-bosses must have been busy.

  The round-trip commute to Mountain View could take up to four hours. The evening time that Ian had once spent biking the city, or cooking dinner with friends, or rolling around on the floor in the new-age ballet class we took together, he now spent on the corporate shuttle. In the mornings, Ian sprinted to the pickup point, thermos of coffee in hand. In the evenings, the bus ejected him back into the fog. I could see him from the bay window as he trudged down the block looking enervated, queasy, and gray.

  * * *

  I sometimes wondered whether there was a unique psychic burden shared by people who worked in technology, specifically those of us building and supporting software that existed only in the cloud. The abstractions of knowledge work were well documented, but this felt new. It was not just the cognitive dissonance of how lucrative and powerful tech companies had become, when their tools did not physically exist, but that all software was vulnerable, at any time, to erasure. Engineers could spend years writing programs only to have them updated, rewritten, and replaced. They poured hours and energy into products that never shipped. Offensive as it was, I wondered if the Día de los Muertos party had provided some closure for the people whose work never went live.

  My own psychic burden was that I could command a six-figure salary, yet I did not know how to do anything. Whatever I learned to do in my late twenties, I learned from online tutorials: how to remove mold from a windowsill; slow-cook fish; straighten a cowlick; self-administer a breast exam. Whenever I wrenched a piece of self-assembly furniture into place, or reinforced a loose button, I experienced an unfamiliar and antiquated type of satisfaction. I went so far as to buy a sewing machine, like I was looking for ways to shame myself.

  I wasn’t alone. Half the programmers I knew between the ages of twenty-two and forty, mostly men, were discovering that their fingers were multipurpose. “It feels so good to do something with my hands,” they said, before launching into monologues about woodworking or home-brewing or baking sourdough. It was like Brooklyn five years ago, except instead of pickling vegetables, the hobbyist artisans examined each other’s crumb shots. At work, a handful of the engineers became obsessed with sous vide, and on weekends they seared, sliced, and plated soft meat, documenting their process and sharing proud, high-resolution pictures on social media.

  I envied Ian, who was trained to think in terms of hardware, the embodied world. He stared at a computer all day, too, but the laws of physics still applied. His relationship to the internet was different from mine: he didn’t have accounts on any of the social networks, was unfamiliar with memes and unattuned to the minutiae of other people’s lives. He didn’t stand up at the end of the day and think, as I did: Oh, right—a body.

  * * *

  I left my apartment to meet Patrick for dinner at a restaurant with a cinema theme. Talk quickly turned to tech, per usual; per usual, I began projecting my anxieties and frustrations about Silicon Valley onto him. Our disagreements about the industry were ongoing, like a podcast no one in their right mind would listen to. The same information could bring us to radically different conclusions—what I interpreted as a cautionary tale, he might read as a blueprint, and vice versa—but I enjoyed these conversations. They expanded the frame and sharpened the edges of my own arguments. Only occasionally did I stalk home in the dark, listening to loud music and feeling grim, wishing I worked in another sector or lived in another city—namely, one where I could bum a cigarette.

  “Would I prefer a counterfactual Silicon Val
ley that only produced meaningful companies?” he asked, as we were presented with matching plates of fried chicken slathered in yogurt and dukkah. “Of course. But I think the genomic startups and the bullshit startups are the outcome of the same process, the foibles and the self-destructive tendencies, all that. If we could have sane, judicious, sober, prudent, well-adjusted Silicon Valley, producing the same companies, that would be great, but I’m not sure we can.”

  Of course we can, I said. Most startups would probably be just as successful, if not more so, if they were run by people who did not, for example, harass or ostracize the women in their engineering organizations. They would probably be just as innovative, run by people who weren’t—no offense—young, white, and male. And how were we defining success here, anyway? I asked, getting a little excited, though I was the one who had brought up success in the first place. Shouldn’t more and different kinds of people be allowed to fail? I sipped on my wine, feeling triumphant.

  “To be clear, I agree with the critiques,” Patrick said, refilling my water glass suggestively. “I also want Silicon Valley to be better. More inclusive, more ambitious, more significant, more serious. More optimistic.” On this we agreed, though I suspected we might have different ideas about how it could manifest. “I think it’s really striking that there is only one Silicon Valley, and I worry a lot about that flame being extinguished. Maybe one question is whether you would want two Silicon Valleys, or none. For me, that answer is really clear.”

  I swirled a piece of chicken skin around my plate. I did not want two Silicon Valleys. I was starting to think the one we already had was doing enough damage. Or, maybe I did want two, but only if the second one was completely different, an evil twin: Matriarchal Silicon Valley. Separatist-feminist Silicon Valley. Small-scale, well-researched, slow-motion, regulated Silicon Valley—men could hold leadership roles in that one, but only if they never used the word “blitzscale” or referred to business as war. I knew my ideas were contradictions in terms.

  “Progress is so unusual and so rare, and we’re all out hunting, trying to find El Dorado,” Patrick said. “Almost everyone’s going to return empty-handed. Sober, responsible adults aren’t going to quit their jobs and lives to build companies that, in the end, may not even be worth it. It requires, in a visceral way, a sort of self-sacrificing.” Only later did I consider that he might have been trying to tell me something.

  Friends hosted a rave in the Sacramento Delta, billed as a radical self-reliance event. The land is dry and needs your sweat, read the invitation. We are itching to fill the farm with joyful, hungry bodies. I wanted to be a joyful body—or, at least, I wanted to try. To prepare, I packed a pair of black harem pants, a small vaporizer, a novel, and The Artist’s Way. “I don’t think people read at raves,” Ian said, eyeing my tote bag, but he let it go.

  When we pulled up to the farmhouse, a group of shirtless men were erecting a geodesic dome. They laced strings of LEDs around the poles, their pectorals tensing, and propped pillows and futon mattresses around the interior. In an outdoor kitchen, people chopped toppings for pizza. A lamb skittered between their legs, looking for scraps. Portable speakers played electro swing.

  The party’s host was a communitarian farmer with an easygoing, searching personality. As the farmer helped us set up our tent in a walnut grove, I asked what the story was with the lamb. The plan, he said, snaking a pole through the fly, was to spit-roast her the next afternoon. “You wrestle her to the ground and spoon her until she relaxes,” he explained, as if he were sharing a recipe for fruit salad. “Then you just reach around and slit her throat.”

  In the late afternoon, a man and woman emerged from the woods, dressed in white, loose linen. They announced that there would be a ritual. They were regal in face paint, pink from the sun. Everyone lined up, passing a joint from front to back, and marched down to the creek, where they disrobed. Our leaders, still partially clothed, waded into the water and took turns dipping everyone backward, like a baptism. The linen floated to the surface like scum. No way, I whispered to Ian. Too goyish. I hung back and kept my suit on, joining once the ritual was over.

  The naked bodies bobbed downstream. They clambered up to the edge of the creek and communed with the livestock on the other side, and lay out to dry in the drooping sun. Cans of beer floated in the creek. I felt a familiar loneliness, participating in something bigger than myself and still feeling apart from it.

  After a while, I climbed out of the water, feeling self-conscious. I shook out a towel next to Ian and an acquaintance who made money cuddling with older men. The cuddle therapist sat cross-legged, his testicles draped with great trust over a small patch of wildflowers. I insinuated myself into Ian’s armpit. We inquired about his sessions: How did it feel to be the object of so much yearning? Did people cry, or confess? Was it heavy; did it feel like an important service? What happened if someone got aroused? “If you get a boner, you have to get up,” the cuddle therapist said, with infinite patience. Ian idly detangled my hair.

  Even on the farm, people were talking startups. With a measure of reluctance outdone only by the exhaustion of precarity, Noah and Ian’s friends had begun moving into the industry; the ecosystem found a way to absorb those with college degrees and fluency in middle-class social cues. A principal at a public elementary school took a job at an education startup making scheduling software. A music critic wrote copy about fitness and meditation apps. Journalists switched into corporate communications. Artists took residencies at the social network everyone hated, and filmmakers found themselves in-house at the larger tech corporations, shooting internal promotional content designed to make workers feel good about their professional affiliations.

  Everyone needed a hustle: artists, musicians, blue-collar workers, and public servants were leaving San Francisco, and new ones were not taking their place. In blond-wood coffee shops that opened for people who wanted to take meetings in coffee shops, the baristas were not, as they had once been, young and new to the city. They were older and softer and still protected, at least for the moment, by rent control, but the writing was on the wall. Even comedians began offering corporate improv seminars, workshops for startup employees to strengthen team relationships through mutual humiliation. “What’s your opinion on coding boot camps?” the cuddle therapist asked Ian.

  That evening, in the orchard, a group of musicians who had been touring the West Coast in a retrofitted school bus performed songs about California. The sky grew dark. Black widow spiders were discovered in one of the portable toilets, setting off a displacement initiative. Five or six people disappeared to have sex in a walk-in refrigerator. Others took ketamine and danced slowly to house music, or reclined on faux-fur blankets in the geodesic dome, doing poppers. A woman wearing a sequined tutu took PCP and perched on a heap of firewood. “There’s just so much to look at,” she said, saucer-eyed, bursting with awe.

  Sometimes it felt as if everyone had watched a highlight reel of people enacting freedom in the sixties and seventies—casual nudism, gleeful promiscuity, communal living, communal eating, communal bathing. There had been some talk of buying group land up near Mendocino. There had been some talk of shared childcare, even though no one had children. It struck me as a performance from an imperfect past, a reenactment. The pursuit of liberation, some pure joy.

  I did not see myself becoming an executor of the sixties counterculture, but I was interested in its endurance—even startup founders held company retreats at Sea Ranch. Everywhere else, the counterculture was a historical subject, a costume-party theme, kitsch. Certainly, this side of the sixties was not a reference for my friends in New York. They had back-to-the-land fantasies, too, of a sort: renovated barns up the Hudson, with vegetable gardens and vintage pickup trucks and farmhouse sinks. Utopianism did not loom large. I didn’t know if this indicated clear-eyed realism or a failure of imagination.

  Around midnight, I returned alone to the tent and zipped myself into a sleeping bag, Ian’s fle
ece camping pillow bundled under my head. I wondered if all this was perhaps just a form of resistance. Technology was gnawing into relationships, community, identity, the commons. Maybe nostalgia was just an instinctual response to the sense that materiality was disappearing from the world. I wanted to find my own way to hedge against it, my own form of collective.

  Beneath me, the earth was hard and cold. It vibrated, perpetually, to the bass line.

  From time to time, friends from outside the industry would post articles about psychological experiments run by the social network everyone hated, with their own baffled commentary, to the social network everyone hated. They would email me news stories about facial-recognition software, or a ride-sharing startup’s ability to track riders with a tool called God View. Did you know about this? they would write. Is this … normal? They would text, suspicious or amused, after stumbling into corners of the internet that spooked them: the microblogging platform served ads for groceries they had just purchased, or a photo-sharing app recommended connecting with a long-lost acquaintance they had just seen on the subway. Food delivery services would suggest local restaurants during far-flung vacations; voice assistants would blurt information unprompted.

  “Check this out,” a friend said over drinks, passing his phone across the table to show me a log of his most frequent locations: home, his office, the gym, train stations, an unknown residential address I didn’t ask about. “My phone has been building a little dossier on my behavior, like a private eye. I don’t know whether to feel flattered or deceived.”

  When I failed to demonstrate surprise, or tried to explain what was happening, or even admitted that some of this was actually related to the work I had done at the analytics startup, my friends’ reactions made me feel like a sociopath. These conversations didn’t make me feel superior or culturally knowledgeable. They scared me. I would hang up the phone and wonder whether the NSA whistleblower had been the first moral test for my generation of entrepreneurs and tech workers, and we had blown it. I would look across the table into the confused faces of smart, hopeful, well-informed participants in civil society, and think, with dismay: They really don’t know.