Uncanny Valley

 From Wikipedia, source of all knowledge: 

“In aesthetics, the uncanny valley is a hypothesized relationship between the degree of an object's resemblance to a human being and the emotional response to such an object.”

File that little definition under “I,” for “I learn something new every day.” I just finished reading Uncanny Valley, Anna Wiener’s memoir of her time working for tech start-ups in Silicon Valley. I stumbled across the definition of an uncanny valley, a thing that I hadn’t previously known existed, when I Googled the book title, because I couldn’t remember the author’s first name. 

*****

The young are different from you and me. Well, they’re different from me, anyway; and the meaning of “uncanny valley” (a very apt title, now that I know what the term means) is not the only thing I learned while reading this very good book. Uncanny Valley is a memoir, about a life that is very particularly the life of a young person in the early 21st century, and so it is chock-full of references to things and people and cultural trends that I didn’t know about. Things like third-wave coffee shops (hint: not Starbucks!) and black box theaters and dakimakura pillows. I was relieved to note that even the author had had to look that last one up when she first heard about it. (And it was weird, but at least it wasn’t please God return-me-to-the-bliss-of-ignorance, sight-seen-that-now-cannot-be-unseen weird, because I’ve been on the wrong end of that kind of Google search more than once, and I still have the scars). 

*****

“What is your North Star metric?” Well, mine is to live out an entire business day without hearing a single reference to a metric, direct or indirect (meaning no dashboards, no visualizations, no X or Y axes…) but that’s neither here nor there. When Weiner was a customer support specialist for the analytics start-up, this is the question that she asked her customers, because it was the question that she thought they wanted to hear; the question that made her sound like she understood their business and the technology that would illuminate its strengths and weaknesses. “I acted like I was cosplaying a 1980s business manager,” she writes, mocking her own desire to please and impress. At least I didn’t have to look up cosplay. This time. 

*****

In Silicon Valley, as in many other tech-focused environments, the non-technical person, the person who does everything but the coding, is a second-class citizen. These are the people who take care of the customers and the employees, pay the bills, write the ad copy and manage the social media, clean the floors, stock the kitchens with expensive snacks and generally keep the whole operation running so that the programmers can plug into their headsets, pull up the hoods of their hoodies, and write the code. As a non-technical person who has worked in tech environments for a long time, I have always wondered: Who decides these things? Who decided that a person who can code but who has no emotional intelligence should make three times as much money as a person who can’t code but who can read the room and then write about it? I tell you who decides: Men, that’s who. Men designed the system in which traditionally male roles are valued--and paid--more highly than traditionally female roles. 

This is not really the entire point of Uncanny Valley, though it does examine the subject of inequality and sexism in Big Tech. And although it’s a memoir, it’s not solely personal, either. It’s a micro and macro hybrid; the micro of Anna Weiner’s personal experience as a non-technical female person in a technical world and the macro of why somehow, for some odd reason, the system has decided that these non-technical people are not important, that their skills are not valuable. And of course, these non-technical people, the second-class citizens who earn less money and don’t get stock options, and are often employed as “contractors'' through third-party agencies that don’t provide benefits, are overwhelmingly women and people of color. 

But there’s more to it than that, too. There are two levels of macro in Uncanny Valley, and sexism and classism and the tyranny of “the meritocracy” is the lower of the two, the higher being the peril of this brave new world in which a handful of computer scientists and programmers in a handful of technical once-startup companies pretty much run the world. And they’re just getting started.

*****

Weiner writes about the pervasiveness of ad tech and the creepy Google search results that get up in your business and follow you around, pushing stories about whatever you happen to be reading or streaming or listening to into your feed; and magically serving ads for products that you’ve searched for in the past, each one becoming ever more specific and ever more targeted until you’re sure that a huge evil silicon chip is reading your mind. And it is. Who doesn’t have a story about Google knowing far too much about what we’re reading, or searching, or saying, or even thinking? Here’s one: Two years ago, when parties still existed, we went to our kids’ swim team’s annual parents party, which was 80s-themed. The younger parents barely remembered the 80s, but they were very enthusiastic about the theme. One mom was wearing a Swatch, complete with a Swatch Guard, a thing that I hadn’t seen or heard about since 1987 or so. I complimented her on her outfit and her attention to detail.

Yes, you know what happened next. For a week, my news and social media feeds were filled with Swatch ads and stories. I never once entered the word “Swatch” into a search field. I didn’t even have my phone in my hand when I was talking to the Swatch lady. But somehow, some way, Google heard me, and thought that I wanted to buy a Swatch, and helpfully offered me the opportunity to do that. 

Wait a minute. I’m writing this in Google Docs. So let’s see what happens. Let’s see if Google Docs tells Google’s search algorithms “Hey! She’s at it again! She really wants to buy a Swatch! Send her a coupon! Insert a Swatch story into her Instagram feed! 

I’ll report back on this. 

*****

As Weiner notes, not only does Big Tech read our minds, it decides what we should say, and when, and to whom, and how. This is a big deal right now, of course, with conservatives all over the country crying crocodile tears about “cancel culture” and “silencing of conservative voices.” Boo hoo. Every time I hear a Trump supporter cry about cancel culture, I think of Colin Kaepernick, rolling his eyes and thinking “yeah, cancel culture--it’s the worst.” 

In all seriousness, though, I agree with them to a certain extent, as much as I hate to admit it or to side with Trump worshippers in anything. Even though our current dilemma, in which large tech corporations have nearly unlimited power, is largely the fault of conservatives who spent the last 70 years or so resisting every attempt to control corporations and limit their influence, I still don’t want a tiny handful of overpaid, over-privileged, self-important software engineers determining the boundaries of free speech in the United States, and then using their social media networks and their collaboration platforms to enforce those boundaries. But that’s where we are right now. Now that immense corporate power is finally biting them in the ass, maybe conservative lawmakers,will come to the realization that it’s always a bad thing to allow a tiny group of people to amass nearly unlimited wealth and power. 

On the subject of Big Tech deciding who gets to speak and what they get to say, Weiner discusses her experience moderating content and chats for the open-source startup (it’s GitHub), writing “No one was equipped to adjudicate speech for the millions of people spending their lives online.” No kidding. That’s a big decision to make. It’s a big deal to censor another person. And as much as I think that Donald Trump deserved to be kicked off Twitter and Facebook and all of the rest of them, there’s a counterproductive downside, too. Weiner agrees. Commenting on tech executives’ tendency to spill their guts on the Internet and whether they might be better advised to just put down the phone and stay quiet for a bit, she touches on the question that many people have asked about Donald Trump. Is it maybe better to allow these guys to keep tweeting and posting and sharing all of their brilliant thoughts? At least then we know what they’re up to. 

*****

Uncanny Valley is a very good book that works as both a work-focused personal memoir and social criticism. Anna Weiner has something to say, and she’s a really good writer. I’m not sure why she insisted on maintaining the vague, no-names-please tone, when even a middle-aged layperson like myself had no trouble identifying the less-well-known companies and people with just a quick Google search. In one case, I didn’t even need to Google first--I guessed, and I Googled to confirm that my guess was correct. It’s even sillier when she writes about the very well-known firms, like the “search engine giant” (Google), or the social network that everyone hated (Facebook--and I do hate Facebook!), or the highly litigious Seattle-based software conglomerate (Microsoft). A stylistic choice, I suppose. 

Last year, I read Studs Terkel’s Working, a book of short essays about the lives of working people in mid-20th century America. Those people could not have imagined the world of work today. But one thing that hasn’t changed is that people want something more from their work than just a paycheck. “I would long for the sense of ownership and belonging, the easy identity, the all-consuming feeling of affiliation. And then I would remind myself: There but for the grace of God go I.” Weiner understands that it is a natural human tendency to look for connection, but she also knows that it’s wrong and even dangerous to rely solely on work for meaning in life. She understands that it’s far too easy to get in too deep, to become too devoted to an undeserving idea or institution or person. 

So where do you draw the line? If you are dedicated to your work, do you then run the risk of becoming a true believer in something that isn’t true? On the other hand, if you tell yourself that work is only work, that you’ll do only what’s necessary and required to earn your paycheck, do you then run the risk of becoming an automaton, and of missing the chance to serve and connect with others through work? How do you strike a balance between finding meaning in your work, and working only to make a living? 

Weiner answered that question for herself by leaving the tech industry rather than continue to enable and participate in a system that she knew to be morally suspect on many levels. Of course, thanks to an employee stock option windfall (small by comparison to other employees of the same start-up, she assures us) and immense talent as a writer, she had the option to leave the industry and start over. People who don’t have those fallbacks, and who have families to support, can’t walk away so easily. 

*****

If there’s one final takeaway from Uncanny Valley, it’s that Big Tech is both completely indispensable and completely unsustainable. With it, the center cannot hold; without it, things will fall apart. And that is the one and only time you’ll ever see me paraphrase Yeats. 

*****

Right now, I’m reading Let Me Tell You What I Mean, the new book of until-now unpublished Joan Didion essays. In “Why I Write,” Joan Didion writes (of course) about why she writes, and she claims that it’s partly because she doesn’t know how to think; not in abstracts, anyway. 

Part of me scoffs at this as utter ridiculousness because I’ve read enough Joan Didion to know that she knows how to think in concretes and abstracts and everything in between. But part of me knows exactly what she means, because I’m not an abstract thinker, either. I am also not typically a big picture thinker. I don’t always see the whole, only the sum of the parts. But even a vague and fuzzy thinker can see that the tech industry’s influence has grown exponentially in just the last few years; and that most of us are going to be affected by this in pretty significant ways. And most of those ways are not good. More of us will be driven into the so-called “gig economy,” scratching out a hand-to-mouth living so that the tech companies that employ us as contractors and sub-contractors and sub-sub-contractors, won’t have to provide benefits or job security or any of the other things that we have always associated with the employer-to-employee relationship. More of us will be driven to political or religious extremism, radicalized by targeted news and social media content. More of us will have a hard time distinguishing between fact and fiction. 

That’s the concrete part. The abstract is what we’re supposed to do about this. And I have no idea. 

*****

Uncanny Valley asks very big questions about important things: Work and its role in our lives, truth and falsehood, wealth and poverty, men and women, fairness and free speech, and more. That’s a lot for one relatively short book, isn’t it?