UNCANNY VALLEY
by ANNA WIENER
“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.”
Three Sentence Summary
Some of the world's most talented people in Silicon Valley have a lot of blind spots, which have IRL impacts because of the change their startups have unleashed. The Valley's self-improvement obsessed inhabitants didn't see (or chose to ignore) the yawning gap between their utopian and hubristic thinking and the hardships that existed on the streets of San Francisco and elsewhere. Political and ethical questions were swept under the carpet in the quest for user growth, but then it became impossible to ignore such questions.
WHAT DID I THINK?
A pen portrait from Silicon Valley bringing to life what it might have felt like to live in the vortex of move fast and break things in the 2010s.
Wiener's anecdotes convey revealing insights about self-improvement culture, sexism and the folly of youth. Having not worked in Silicon Valley, I was struck by how familiar I was with some of the scenes she described that teeter on the brink of caricature. This highlighted to me how successful Silicon Valley has been in exporting it's peculiar culture, not just technology.
Note: Uncanny Valley is a clever title that refers to a concept that of the same name. It refers to the unpleasant feeling that some people have when they see robots or picture of a human being created by a computer, that appear very similar to a living human.
