2025-03-11 - Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener ========================================== A friend recommended this book, and i checked it out from the local library. During the time period this book is set in, i was enthusiastic about startup culture and startups. I deeply enjoyed this author's writing style. She calls herself a millennial but conveys a healthy dose of generation X skepticism. I can relate to her sense of being in the middle of things and yet still feeling like an outsider. What follows are excerpts and spoilers that i found interesting. Chapter 1 ========= Depending on whom you ask, it was either the apex, the inflection point, or the beginning of the end for Silicon Valley's startup scene--what cynics call a bubble, optimists called the future, and my future coworkers, high on the fumes of a world-historical potential, breathlessly called the ecosystem. A social network everyone said they hated but no one could stop logging in to went public at a valuation of one-hundred off billion dollars, it's grinning founder ringing the opening bell over video chat, a death knell for affordable rent in San Francisco. It was a year of new optimism: the optimism of no hurdles, no limits, no bad ideas. The optimism of capital, power, and opportunity. It was the dawn of the era of the unicorns: startups valued by their investors, at over a billion dollars. My freelance work, proofreading and copyediting manuscripts for a small press, was also waning in volume, because I had recently broken up with the editor who assigned it to me. The relationship had been stressful, but reliably consuming: the editor, several years my senior, had talked about marriage but wouldn't stop cheating. These infidelities were revealed after he borrowed my laptop for a weekend and returned it without logging out of his accounts, where I read a series of romantic and brooding private messages he exchanged with a voluptuous folk singer via the social network everyone hated. This year, I hated it extra. Chapter 2 ========= I joined the e-book startup at the beginning of 2013, after a series of ambiguous and casual interviews. For the first time in my career, I had some expertise. The men asked for my opinions--on the app's reading experience, on the quality of the inventory, on how best to ingratiate ourselves with online reading communities--and listened for the answers. Despite misunderstanding the technical infrastructure and having little insight into strategy, I felt useful. It was thrilling to watch the moving parts of a business come together; to feel that I could contribute. Later, once I better understood the industry-wide interest in promoting women in tech--if not in the ranks, then at least in corporate marketing materials--I would allow myself to consider that perhaps I was more important to the aesthetic than critical to the business. What I also did not understand at the time was that the founders had all hoped I would make my own job, without deliberate instruction. The mark of a hustler, a true entrepreneurial spirit, was creating the job that you wanted and making it look indispensable, even if it was institutionally unnecessary. This was an existential strategy for the tech industry itself, and it did not come naturally to me. "She's too interested in learning, not doing," the CEO typed once into the company chat room. This was an accident... I had always been interested in learning, and I had always been rewarded for it; learning was what I did best. I wasn't used to having the sort of professional license and latitude that the founders were given. I lacked their confidence, their entitlement. I did not know about startup maxims to experiment and "own" things. I had never heard the common tech incantation "Ask forgiveness, not permission." In an effort to self-educate, I read blog posts about the startup mentality and did my best to imitate it. After several long and heartfelt emails and another painful one-on-one huddle in the conference room, it was clear that there was no way I could stay. This was not the right moment in the company's journey, they said, for someone like me to get up to speed. The areas where I could add value would not be active for some time. Chapter 3 ========= There weren't any jobs, my friends said, unless you wanted to work for a tech company. It went without saying that none of them did. When I traveled to San Francisco in the spring, to interview for a customer-support position at a data analytics startup, I didn't mention it to any of my ex-Bay Area friends. I dreaded how they would react if they knew I was angling for a job in the tech industry, that I had even a shred of interest in joining the people on whom they blamed their displacement--the people who had ruined their fun. The interview had been arranged with the help of the e-book startup's CEO, who advise that big data was a hot space. I was not particularly excited about customer support, but it was an entry-level job that required no programming knowledge. As a sociology major with a background in literary fiction and three months of experience in snack procurement, I assumed that I was not in a position to be picky. The e-book startup's cofounders had been adamant that customer support was a temporary state. If I hustled, all three of them agreed, I would quickly find myself in a more interesting, autonomous, impressive role. [The company offered her the job.] The offer included medical and dental coverage, a four-thousand-dollar relocation stipend, and a starting salary of sixty-five thousand dollars a year. The manager informed me that the salary was above market and nonnegotiable. [A friend asked "What is that? Do you care about it? And customer support--aren't you worried it'll be soul ruining?"] I was worried about a lot of things... But I wasn't too worried about my soul. Out of self-protection, I stuck to the narrative that I was moving across the country just to try something new. It was easier, in any case, to fabricate a romantic narrative than admit that I was ambitious--that I wanted my life to pick up momentum, go faster. Chapter 4 ========= The solutions manager assigned me an onboarding buddy, Noah, a curly-haired twenty-six-year-old with a forearm tattoo in Sanskrit and a wardrobe of workman's jackets and soft fleeces. Noah was warm and loquacious, animated, handsome. He struck me as the kind of person who would invite women over to get stoned and look at art books and listen to Brian Eno, and then actually spend the night doing that. I had gone to college with men like this: men who would comfortably sit on the floor with their backs against the bed, men who self-identified as feminists and would never make the first move. I could immediately picture him making a seitan stir-fry, suggesting a hike in the rain. Showing up in an emergency and thinking he knew exactly what to do. Noah spoke in absolutes and in the language of psychoanalysis, offering definitive narratives for everyone, everything. Chapter 5 ========= The city's passive-aggressive, progressive, permissive politics tended to rankle transplants, but tech's self-appointed representatives weren't for everyone, either. Every three months a different engineer or aspiring entrepreneur, new to the city, would post a screed on a blogging platform with no revenue model. He would excoriate the poor for clinging to rent control and driving up condo prices, or excoriate the tent cities by the freeway for being an eyesore. He would suggest monetizing homeless people by turning them into Wi-Fi hotspots. He would lambaste the weak local sports teams, the abundance of bicyclists, the fog. "Like a woman who is constantly PMSing," a twenty-three-year-old founder of a crowdfunding platform wrote about the climate. The extension of casual misogyny to weather was creative, but the digital ambassadors didn't seem to like actual women, either: they whined that the women in San Francisco were fives, not tens, and whined that there weren't enough of them. Homeless encampments sprouted in the shadows of luxury developments. This concentration of public pain was new to me, unsettling. I had never seen such a shameful juxtaposition of blatant suffering and affluent idealism. It was a well-publicized disparity, but one I had underestimated. As a New Yorker, I had thought I was prepared. I thought I'd seen it all. I felt humbled and naïve--and guilty, all the time. Chapter 6 ========= As part of the onboarding process, the operations manager set me up on lunch dates with coworkers from across the company. The startup hosted a monthly salon for the data curious, a catered happy hour with presentations from product managers and engineers, sourced from our customer list... The men roamed in clusters, like college freshmen during orientation week. ... There was not a coursing undercurrent of peculiar sexual energy, or any sexual energy at all; everything was straightforward, up front. The attendees were clear about what they wanted, which was for their companies to grow. "I want you to eventually lead Support," the CEO aid, leaning in. "We need more women in leadership roles." I basked in his attention. ... I didn't think to mention that if he wanted more women in leadership roles, perhaps we should start by hiring more women. I didn't note that even if we did hire more women, there were elements of our office culture that women might find uncomfortable. Instead, I told him that I would do whatever he needed. Chapter 7 ========= Every Tuesday, at exactly noon, over a hundred synchronized sirens wailed across San Francisco, a test of the city's emergency warning system. The sirens also signaled, at the analytics startup, that it was time for our weekly all-hands. Down for the Cause: the phrase was in our job listings and our internal communications. It meant putting the company first, and it was the highest form of praise. The holy grail was being thanked by the CEO in person--or, better yet, in the company chat room--for being DFTC. For years, the catchphrase had been "So easy, your mother could use it," but this had grown uncouth and politically incorrect, to be used only in meetings where women weren't present, of which there were plenty. One evening, over dinner, the CEO encouraged me to expand my scope: learn how to code, start doing work outside of my job description. "Make it so that they'll have no option but to promote you," he advised. Who was "they," I wondered--wasn't "they" him? He told me he would personally promote me to solutions architect if I could build a networked, two-player game of checkers. I was not excited to be in control of the machine. I did not achieve flow. There was nothing I needed or desired from software. There was nothing I wanted to hack or build. I didn't need to outsource another part of my life to an app, and I never played checkers. The part of my brain that took some pleasure in coding also thrived on obsessive-compulsive behavior and perfectionism. It wasn't the part of my brain that I wanted to nurture. Chapter 8 ========= Besides, I had never lived alone before, and now had 275 square feet to myself. It felt like total privacy. The door locked in four places. The neighborhood had incubated the sixties counterculture and nearly fifty years later nobody seemed willing to give that identity up. Visitors from all over the world arrived as if on a pilgrimage, looking for something that may never have existed. My single coworkers were all on multiple dating apps, and encouraged me to follow suit. But I found myself newly cautious, leery of giving away too much intimate data. ... I never knew with whom I was sharing my information. Chapter 9 ========= In midsummer, news broke that a National Security Agency contractor had leaked classified information about the US government's enormous, tentacled surveillance programs. The part of the story that captured my attention was a minor detail, practically a sidebar. It was revealed that lower-level employees at the NSA, including contractors, had access to the same databases and queries as their high-level superiors. Agents spied on their family members and love interests, nemeses and friends. It was by all accounts, a nightmare scenario. But it wasn't that hard to imagine. At the analytics startup, we never once talked about the whistleblower, not even during happy hour. ... We didn't think of ourselves as participating in the surveillance economy. We weren't thinking about our role in facilitating and normalizing the creation of unregulated, privately held databases on human behavior. ... Besides, if we didn't do it, someone else would. The sole moral quandary in our space that we acknowledged outright was the question of whether or not to sell data to advertisers. That was something we did not do, and we were righteous about it. * * * The CEO and solutions manager agreed we needed more women on Support, but they didn't hire any. Instead, we built out a small cadre of overqualified millennial men fleeing law, finance, education, and dorm-room entrepreneurship. * * * It didn't take long to see that in Silicon Valley, non-engineers were pressed to prove their value. * * * One morning, a meeting was dropped mysteriously onto our calendars. At the designated time, we shuffled into a conference room, shrugging. On the other side of the table, the solutions manager paced back and forth, but he was smiling. He asked us to write down the names of the five smartest people we knew, and my coworkers dutifully obliged. Smart in exactly what way, I wondered, capping and uncapping my pen. I wrote five names down: a sculptor, a writer, a physicist, two graduate students. I looked at the list and thought about how much I missed them, how bad I'd been at returning phone calls and emails. "Okay," the solutions manager said. "Now tell me, why don't they work here?" Why didn't my smartest friends work there? It was hard to confront, but not because it was complicated. My friends wouldn't have found the work fulfilling or meaningful. They weren't interested in other businesses' business metrics. They didn't care for tech and, for the most part, they weren't motivated by money, not yet. Those who were motivated by money could make more of it doing something else: finance, medicine, law, consulting. They already did. Startup culture was not for them. They would have taken one look at the company website and balked. Chapter 11 ========== 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. 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. Chapter 13 ========== Being the only woman on a nontechnical team, providing customer support to software developers, was like immersion therapy for internalized misogyny. I liked men--I had a brother. I had a boyfriend. But men were everywhere: the customers, my teammates, my boss, his boss. I was always fixing things for them, tiptoeing round their vanities, cheering them up. Affirming, dodging, confiding, collaborating. Advocating for their career advancement; ordering them pizza. My job had placed me, a self-identified feminist, in a position of ceaseless professionalized deference to the male ego. From time to time, the women in the office would go out to a nearby wine bar with fake fireplaces and plates of sweating charcuterie, and try to drink it out. I enjoyed these outings, even if they bore the metallic taste of duty--less a support network than a mutual acknowledgment. I stopped wearing dresses, to stanch a recruiter's stream of strange and unsettling compliments about my legs, which he spoke about as if I were a piece of furniture. Sexism, misogyny, and objectification did not define the workplace--but they were everywhere. Like wallpaper, like air. The Account Management team brought on a man who spoke in inscrutable jargon and maintained a robust fleet of social media accounts; he had thousands of followers, and behaved as if he were an influencer. He was constantly changing his job title on a web site where people voluntarily posted their own résumés, giving himself promotions to positions that did not exist. The influencer brought a scooter into the office and rolled around barking into a wireless headset about growth hacking: "value prop, first-mover advantage, proactive technology, parallelization. Leading-edge solutions. Holy grail." One afternoon, he rolled up to my desk. "I love dating Jewish women," he said. "You're so sensual." I brought the comment up to the solutions manager during one of our perambulating one-on-one check-ins. I wasn't trying to get anyone in trouble, I said, as we walked past a sandwich shop effusing artificial bread scent, and the comment was not in and of itself so offensive--but I had to think about the influencer's sexual proclivities in the middle of my workday, and I wanted not to do that. The solutions manager seemed embarrassed. "I'm sorry that happened," he said, staring at the sidewalk. "But you know him. That's just who he is." Chapter 14 ========== [The author introduces the idea of the annual company ski trip in Tahoe.] I also resented that it seemed as if we had no choice: it was not DFTC to skip out on the off-site. This made it feel like mandatory vacation, mandatory fun. The startup had booked a row of condominiums at a resort in South Tahoe, up against the lake. The housing groups had been preassigned, without employee consultation. There was one person I hoped not to bunk with: several weeks prior, I had split a cab with one of the men from the Solutions team, en route to our mutual neighborhood after a late night spent drinking at work. During the ride, his hand had slipped up the back of my shirt, and, when I shoved it away, down the waistband of my pants. I kept the conversation going, pushing his hands away, sliding toward the window. Chapter 15 ========== "If the reports are accurate, the veil between ad tech and state surveillance is very thin." * * * "The worst part," Parker said, "is that the technology is getting worse every day. It's getting less secure, less autonomous, more centralized, more surveilled. Every single tech company is pushing on one of those axes, in the wrong direction." Chapter 16 ========== The startup was moving into the enterprise. We were selling to major corporations in and outside of the tech sector. We were selling to the United States government. We were becoming accountable. The company was growing. As early employees, we were dangerous. We had experienced an early, more autonomous, unsustainable iteration of the company. We had known it before there were rules. We knew too much about how things worked, and harbored nostalgia and affection for the way things were. We didn't want to outgrow the company, but the company was outgrowing 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 told him I was down--of course I was down. 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." 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. Chapter 17 ========== 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 woman that added unsolicited texture to the workplace. 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. 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. Our customers. My inbox and personal voice mail were full of demands from entitled, stubborn unknown men. I thought of all the times over the past year that I had been underestimated, condescended to, dismissed. * * * 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. I didn't know that customer success managers at other companies were usually young women who somehow didn't look dowdy in floral prints and never left the house with wet hair, whose socks always matched, who didn't make too many jokes, who always knew the answers. ... Women to whom saying no was impossible. It was easy to say no to me. I was always picking lint off my own chest, trying to skate by on good humor. When I met with customers, I acted like I was cosplaying a 1980s business manager. Chapter 18 ========== There was, of course, a red flag. That spring, the startup had been implicated in a highly publicized gender discrimination scandal. The first woman on the engineering team--a developer and designer, a woman of color, and an advocate for diversity in tech--had posted a series of grievances to the microblogging platform. The startup, she claimed, was a boys' club, a sexist institution, down to the core: colleagues condescended to her, reverted and erased her code, and created a hostile work environment. She described a company culture where women were disrespected and intimidated. The developer's posts went viral: The story wound its way up into the national media. The startup conducted an investigation. An implicated founder stepped down, and another moved to France. All of this made me leery, but I also wondered, privately, if there might be some benefit to joining an organization immediately after this sort of blowup. * * * [The author interviewed and then received an offer.] "We're expecting big things from you, ourselves, and for the company," read the offer letter, with condescension I found only vaguely objectionable. "You should be justifiably proud." I was, and I wasn't. Mostly, I was burned out. What I wanted in a workplace was simple. I wanted to trust my manager. To receive fair and equal compensation. To not feel weirdly bullied by a twenty-five-year-old. To put some faith in a system--any system would do--for accountability. To take it all much less personally, and not to get too close. Chapter 21 ========== The engineers all read a heavily moderated message board, a news aggregator and discussion site run by the seed accelerator in Mountain View. The message board was frequented by entrepreneurs, tech workers, computer science majors, libertarians, and the people who lived to fight with them. People whose default conversational mode was debate. Mostly men. Men on both sides of the seawall; men all the way down. It wasn't for me, but I read it anyway. It struck me as the raw male id of the industry, a Greek chorus of the perpetually online. * * * I flew to Phoenix for an annual conference of women in computing. Everyone I knew in tech had a story, first or secondhand. That week, I heard new ones: the woman who had been offered an engineering job, only to see the offer revoked when she tried to negotiate a higher salary; the woman who had been told, to her face, that she was not a culture fit. The woman demoted after maternity leave. The woman who had been raped by a "10X" engineer, then pushed out of the company after reporting to HR. The woman who had been slipped GHB by a friend of her CEO. We had all been told, at some point or another, that diversity initiatives were discriminatory against white men; that there were more men in engineering because men were innately more talented. Women kept personal incident logs. They kept spreadsheets. They kept tabs. Some were beginning to step forward and speak about their experiences openly. It felt like the start of a sea of change. Not everyone was excited by the public conversation. During the conference's keynote speech, the CEO of a highly litigious Seattle-based software conglomerate encouraged women to refrain from asking for raises. "It's not really about asking for the raise, but knowing and having faith that the system will give you the right raises as you go along," he said. "That might be one of the additional superpowers that, quite frankly, women who don't ask for raises have." Better, he offered, to trust karma. * * * To my knowledge, our company had just two black employees. Chapter 27 ========== 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." ... 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. 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 partly 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. 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 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. Chapter 28 ========== At work, corners of the open-source platform were growing increasingly vicious and bizarre. 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 had. * * * 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 this 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." Chapter 29 ========== 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. * * * 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. What I didn't realize was that technologists; excitement about urbanism wasn't just an enthusiasm for cities, or for building large-scale systems, though these interests were sincere. It was an introductory exercise, a sandbox, a gateway: phase one of settling into newfound political power. Chapter 30 ========== The venture capitalists were discussing a universal basic income, and I couldn't look away. They were concerned about the unlocked economic potential of the urban poor. ... They wanted to see automation and artificial intelligence jump-start a renaissance: the machines would do the work so the rest of us, rendered useless, could focus on our art. I'd believe in an AI renaissance as soon as venture capitalists started enrolling in pottery classes; as soon as they were automated out of a job. * * * The intellectual culture of Silicon Valley was internet culture: thought-leadership, thought experiments. Message-board intellectualism. But rationalism could also be a mode of historical disengagement that ignored or absolved massive power imbalances. A popular rationality podcast covered topics such as free will and moral responsibility; cognitive bias; the ethics of vote trading. When the podcast did an episode with an evolutionary psychologist who identified as a transhumanist, bivalvegan classical liberal, she and the host discussed designer babies optimized for attractiveness without once bringing up race or the history of eugenics. Arguing fervently about a world that was not actually the world struck me as vaguely immoral. At best, it was suspiciously flattering to power. I found the subculture astonishing, not least because it flourished among grown adults. * * * The rationalist swept her hair behind one ear. Contrarianism was underrated, she said. The intellectual contributions were, on net, positive. It was difficult to judge, in the present moment, which ideas would hold water; thus, better to err n the side of more debate, rather than less. "As an example, think of the abolitionists," she said. I asked what the abolitionists had to do with libertarian contrarianism. "Well," she said, "sometimes minority opinions lead to positive and widespread adoption, and are good." As a neutral statement, this was hard to disagree with. Some minority opinions did lead to positive change. I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt. But we weren't talking about a neutral statement. We were talking about history. I... ventured that the abolition of slavery was perhaps not a minority position. Slaves themselves were surely abolitionists, I said. Just because no one was polling them didn't mean they did not exist. I was trying to be lighthearted. I was trying to be kind. I was trying not to embarrass both of us, though that ship might already have sailed. The rationalist turned to look wistfully at the other partygoers, now gathered in the living room and happily instructing a virtual-assistant speaker to play workout music. She sighed. "Okay," she said. "But, for the sake of argument, what if we limit our sample to white people?" Chapter 33 ========== When it started to look like perhaps we were wrong--perhaps the United States presidency might actually go to a realestate developer who had once played the part of a successful businessman on reality television--everyone came up with a last-ditch, Hail Mary pass at civic participation. In the grand tradition of affluent white American living in coastal cities in times of political crisis and social upheaval, I had turned inward. author: Wiener, Anna, 1987- detail: tags: biography,book,non-fiction title: Uncanny Valley Tags ==== biography book non-fiction