Uncanny Valley

by Anna Wiener

  Among the whistleblower’s revelations was that the NSA was reading private citizens’ personal communications: emails and texts, direct messages on social-networking platforms. It was harvesting contact lists and creating communication maps, tracking where and when and with whom Americans were congregating. The NSA was crawling through people’s internet activity without their knowledge or consent. It did so by gathering cookies, which allowed user behavior to be mapped and tied together across the web. Cookies were something that I knew more than a little bit about: they were a critical technology for the data-analytics software.

  To obtain some of this information, the NSA had turned to the cloud. The idea of the cloud, its implied transparency and ephemerality, concealed the physical reality: the cloud was just a network of hardware, storing data indefinitely. All hardware could be hacked. The servers of global technology companies had been penetrated and pillaged by the government. Some said the technology companies had collaborated wittingly, by creating back doors. Others defended their innocence. It was hard to know with whom to sympathize, or whom to fear.

  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. In general, we rarely discussed the news, and we certainly weren’t about to start with this story. 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. We were just allowing product managers to run better A/B tests. We were just helping developers make better apps. It was all so simple: people loved our product and leveraged it to improve their own products, so that people would love them, too. There was nothing nefarious about it. Besides, if we didn’t do it, someone else would. We were far from the only third-party analytics tool on the market.

  The sole moral quandary in our space that we acknowledged outright was the question of whether or not to sell data to advertisers. This was something we did not do, and we were righteous about it. We were just a neutral platform, a conduit.

  If anyone raised concerns about the information our users were collecting, or the potential for abuse of our product, the solutions manager would try to bring us back to earth by reminding us that we weren’t data brokers. We did not build cross-platform profiles. We didn’t involve third parties. Users might not know they were being tracked, but that was between them and our customer companies.

  “Don’t forget, we’re on the right side of things,” the solutions manager would say, smiling. “We’re the good guys.”

  * * *

  We were swamped with work, inundated with new customers. Every team needed to hire. Our referral bonus, a new-employee dowry, increased from five thousand dollars per hire to eight. Noah began pulling in a substantial secondary income in referral bonuses, dispatching his younger brothers and parents to help the recruitment effort.

  The CEO was picky about hiring: the first hundred employees of the company set the tone for its future, he said. Culture trickled down. It was critical that we be careful about determining its course. This bolstered our sense of self-importance and gratitude for our employment: we were the chosen, an elite few. But it also meant that scaling up was challenging.

  I interviewed dozens of candidates for the Solutions team. How would you describe the internet to a medieval farmer? I asked prospective support engineers, as authoritatively as possible. What’s the hardest thing you’ve ever done?

  Almost none of them made it past the founders, who began to get annoyed—I was wasting their time. “Don’t hire anyone worse than you,” the CEO instructed. He meant this as a compliment.

  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. One was a former private equity analyst, fresh from New York, who called me “honey” and dressed in adolescent defiance of Wall Street: combat boots, skinny jeans, and fluffy, oversized sweaters. Another had taught math in Boston’s public school system—the startup grind, he said, felt like a vacation by comparison. A third had recently received his Ph.D. in computational biology from an Ivy League university, and referred to himself as “doctor.” It was only sort of a joke. With the exception of the doctor, they were all, once again, younger than I was.

  The boys were more technical than I had been when I started—better than me—which gave me a complex. Still, we developed an easy rapport. They admired my seniority and complimented my emotional intelligence. They corrected my scripts; I corrected their grammar. They were competitive, and constantly in pursuit of the CEO’s acknowledgment and respect. I felt responsible for them, protective.

  When some of the support engineers began to exhibit signs of burnout, I suggested to the CEO that complimenting their work might go a long way. They could use the ego boost, I said. Some positive reinforcement couldn’t hurt productivity, besides—maybe we’d even see it reflected in their individual success metrics, which I presented to the company during Tuesday meetings. I hated the success metrics, but I liked being the one who monitored them.

  The CEO and I didn’t always speak each other’s language. I was interested in talking about empathy, a buzzword used to the point of pure abstraction, and teaching the support engineers how to properly use punctuation. He was interested in running complex data analysis on our team’s performance and holding the boys accountable to numbers. I talked about compassionate analytics. He talked about optimizing. I wanted a team of tender hearts. He wanted a team of machines.

  “Why would I thank you for doing your job well?” the CEO asked, frowning. “That’s what I’m paying you for.”

  * * *

  It didn’t take long to see that in Silicon Valley, non-engineers were pressed to prove their value. Hiring the first nontechnical employee was always the end of an era. We bloated payroll; we diluted lunchtime conversation; we created process and bureaucracy; we put in requests for yoga classes and Human Resources. We tended to contribute positively, however, to diversity metrics.

  The hierarchy was pervasive at the analytics startup, ingrained in the CEO’s dismissal of marketing and insistence that a good product would sell itself. It was reflected in our salaries and equity allotment. Despite evidence that emotional intelligence, unlike programming languages or agile development, could not be taught—there was a reason compassion was a tall hurdle for AI—soft skills were undervalued.

  Our operations manager, a public defender before she immigrated to the United States, ran payroll, planned events, pinch-hit as a technical recruiter, worked on the interior design, assisted the CEO, and served as our ad hoc Human Resources department. She chatted in Spanish with the facilities crew and prepared materials for board meetings. She put up with complaints about the snack selection, and took shit for putting baby wipes in the men’s bathroom. The founders had hired her, she once told me, because they knew she would get things done, and the founders had been right: she quietly ran the show. I didn’t know why this skill set should be any less valued, culturally or monetarily, than the ability to write a Rails app.

  Still, I was susceptible to the mythos. I looked for technical self-starters. I prioritized the programming-curious. He just taught himself to code over the summer, I heard myself say of a job candidate one afternoon. It floated out of my mouth with the awe of someone relaying a miracle.

  * * *

  Management arranged for a team-building exercise, scheduled for a weeknight evening. We pregamed at the office lunch tables, drin
king with the lights low and the music up. The solutions manager gamely pounded root beers. The Engineering team’s Betta fish throbbed in its murky aquarium.

  We walked en masse to a tiny event space at the mouth of the Stockton Tunnel. Two energetic blonds, a man and a woman, gave us colorful branded sweatbands. The blonds were attractive and athletic, strong limbs wrapped in spandex leggings and tiny shorts, and we were their foils: an army of soft bellies and stiff necks, hands tight with the threat of carpal tunnel. Noah did a double-take: one of the blonds was a friend of his from high school. The situation would have mortified me, but they embraced, laughing, the picture of breezy Californian male friendship.

  The event space warmed up as people got drunk and bounced around the room, taking selfies with the CTO and fist-bumping the cofounders without irony. We played carnival games, tossed miniature basketballs against the rims of miniature hoops. We clustered by the bar and had another round, two.

  Eventually, we were dispatched on a scavenger hunt across the city. We poured out of the building and into the street, spreading across rush-hour San Francisco, seeking landmarks. We made human pyramids in the center of Union Square, snapped each other’s sweatbands, photographed ourselves mid-jump on the steps of an old, regal bank. We barreled past tourists and harassed taxicab drivers, pissed off doormen and stumbled into homeless people.

  We were our own worst representatives, tearing through the city, shouting apologies over our shoulders. We were sweaty, competitive—even happy, maybe happy.

  * * *

  One morning, a meeting was dropped mysteriously onto our calendars. The last time this happened, we were given forms that asked us to rate various values on a scale of 1 to 5: our desire to lead a team; the importance of work-life balance. I gave both things a 4 and was told I didn’t want them enough.

  At the designated time, we shuffled into a conference room, shrugging. The conference room had a million-dollar view of downtown San Francisco, but we kept the shades down. Across the street, a bucket drummer banged out an irregular heartbeat.

  We sat in a row, backs to the window, laptops open. I looked around the room and felt a wave of affection for these men, this small group of misfits who were the only people who understood the backbone to my new life. 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 was not accustomed to stack-ranking my friends by intelligence. 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. I wondered how I’d stopped making time for the things and people I held dear. I felt blood rush to my cheeks.

  “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. A slideshow blinked across the jobs page: group photos in which we all wore our data-driven T-shirts; group photos in which we sat on each other’s shoulders, making faces. Photos of the CEO and my coworkers voluntarily participating in a fear-based endurance event near Tahoe, a massive obstacle course where they swam through dumpsters of ice water and plowed across muddy fields while being administered electric shocks by former Division II athletes. Photos of me, modeling the company T-shirt, thick-necked and grinning.

  My friends were hardworking and committed, but their vocations were poorly compensated, and against that rubric their life choices were wholly unimpressive. They were the sort of people some tech workers looked down on for not contributing meaningfully to the economy, though the derision cut both ways—if anyone our age had ever introduced himself as an entrepreneur, my friends would have laughed themselves into fits of smug superiority.

  In any case, my friends’ world was sensuous, emotional, complex. It was theoretical and expressive. It could, at times, be chaotic. This was not the world that analytics software facilitated. It was a world I wasn’t sure I could still call mine.

  If, in New York, I had never considered that there were people behind the internet, in San Francisco it was impossible to forget. Bubbly startup logos glowed from the tops of warehouses and office towers, and adorned the hats and vests and cycling kits of commuters downtown.

  The city was dotted with reminders that the English language was being disrupted. The stretch of highway that swept Silicon Valley, from San Francisco down to San Jose—where the money really started to tumble; where billboard space cost the most—was flanked with advertisements pitching software products to software developers in a language that only somewhat resembled modern speech. The ads transcended all context and grammatical structure. WE FIXED DINNER (meal delivery). HOW TOMORROW WORKS (file storage). ASK YOUR DEVELOPER (cloud-based communications). They looked futuristic and strange alongside the more traditional advertisements, although the older industries were starting to better understand their new target market. A financial-services company—one that had been around for more than a century, a provider of life insurance, investment management, and, in the 1980s, bald-faced fraud—stuck to the conventions of grammar, but held a mirror to an audience that perhaps wouldn’t want to recognize itself. That ad read DONATE TO A WORTHY CAUSE: YOUR RETIREMENT.

  Descending the train station escalator one evening, I noticed an ad covering the platform below. The product was a password-storage app—identity as a service—but the company wasn’t advertising to users; they were advertising their job openings. They were advertising to me.

  The ad featured five people standing in V-formation with their arms crossed. They were all wearing identical blue hoodies. They were also wearing identical rubber unicorn masks. I walked off the escalator and onto one of their heads. The copy read BUILT BY HUMANS, USED BY UNICORNS.

  What was anyone ever talking about? People said things like “co-execute” and “upleveling”; they used “ask” and “attach” and “fail” as nouns. They joked about “adulting.” They substituted viral memes for social currency. They deployed internet slang as if it constituted a vocabulary—as if acronyms weren’t already standing in for other words. “You know that animated GIF of the stick figure?” a coworker in his early twenties asked, to describe his emotional state. I did not. “Lol,” he said, not laughing. Ha ha, I said. Not laughing.

  None of the startups in the ecosystem were named for posterity, and certainly not for history. Naming standards were dictated by URL availability, forcing new companies to get creative. Somewhere, a branding studio was raking it in convincing startup founders to sound illiterate. Entrepreneurs formed LLCs under fabricated portmanteaus, or nouns with the vowels removed. I resigned myself to a future where, if I got lucky, my grandchildren’s college tuition would be thanks to some company that sounded like accidental metathesis, or a Freudian slip.

  Sometimes it felt like everyone was speaking a different language—or the same language with radically different rules. There was no common lexicon. Instead, people used a sort of nonlanguage, which was neither beautiful nor especially efficient: a mash-up of business-speak with athletic and wartime metaphors, inflated with self-importance. Calls to action; front lines and trenches; blitzscaling. Companies didn’t fail, they died. We didn’t compete, we went to war.

  “We are making products,” the CEO said, building us up at a Tuesday team meetin
g, “that can push the fold of mankind.”

  * * *

  On a chilly morning in late summer, the fog still lingering, we took a field trip to see our own, newly unveiled highway billboards. Everyone got to work early. The operations manager ordered fresh-squeezed orange juice and pastries, cups of yogurt parfait with granola strata. A bottle of champagne sat on the table, unopened.

  I was proud of our communications director, and nervous for her. It was unclear what metrics could be associated with a highway billboard. The CEO already didn’t believe in marketing. He believed in networks. Word of mouth. He believed in making something so useful, so necessary, so well designed that it insinuated itself into people’s lives without external pressures. Billboards were wildly expensive. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to prove the return on investment.

  We walked down into SoMa in a pack, hands in our pockets. We took a group photograph in front of one of our ads, arms around one another, smiling and proud. I forwarded the photo to my parents in New York, promising, guiltily, that I would call home soon.

  Noah took me under his wing. Meeting his friends was like swinging open the gate to a side of the Bay Area I thought had been pushed out. Here were chefs and social workers, academics and musicians, dancers and poets. Few were employed full-time. They practiced radical honesty and believed in nonreligious spiritual orientation. They spoke in the language of encounter groups. They sat in each other’s laps and snuggled in public. They owned costume boxes. It was not unusual, at parties, to walk into a bedroom and find someone administering Reiki.