Searching for Stories, Seeing the System: Anna Wiener's "Uncanny Valley"
There’s a way of feeling fully and suddenly in your body, like when you’re standing in the bathroom line at a bar and you can trace the exact way the waist of your jeans pinches your hips and your stomach bends the front of your shirt forward, even without looking at yourself. Or when you sit up in bed with your laptop, Googling that strange pain in your neck, and it feels sharper and hotter than ever as the minutes tick by. Or the way you know precisely when you’ve sweat completely through your interview blazer. Anna Wiener grounds her new memoir Uncanny Valley in such acutely embodied observations, feeling for the physical in the disembodied life of working for the internet. She traces a winding path through the hazy dream world of Silicon Valley in the early 2010s, not as a cynical investigator but as a willing, if bemused, participant.
Cover, “Uncanny Valley, a Memoir” by Anna Wiener, from Macmillan. Fair use.
Uncanny Valley is in many respects the kind of withering critique of 21st century tech culture that I love to read and to write. Wiener is unsparing in her disappointment with the way tech has mismanaged the future to which it feels wholly entitled. But it’s also a painfully personal account of the millennial experience and the ways that the lives of people in my generation have been profoundly reshaped by technology.
In her mid-twenties, Wiener left her work as a publishing assistant to take a job at an e-book reader startup in New York. This turned into a short-lived crash course in tech startups that led her to San Francisco, where she worked for a data analytics company and later an open source platform for software developers. Wiener relays her memories of that time with a dream-like quality, drifting from surreal work chat backlogs and house parties she observed at a dissociative distance, through lavish corporate retreats, and into the back seat of cab where a coworker once groped her. In describing how she decided to leave the data analytics startup for something new, Wiener acknowledges a fundamental and familiar bind for women in male-dominated workplaces. “I didn’t have horror stories yet,” she writes. “Compared to other women I’d met, I had it good. But the bar was so, so low.”
Uncanny Valley, however, isn’t a horror story, nor is it a polemic about women in tech. Wiener uses moments of physicality and texture to relate something subtler about the experience of moving a gendered body through an ‘ecosystem’ of men. The seamless slipstream of online life that the Valley envisioned is still, stubbornly, an embodied one. Wiener often feels her clothing mismatched to an occasion, as in the case of a “publishing-era silk blouse” worn uncomfortably to a warehouse happy hour of roboticists or a too-tight dress for a put-together roommate’s birthday party. Throughout, Wiener remembers her body so often as something ill-suited to a situation, something in the way, a surprise. She compares her work answering an endlessly refilling queue of support tickets to the hands-on robotics work of a hardware engineer she began dating: “He didn’t stand up at the end of the day and think, as I did: Oh, right—a body.”
The main narrative ends on the night of the 2016 presidential election, giving Wiener a frame through which to reflect on all that she saw and did in her time in the Valley and to spin out the consequences. The data analytics startup, which had looked like a scrappy bunch of ambitious entrepreneurs with a great product from the inside, started to look more and more like malicious surveillance. At the open source platform, Wiener and her team sifted through complaints about offensive and illegal material being hosted on the platform; she recalls writing polite emails asking users to remove swastikas from their profile pictures.
Her conclusions are nothing we don’t already know about these platforms in particular, about tech in general, or about the future they built for us. What is devastating about this book is Wiener’s own ambitions for herself; her ability to want the same things that tech seems to think it deserves; and the persistent burning way she “envied their sense of entitlement to the future” and set out to claim it as her own. Wiener knows that she didn’t fail—the $200,000 stock option she left the Valley with is a windfall for any average person. But she mourns the feeling that it all could have been hers: the high that tech types are always chasing, being on the bleeding edge, and living and making the future as it happens. Having had a taste, who wouldn’t?
But Wiener also understands that what she felt in the Valley, all the promise and possibility of tech and transformation and disruption, was never really meant for her. Her most painful conclusions are about how inessential her perspective ultimately was to the ecosystem. Near the end of the book she writes about finally coming to understand that the things she was searching for in this work—”the emotional narrative, the psychological explanation, the personal history”—weren’t present because of some deprivation or lack, but because the men of the ecosystem simply didn’t need them. Wiener invokes her own experience of her body and her awareness of being out of place to set off a deeper emotional contrast between her own desires for the shape of her life and that which the Uncanny Valley offered to its denizens. “The young men of Silicon Valley were doing fine,” she writes. “The had inexorable faith in their own ideas and their own potential. They were ecstatic about the future. They had power, wealth, and control. The person yearning was me.”
Image Credit: One Night in San Francisco by Thomas Hawk on Flickr | CC BY NC-2.0
