Uncanny Valley

by Anna Wiener

  * * *

  At work, corners of the open-source platform were growing increasingly vicious and bizarre. The Terms of Service team was alerted to content posted by people claiming to be members of a terrorist organization; content posted by people who were doxing government employees and stalking our coworkers. We were alerted to content that contained targeted death threats. One was credible enough to shutter HQ for a day.

  We debated what to do about code for a game in which players competed to kill Jews. We squinted at repositories full of ASCII art that spelled out phrases like FAGGOTS ARE GAY BUT NOT QUEERS and VAPE IN MY PUSSY AND CALL ME YOUR MEME SLUT. We passed around account avatars of iconic cartoon animals styled to look like Hitler, and responded in the chat room with shrugging emojis styled to look like us.

  Most days, I stuck to processing copyright takedowns and trademark reports, following tedious procedures with great satisfaction, like a proud paralegal for the open-source community. Other days, I sent polite emails to users asking them to please change out the swastikas they were using for their avatars, or to consider removing the anti-Semitic comics they had uploaded to their repositories.

  I often had to step back and remember that this sort of material accounted for a minuscule fraction of activity on the open-source platform. In the grand scheme of things, the company was lucky: unlike the traditional social networks, it did not offer a way to livestream graphic acts of violence. Unlike the home-sharing platform and car-hailing apps, it was not in the business of in-person interactions. By comparison, the tool facilitated a very specific, benign form of digital civic life. No one was signing in to form an opinion about abortion or the curvature of the earth; no one was looking to be debriefed on the news. The majority of users engaged with the site as intended.

  Still, I had long since stopped doing public work under my own name. For all external correspondence, I used male pseudonyms. Thankfully, we never had to use the phone. I did this in part because the work could be sensitive, with the potential to upset people whose digital currency was cruelty; I wasn’t the only person on the team using a fake name. But using male pseudonyms wasn’t just useful for defusing or de-escalating tense exchanges. It was useful for even the most harmless support requests. I was most effective when I removed myself. Men, I saw, simply responded differently to men. My male pseudonyms had more authority than I did.

  * * *

  It was still the era of the social web. Everyone in the pool. Alone, together. Social networks, claimed the social networks’ founders, were tools for connection and the free circulation of information. Social would build communities and break down barriers. Pay no attention to that ad tech behind the curtain: social would make people kinder, fairer, more empathetic. Social was a public utility for a global economy that was rapidly becoming borderless, unbounded—or would be, if anyone in Silicon Valley could figure out how to win China.

  Social would bring liberal democracy to the world. Social would redistribute power and set people free, and users would determine their own destinies. Deeply rooted authoritarian governments were no match for design thinking and PHP applications. The founders pointed to Cairo. They pointed to Moscow. They pointed to Tunisia. They side-eyed Zuccotti Park.

  Not that the platforms themselves betrayed revolutionary potential—they looked innocuous, because they looked the same. 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. People accustomed to looking at tabular data, for whom coding was creative, and good code was clean. People who thought that personalization was the responsibility of an algorithm. Systems thinkers, for whom the system was computational, and did not extend into the realm of the social.

  The software was transactional, fast, scalable, diffuse. Crowdfunding requests for insulin spread as quickly and efficiently as anti-vaccination propaganda. Abuses were considered edge cases, on the margin—flaws that could be corrected by spam filters, or content moderators, or self-regulation by unpaid community members. No one wanted to admit that abuses were structurally inevitable: indicators that the systems—optimized for stickiness and amplification, endless engagement—were not only healthy, but working exactly as designed.

  * * *

  In the spring, a far-right publication ran a blog post about the VP of Social Impact, zeroing in on her critique of diversity-in-tech initiatives that tended to disproportionately benefit white women. The post ran with a collage of octopus-cats, under the headline ANTI-WHITE AGENDA REVEALED.

  The article sparked a furor in the comments section, accumulating hundreds of responses. The publication’s readers made conspiratorial statements about Marxism and Hollywood, liberal victimhood, reverse racism, and the globalist agenda. They published panicked micro-essays about the Federalist Papers and North Venezuela, and the cultural extermination of the West. It was a cacophony of dog whistles.

  The comments section burst. Menacing vitriol about my coworkers spread across social media. The Sales line rang with rabid callers. The publication seemed to have mobilized a faction that was hell-bent on amplifying far-right ideas under the guise of political debate, using any available channel. By the end of the day, the VP, the CEO, and a handful of outspoken employees had become targets of a vicious internet harassment campaign. It was not the first time this had happened to coworkers—it was, to my knowledge, already the third instance in a year.

  The campaign was a barrage; it persisted for days. Some of the threats were specific enough that the company hired security escorts. HQ had an uneasy air. A threatening note was found taped to the door of the employee entrance.

  I mentioned to a coworker how striking it was that all internet harassment now seemed to follow a playbook: the methods of the far-right commentariat were remarkably similar to what we had seen, eighteen months prior, from the troll bloc targeting women in gaming. It was like an entire generation had developed its political identity online, using the style and tone of internet forums.

  Is this just how things are now? I asked. It was bizarre to me that two different groups would have the same rhetorical and tactical strategies.

  My coworker was a connoisseur of online forums and bulletin boards. He looked at me askance. “Oh, my sweet summer child,” he said. “They are absolutely the same people.”

  Silicon Valley had become a gesture, an idea, an expansion, and an erasure. A shorthand and a Rorschach test. A dream or a mirage. There was confusion over whether the South Bay was a bedroom community for San Francisco, or the converse. Both appeared to be true.

  Tech was only about 10 percent of the workforce, but it had an outsized impact. The city was turning over. People kept coming. The Mission was plastered with flyers addressing newcomers. Nobody cares about your tech job, the flyers read. Be courteous of others when in public and keep the feral careerism of your collegial banter on mute.

  Rents rose. Cafés went cashless. The roads were choked with ride-shares. Taquerias shuttered and reopened as upscale, organic taco shops. Tenement buildings burned, and were replaced with empty condominiums.

  On the side of San Francisco where streets were named after union organizers and Mexican anti-imperialists, speculators snapped up vinyl-sided starter homes and flipped them. Amid tidy rows of pastel Edwardians, the flipped houses looked like dead teeth, muted and ominous in freshly painted, staid shades of gray. Newly flush twentysomethings became meek, baby-faced landlords, apologetically invoking arcane housing law to evict inherited long-term tenants and clear the way for condo conversions. Real estate developers planned blocks of micro-apartments, insistent that they weren’t just weekend crash pads, but the new frontier of millennial living: start small, scale up later.

  Against the former factories and chipping Victorians, the car-repair shops and leather bars, downtown’s new developments looked placeless, adrift. To differentiate themselves, they added electronic locks and Wi-Fi-enabled refrigerators, and called the
apartments smart. They offered bocce courts, climbing walls, pools, cooking classes, concierge services. Some hosted ski trips to Tahoe and weekend trips to wine country. They boasted bicycle lockers, woodworking shops, dog-wash stations, electric-car chargers. Half had tech rooms and coworking lounges: business centers designed to look like the residents’ offices, which were themselves designed to look like home.

  Outside my studio, a pickup truck backed into the tea tree, killing it. The tree was removed and replaced with a portable toilet identical to the portable toilet across the street. Neither was for use by the neighborhood’s growing population of homeless people, some of whom were left to defecate in succulent planters and in the shadows of garage overhangs, but for the construction crews that arrived every morning to build out junior one-bedrooms in the basements of facing Victorians. This was a landlord’s market.

  The toilets were both padlocked, and routinely broken into. At night, I lay in bed at the base of the bay window, listening to people struggle with the shackle; the sound of the plastic door swinging open, shuddering shut.

  * * *

  Glossy photographs of well-coiffed real estate agents began appearing in my mailbox, printed on card stock with calligraphic fonts. The agents were excited to unveil a gorgeous oasis with soaking tub and matte cabinetry; they were delighted to share an adorable bungalow with original details and breakfast nook. The agents pitched proximity to the freeways, and inserted maps of the tech shuttle routes, color-coded by company. Coveted location, the brochures read. Fabulous investment property with no rent control. I stood on the steps of my apartment building, looking at the agents’ headshots and thinking about bleaching my teeth.

  San Francisco had tipped into a full-blown housing crisis. Whenever the media reported that a new tech company had filed an S-1 with the SEC, people started comparing notes on tenants’ rights. Buy a house before the next IPO, my coworkers joked. It wasn’t a joke because it was funny; it was a joke because the overnight-wealthy were bidding 60 percent over asking on million-dollar starter homes, and paying in cash.

  Four of the six apartments in my rent-controlled building were occupied by middle-aged couples, some of whom had been there since at least the last boom; they were familiar with the rhetoric of community and revolution, had heard it all before. The recent flood of euphoric young people in pursuit of professional adventure, and the flood of cash that followed, was stressful, not impressive. I suspected no one in our building was in the market for a passive-income property, or a million-dollar condo. I suspected they all just wanted to stay.

  The real estate brochures came hard and fast. They began to address the building’s owner, who did not live there, and offered enticements to flip. Hi neighbor! they chirped. I wanted to share the big news about recently sold homes in your area.

  We have considered and ready buyers eager to invest in your neighborhood.

  If you could get the right price for your home, would you sell?

  The brochures collected on top of the mailboxes like a come- on and a taunt—reminders of our luck, and our impermanence.

  * * *

  There was a lot of discussion that year, particularly among the entrepreneurial class, about city-building. Everyone was reading The Power Broker—or, at least, reading summaries. Everyone was reading Season of the Witch. Armchair urbanists blogged about Jane Jacobs and discovered Haussmann, Le Corbusier. They fantasized about charter cities. They were beginning to notice something interesting—a potential opportunity, perhaps—taking place outside the windows of their ride-shares. They were beginning to catch on to the value of civic life.

  At a party, I met a man who leaned in and told me, with warm breath, that he was trying to get involved with an exciting new urbanism project. His T-shirt was creased geometrically, as if he’d had it same-day delivered and only unfolded it an hour ago: artful dishevelment in the age of on-demand. I asked if he worked for the city, or in urban planning. He’d gotten his start like the rest of us, he said, gesturing vaguely around the room, which was full of technologists. But he’d been meaning to read more about urbanism, if I had any book recommendations.

  I thought about the college syllabi from my undergraduate courses in urban studies and felt a flash of superiority, but couldn’t remember any of the titles. I inquired about the project, and he hesitated, the pause of someone drunk enough to be itchy with a secret, but not so drunk he wanted to make mistakes. I waited.

  Cities were important, he began, as if warming up for a pitch; as if we did not tacitly agree on this, standing in a living room in a famous urban center. “But cities could be smarter,” he said. “They should be smarter. What if we were given a blank slate? What problems could we fix?”

  Men were always talking about our problems. Who was the we? “We have all these new technologies at our disposal,” he said. “Self-driving cars, predictive analytics, drones. How can we put them together into the perfect combination?” I resisted making a joke about central planning.

  I asked where the first blank-slate city would be, expecting him to say somewhere in California—outside of Sacramento, maybe, somewhere within commuting distance that would release some of the pressure from San Francisco.

  Central America, he said. Maybe El Salvador. “Somewhere with people who want to work hard, and don’t want to have to deal with crime,” he explained. I stared, with great interest, at the bottom of my beer bottle. “The idea is to follow lean-startup methodology. The city will start small, like an early startup that has to cater to the first hundred users, rather than the first million.” I asked how he planned to scale up, and regretted it as soon as he gave me the answer: shipping containers.

  To live in? I asked. What about community? People didn’t come from nowhere. What about the local economy? I was starting to get mad. I was starting to show my cards. “Ideally, it would be a special economic zone,” he said. “You know Shenzhen?” I knew Shenzhen: a high-gloss, highly surveilled city where rapid economic growth encouraged both luxury development and child-labor abuses; a citizenry partaking of modernity and progress, under dictatorial control. An epiphenomenon of authoritarian capitalism. Did he know Shenzhen? I wished I was drunker, so that I could get mean. I asked what the seed round was, intending it as a joke.

  They were just bootstrapping, he said. Paying mostly out of pocket—the team was still small. They just needed to raise fifteen million dollars.

  * * *

  City-building was a natural interest for well-capitalized people whose employees could hardly afford to live in the Bay Area and whose corporate patrons and VC hypebeasts instilled the belief that startup founders could not just change the world, but should be the ones to save it. It was a testing ground for the efficacy of a first-principles approach to living.

  First-principles thinking: Aristotelian physics, but for the management-science set. Technologists broke down infrastructure and institutions, examined the parts, and redesigned systems their way. College dropouts re-architected the university, skinning it down to online trade schools. Venture capitalists unbundled the subprime mortgage crisis, funding startups offering home loans. Multiple founders raised money to build communal living spaces in neighborhoods where people were getting evicted for living in communal living spaces.

  There was a running joke that the tech industry was simply reinventing commodities and services that had long existed. This joke was disliked by many entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, though I thought they should be thankful for the diversion: it moved the conversation away from structural questions about why certain things, like mass transit, or housing, or urban development, had problems in the first place.

  On an aesthetic level, I didn’t trust the entrepreneurial class to build a metropolis where most people would want to live. Their impact on San Francisco was not especially inspiring, not that it was entirely their fault. The city was overflowing with new businesses giving new money the hard sell: a store full of minimalist tea kettles; a champagne bar se
rving caviar on shrimp chips; a members-only coworking clubhouse with boutique exercise classes in a eucalyptus-scented gym. A Ping-Pong club with truffle fries. A shop hawking pencil cases and bento boxes to digital nomads. Gentle-on-the-joints fitness studios: simulated cycling, simulated surfing.

  Sometimes, reasoning from first principles was a long and tedious process of returning to the original format. E-commerce sites that hadn’t already burned through their venture funding began opening brick-and-mortar flagships—in-person retail, the first-principles approach revealed, was a smart platform for consumer engagement. An online-only glasses retailer found that shoppers appreciated getting their eyes checked; a startup selling luxury stationary bicycles found that luxury cyclists appreciated cycling alongside other people. The mattress purveyors would open showrooms; a makeup startup would open testing counters. The online superstore would open bookstores, the shelves adorned with printed customer reviews and data-driven signage: BOOKS E-READERS FINISH IN 3 DAYS OR LESS. 4.8 STARS AND ABOVE.

  There was always something a little off about these spaces—something a little crooked. It was unsettling to find dust on the shelves; strange to see living plants. The stores shared a certain ephemerality, a certain sterility, a certain snap-to-grid style. They seemed to emerge overnight, anchors in physical space: white walls and rounded fonts and bleacher seating, matte simulacra of the world they had replaced.