Uncanny Valley summary

The article about the publishing start-up led with a photo of the cofounders, grinning in button-down shirts, and telegraphing easy confidence. She envied how convincing, high-functioning, and unapologetically ambitious they were. When she applied and was invited for an interview, she was impressed by their normal-guy, non-nerdy demeanors in her interviews. 

They offered her a three-month trial curating book titles and copywriting out of their New York office, and she happily took it. The job felt thrilling. For one thing, she had expertise for the first time in her career. Of course, part of her job was also to make coffee and keep a selection of healthy snacks within the founders’ easy reach. But being on a small team of five made her feel that her contribution mattered. 

What Anna saw when she arrived in San Francisco was a city already turning into a late-capitalist hellscape of spiking rents and corporate-branded Pride parades designed by heterosexual digital marketing managers. The artists and creative types – the type of people Anna was friends with back in New York – were already moving on to gentrifying neighborhoods in other US cities, priced out by new tech transplants like her.

Using a millennial-friendly platform for renting strangers’ bedrooms, she rented a room from a couple living in their own basement and renting out their home full time. She wasn’t sure whether she could use a knife from their kitchen or read a book on their sofa. She felt like a trespasser.

Anna’s new company specialized in Big Data and was described as a pickax-during-the-Gold-Rush tool. Not everyone knew what they needed from Big Data, but everyone knew they needed it. The revenue model didn’t make sense, but that was fine. Anna was to learn that basic economics don’t hold any sway over the venture-backed ecosystem.

She learned basic code and how to fix it, which made her feel like a genius. And for the first time in her career, she wasn’t responsible for making anyone coffee. 

Anna’s job may have been engrossing, but she was finding it difficult to carve out a social life in San Francisco. 

She fostered some level of intimacy with her office colleagues simply because she was around them ten-plus hours every day. But outside of the tech scene, most of the people she met she saw as neo-hippies clinging to San Francisco’s rapidly disappearing culture of radicalism. 

One day, during a screening of the CEO’s favorite film about hackers, Anna looked over at him and wondered how he was her boss. He was just a kid, after all. He’d never had a full-time job. Worse, he could be cruel and petty. Sometimes he gave his employees the silent treatment. When she encouraged him to deliver positive feedback to her team, he said, “Why would I thank them for doing their job well? That’s what I pay them for.”

Meanwhile, Anna was making real friends, which only strengthened her conviction that the CEO’s behavior wasn’t actually normal. She had gotten close with Noah, a well-liked employee at her company. He was a lot like her friends from college – articulate guys who had collections of art books and knew how to carry on a conversation. He had friends outside the tech world and lived in a communal living experiment in Berkeley. 

One afternoon, Anna found herself sitting in a waiting room modeled perfectly after the Oval Office. She was interviewing for a job at another start-up, which sold software to developers. The office was tacky and embarrassing, but Anna liked it anyway. It reflected the company’s hacker culture, also exemplified by a flat hierarchy and, for years, a name-your-own-salary policy. 

There were a few red flags, though. The company had recently weathered a highly publicized gender-discrimination scandal brought by a female developer. Anna’s job offer also entailed a ten-thousand-dollar pay cut and the humiliating title of Supportocat. 

Clearing out her parents’ basement on a trip back to New York, Anna cringe-read her undergraduate writing and tried on her old clothes. She cried at an experimental dance concert and felt alive, more like herself than she had in years.

But she also realized that she didn’t necessarily like the person she had become.

One evening, a few years after she had arrived in San Francisco, Anna was out for drinks when a freaked-out friend outside the tech scene handed her his phone. Unbeknownst to him, the device had been compiling a dossier of his frequently visited locations, like a stalker or a spy. 

Anna had had a few years to get accustomed to the knowledge that her every move was being tracked. So when she didn’t register shock or even surprise at her friend’s revelations, he looked at her like she was a sociopath. She became worried that she and her whole community had flunked the moral test represented by the NSA whistleblower years back. They had facilitated and normalized the creation of privately held databases of human behavior. 

One night, after yet another tech-world party where she felt like an outsider, Anna worriedly told her boyfriend that she just didn’t have the certainty, confidence, and drive that were required to succeed in Silicon Valley. “I think,” Ian said, “you’re underestimating what you have that they don’t.”

Anna had internalized the industry’s prioritization of skill sets, ranking her own near the bottom. Because her empathy and emotional intelligence weren’t valued by the tech community, she had repressed them in order to succeed.