The Silicon Guide to The Purpose-Driven Life: On Anna Wiener’s “Uncanny Valley”
Anna Wiener | Uncanny Valley: A Memoir | Macmillan | 2020 | 228 Pages
We probably have some idea of what it feels like to be Anna Wiener, recently emerged from a liberal arts program, a couple of years left on our parents’ insurance, eager and hopeful and anxious and scared. When we first meet Anna in her memoir about living and working in Silicon Valley, she’s a twenty-five-year-old NYC urbanite, working in the publishing world: “sitting at a narrow desk outside my boss’ office, tracking the agency’s expenses and trying to determine my value using my annual salary - increased, the previous winter, from twenty-nine thousand to thirty...”
Wiener tells us that “every month since graduation was accounted for on my resume.” And yet, filling the time isn’t exactly the same as living with purpose. Wiener describes her desires as “generic”—which is not to say trivial. “I wanted to find my place in the world, and be independent, useful, and good. I wanted to make money, because I wanted to feel affirmed, confident, and valued. I wanted to be taken seriously. Mostly, I didn’t want anyone to worry about me.” These are solid desires, but too vague to provide any force. And so she “created and abandoned private, aspirational blogs with names like A Meaningful Life, in the vain hope that they might push me closer to leading one.” Speaking for a generation, Wiener writes: “we had taste and integrity. We were nervous, and very broke.”
In the midst of this precarious living (30K in NYC is... not a lot), and with an eye toward California, Wiener was “worried about a lot of things [...] loneliness, failure, earthquakes. But I wasn’t too worried about my soul.” (A liberal arts grad not worried about her soul?) Besides, Wiener thinks, it’s not like she’ll be working in tech forever: “I would reinvent myself professionally, I figured, and return to New York with a midlevel managerial title.”
Also: there’s so much money to be made in the Valley...
A Tale of Two Cities
Wiener’s memoir is largely the story of places: old places with history, local character, and affordable housing for families, and the new, gentrified places that all look the same, and are populated by the same young people, places that Wiener calls “snap-to-grid.” After graduating into a recession, most of Wiener’s college friends headed to New York or Boston for unpaid internships. But a brave few sought a less corporate life out west.
Initially, the move West opened up pathways for self-actualization: art and weed and surfing. But Weiner grimly notes that “this utopia was short-lived.” Soon enough, rents spiked, art galleries closed, and bars were overrun with “men in their twenties wearing corporate-branded T-shirts [...] men who said ‘K’ instead of ‘thousand.’” Whereas once you could make a living as “artists and writers working as loosely credentialed yoga instructors or grocery store cashiers,” the jobs were all dried up now, “unless you wanted to work for a tech company.” By the time Wiener herself moves to California, everyone she knew had left, seeking new gentrifying cities like New Orleans.
As is typically the case with gentrifying places, the influx of new money in San Francisco led to widespread displacement and a rise in homelessness. Increasingly, the income disparities and corresponding living situations grew stark. In a particularly jarring paragraph, Wiener describes streetside portable toilets, locked at night. These toilets were not for the growing homeless population, Wiener tells us, but rather “for the construction crews that arrived every morning to build out junior one-bedrooms.” She confesses that “this concentration of public pain was new to me, unsettling. I had never seen such a shameful juxtaposition of blatant suffering and affluent idealism.”
Certainly, it wasn’t just San Francisco that changed. Back in New York, things were different too. Wiener observes: “the neighborhoods I had known as a child were now dotted with restaurants playing overdetermined playlists.” She adds that “the city was beginning to look like a generic idea, perhaps sprung from the mind of a real estate developer, of what a wealthy metropolis should be.”
Work and Life in The Valley
Wiener began her work in the Valley working for an ebook startup, before moving to a better job at an ad-tech startup (before long, earning three times what she made in NYC.) In both jobs, her work was support and service for the coders and the customers, but even in those roles, she felt the magic of Big Data. “The first time I looked at a block of code and understood what was happening, I felt like nothing less than a genius.” She elaborates: “It did not take long for me to understand the fetish for big data. Data sets were mesmerizing: digital streams of human behavior, answers to questions I didn’t know I had.”
In the earliest days of her work in Big Data, Wiener was blissfully unaware of its ethical conundrums. Though of course there were occasional indicators. For example, after the infamous NSA leak: “don’t forget, we’re on the right side of things,’ the solutions manager would say, smiling, ‘We’re the good guys.’” Later, a colleague pointed out that “the veil between ad tech and state surveillance is very thin.” And soon enough, the social problems began to surface—hate speech, cyberbullying, fake news, pizzagate. Wiener notes that “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.”
To be fair, these landmines might have been more apparent to her industry if it wasn’t populated and run almost exclusively by young white men, an observation Wiener makes periodically. But even that structural imbalance is something that Wiener is initially unaware of, mostly because of the widespread illusion of meritocracy — the comforting idea that everyone was in their respective positions because they had earned them because they were simply that competent. Wiener notes that meritocracy was “the operating philosophy for companies that flirted with administering IQ tests to prospective and existing employees.” And Wiener herself had received that first job offer after taking a portion of the LSAT as part of her interview process.
As you might imagine, a corporate culture dominated by young men is not ideal. Wiener tells us that, “I wanted the men on my team to think I was smart and in control, and to never imagine me naked, I wanted them to see me as an equal.” Sexual harassment aside, even monetary equality turned out to be a tough ask: at a conference for women in tech, Wiener was told that “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...the best thing you can do is excel.” And so when Wiener asks for a raise as compensation for the extra work she is required to do, her request is denied: “‘You’re doing this because you care,’ the solutions manager said - and I must have cared, because I kept doing it.”
Gender trouble asserted itself on the customer side of things too. “What gets measured gets managed,” Wiener would tell her (mostly male) customers, “quoting a management guru whose writing I had never read.” Wiener memorably calls this “Aristotelian physics, but for the management-science set.” And of course, it did feel great helping solve problems for her (mostly male) customers, or rather, it felt great solving problems, full-stop. Wiener reflects that “some days, helping men solve problems they had created for themselves, I felt like a piece of software myself, a bot: instead of being an artificial intelligence, I was an intelligent artifice, an empathetic text snippet or warm voice, giving instructions, listening comfortingly.” I believe they call that emotional labor, and I suppose it goes with the territory when you’re working with “boys who were mathematically brilliant and slightly socially awkward, encouraged but underestimated, and in almost every case, subject to an unbelievable amount of pressure.”
While Wiener does not detail what leads her to therapy, I can’t help but speculate that at least some of it connects to that bit about concern for the soul: maximizing efficiency and only valuing what can be quantified is not exactly conducive to flourishing. (The rampant sexism probably didn’t help either.) I wonder how much of the problem is also more pernicious: she had described herself as feeling like a bot, an artifice, and what if the industry itself pushes toward that outcome? Wiener reflects that “working in tech had provided an escape from the side of my personality that was emotional, impractical, ambivalent, and inconvenient - the part of me that wanted to know everyone’s feelings, that wanted to be moved, that had no apparent market value.” She observes that “eventually, I would acknowledge that these qualities weren’t actually less valuable..than what the founders and technologists prioritized.”
And beyond the gaslighting of emotions, intuition, ways of knowing and valuing that cannot be quantified or turned into an algorithm, what if Silicon Valley is also a place of profound disembodiment?
Bodies, Labor, Alienation
One of the themes in Wiener’s memoir, one of the most significant is the abstraction of labor, and the ways in which experiencing the pain of that abstraction leads to lifestyle hacks designed to offset it. Wiener writes of the psychic burden of knowing your work is intangible, impermanent: “all software was vulnerable, at any time, to erasure. Engineers could spend years writing programs only to have them updated, rewritten, replaced.” She writes of her own personal angst, “that I could command a six-figure salary, yet I did not know how to do anything.” She adds, “I went so far as to buy a sewing machine, like I was looking for ways to shame myself.” This desire for permanence, and for work that looked like work and that led to finished, physical products was an itch her colleagues scratched too. “‘It feels so good to do something with my hands,’ they said, before launching into monologues about woodworking or home-brewing or baking sourdough.”
In addition to manual-labor-as-leisure, Wiener notes that her colleagues were also obsessed with biohacking — tracking calories and REM cycles, experimenting with dieting and exercise regimens, Fitbits and CrossFit and the rest. She writes: “the body was a platform, the biohackers argued: if an upgrade was available for their laptop’s operating system they would download it posthaste, without question. The same was true of their human organisms.” Wiener writes that she found this whole subculture “a little sad,” explaining that “the goal was productivity, not pleasure. And to what end - whom did it serve.” She notes that “it seemed more likely that biohacking was just another mode of self-help.” Wiener adds that she “wanted to better understand my own desires, what I wanted: to find a purpose. But nonmedical monitoring of heart rate variability, sleep latency, glucose levels, ketones - none of this was self-knowledge. It was just meta-data.”
As another, compounding form of disembodiment, for a significant portion of her work in the second job, Wiener worked remotely. She writes of this experience that “it was strange when we were embodied, disorienting to see everyone from the neck down. Our relationships, fostered through software, did not immediately map onto physical reality. We were all more awkward in person than in the company chat rooms and over video, where conversation flowed.” And so after joining her peers on a 60s-inspired commune outdoor retreat experience, Wiener reflects that “maybe nostalgia was just an instinctual response to the sense that materiality was disappearing from the world.”
Burnout and Repetition
Toward the end of her memoir, Wiener writes: “all this time, and I could just leave. I could have left months ago.” Her friends from New York would ask her why she stayed, and she would reply “money and health insurance [...] and the lifestyle.” I think by lifestyle, Wiener really does mean the style of life, the desire for a scripted, structured, purpose-driven existence amidst all the anxieties of being young, formless, unrooted, and uncertain.
By age 29, Wiener began “to want things I had not wanted when I was twenty-five”: babies, mostly, and maybe a mortgage. And on the meta-level, “to find a way, while I could, to engage with my own life.” The glamour, such as it was, was never sustainable. Wiener uses the imagery of a love affair gone wrong predicated on the seductive confidence of young men:. “I had trusted them to tell me who I was, what mattered, how to live.”
And the scary thing is, this is probably true of everyone. Wiener says that “I understood my blind faith in ambitious, aggressive, arrogant young men from America’s soft suburbs as a personal pathology, but it wasn’t personal at all. It had become a global affliction.” How much of our lives revolve around the coding that emerges from the Valley, the apps the Valley supplies us with, the sales we make driven by the personalized marketing made possible by the data we willingly surrender? And how many of us lionize the American Founders — or imagine ourselves at the helm of the ship, fulfilled because powerful? And how many of us in our twenties and thirties look to the never-ending scroll of images to help us picture what fulfillment looks like?
In the end, Wiener observes that she “could have stayed in my job forever, which was how I knew it was time to go.” Facing herself honestly, she found that “the money and the ease of the lifestyle weren’t enough to mitigate the emotional drag of the work: the burnout, the repetition, the intermittent toxicity.” Wiener left the techy corporate biohacking self-actualization bandwagon because she really does care about her soul, after all.
I wonder what that means for those who choose to stay.