Essential insight into startup culture
January tends to be a slow time for new books, as publishers have already flooded the scene with marquee titles in advance of the holiday sales season.
But if you keep a sharp eye, you might just find a book released in January that people will still be talking about at the end of the year. Last year, that book was Tressie McMillan Cottom’s “Thick,” a book I touted in my first column of 2019.
This year, my pick is “Uncanny Valley,” a memoir by Anna Wiener, a staff writer for The New Yorker. While “Uncanny Valley” is billed as a memoir — and it is — it doubles as a kind of ethnography of Silicon Valley startup culture, which Wiener joined as a refugee from low-level New York book publishing in 2013.
Wiener’s initial foray at a digital reading app was short — and the app didn’t last much longer — but she quickly wound up in customer service at a “data analytics” firm. This is where the book takes off, due to both her personal journey and her insight into the forces that have so profoundly shaped our culture.
The specifics of what these companies are doing matter little; regardless,their owners are convinced they’re changing the world. The book is an exploration of Wiener’s gradual alienation from herself as she’s drawn deeper into the startup mindset of messianic zeal around growth and market share.
The rest of us are just starting to pay the price for all that hubris. As Wiener tells the tale, this is not a story of thirst for power or greed, necessarily, though the promise of wealth seems to play a role in driving the culture. More important was the sense of doing something big, something that would put a stamp on the world. Valuation was only the scorecard.
The companies claimed to be obsessed with customer service, but in one of the most revealing (and terrifying) moments, Wiener recounts employing the company’s “God mode,” which allowed total access to all of her customers’ personal information. Her company was ostensibly in the business of maximizing the usefulness of that underlying data.
The quality of Wiener’s on-the-ground observations, coupled with acuity she brings to understanding the psychology at work, makes the book illuminating on a page-by-page basis. It is as though Wiener found herself under a spell that separated her from herself, a temporary state she still finds a little baffling.
She wanted to believe that all these young, driven, mostly male people were doing as much good as they proclaimed, but of course this wasn’t the case. It was never the case.
Mark Zuckerberg once proclaimed that Facebook would be a vehicle for world harmony. Google’s slogan was “don’t be evil.” Both of these entities are now vectors for propaganda that has sown division to the point that we now question whether we still live in a shared reality
Nonetheless, “Uncanny Valley” is a kind of compassionate condemnation. Wienerextends great empathy to the people she once moved among. They are not evil or craven, necessarily. The temptations are real and explicable.
But that empathy makes the portrait all the more damning. These men consider themselves masters of the universe, but Wiener reveals their flaws and frailty. It is this that is most dangerous: the inability to admit fault or to reorient work around a different set of values.
Wiener’s book isn’t a warning so much as a lament over the damage done and the damage still to come.
Kalanithi
I just read somewhere that “Where the Crawdads Sing” was the bestselling book of 2019, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s near the top in 2020. It has some serious legs. For Peg, a novel that takes its characters and its setting seriously: by Pitchaya Sudbanthad.