Uncanny Valley, by Anna Wiener

JOANNA KAVENNA Uncanny Valley

In 1999, David Bowie appeared on Newsnight and said the internet was an alien life form and an exhilarating and terrifying force for disruption. Paxman seemed pretty bemused.

Yet Bowie was right. The digital revolution has radically altered society. We have access to vast reams of information; the old monopolies have been undermined; formerly silenced communities and individuals can now be heard.

At the same time, we have seen the emergence of a new form of power: ‘surveillance capitalism’, as Shoshana Zuboff defines it. Our personal information is collected and sold; our private lives are visible to those who govern us. All this raises major philosophical questions about power, knowledge and freedom.

Uncanny Valley is a response to some of the above. It is a memoir, describing five years Anna Wiener spent working in

Silicon Valley, aged 25 to 30. She arrived in 2013, having fled from a literary agency in New York, where she was ‘privileged but poor’. Tired of elite stasis, she wanted her life to ‘pick up momentum, go faster’. She worked initially at an unnamed data-analytics company and then at an also unnamed company, which closely resembles Github. Wiener’s title is a reference to the eerie feeling that afflicts us when we’re confronted with an entity (robot, doll, virtual-reality actor) that is meant to resemble a human but somehow doesn’t.

Wiener finds the Valley uncanny indeed. The gold rush of big data is happening: ‘Not everyone knew what they needed from big data, but everyone knew that they needed it.’ Everyone ‘salivated over predictive analytics, the lucrative potential of steroidal patternmatching, and the prospect of bringing machine-learning algorithms to the masses’. The data-analytics company wants to make it easier for companies to ‘collect … and analyse data’ and they also want to unseat the ‘big data incumbents: slow-moving corporate behemoths’. Wiener spends her days in ‘God Mode’ – with access to ‘all of our customers’ data sets’.

She contends with dire sexism in the office, with solitude and a lurking sense of unease: ‘I felt free, invisible, and very lonely.’ She goes on dates with men ‘who seemed boring and benign, if well-versed in social theory’. She has a gift for lovely, self-lacerating descriptions. She dismisses the internet as ‘a collective howl’ and then cyber-surfs guiltily (who doesn’t…): ’Just me and my Id, hanging out, clicking.’ She reads ‘books that had been heavily documented on social media, only to find that the books themselves had a curatorial effect – beautiful descriptions of little substance, arranged in elegant vignettes’.

Things in general are quite dreamlike. Companies, films and people are left unnamed. Facebook is the ‘social network everyone hated’, Google is ‘a search-engine giant down in Mountain View’ and the Matrix is ‘a science-fiction movie about hackers who discover that society is a simulated reality’. This works to make the ordinary unfamiliar and to express Wiener’s sense of dislocation. Yet it feels a bit odd when Edward Snowden is left unnamed as well, and referred to as ‘the whistleblower’. Snowden made a political decision, elaborated in Laura Poitras’s film Citizenfour, that he would reveal his identity and would not hide in the shadows.

After Snowden, someone tells Wiener that she works for a ‘surveillance

company’ and ‘the veil between ad tech and state surveillance is very thin’. She writes, ‘I didn’t know how to respond… It was perhaps a symptom of my myopia… I was hardly thinking about the world at all.’ Elsewhere she explains, ‘We didn’t think of ourselves as participating in the surveillance economy…’ She later wonders if ‘the NSA whistleblower had been the first moral test for my generation of entrepreneurs and tech workers, and we had blown it’. She mentions writing of ‘little substance’ but not the works of Shoshana Zuboff, Christopher Wylie, Peter Pomerantsev, Glenn Greenwald or Carole Cadwalladr.

But Wiener’s point may be to explore both the ambivalence of life within the surveillance economy and the illusions we maintain. The result is fascinating, ambiguous and genuinely uncanny.