Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Swimming In the Kool-Aid

Here’s the skinny: your attempt to change the world will result in more global misery; your commitment to some idea/dream/vision will inevitably be subjugated to your need for the power necessary to realise it; your enthusiasm will gradually transform into obsession which will alienate the people who care about you the most. Ultimately you will be disappointed and probably blame others.

You won’t be wrong to do so. Baby-boomers did not invent the notion of self-actualisation, but we made it popular. ‘Be all you can be.’ ‘There are no limits.’ ‘Make your life meaningful.’ These were some of the motivational phrases. They are difficult to reject, primarily because of fear of missing out (FOMO) and associated middle class aspirationalist pathologies.

Falling victim to someone else’s enthusiastic commitment is even more destructive. This is what Anna Wiener writes about. The lure of wealth, prestige, peer reputation is certainly there but the trigger for her was the smooth confidence of some tech entrepreneurs in New York City whose mission it was to “disrupt” the publishing business through an e-reader app. Pushed for an explanation of why publishing needed a disruption, there only possible rational response can be ‘efficiency.’ It’s cheaper to publish on-line than through a system that requires office and editorial staff, print works, and of course masses of paper. But the irrational response is much more honest: ‘because we can.’

But New York was only a taster for the much larger narcissistic, gas-lighting show on the West Coast. San Francisco is where the art of the techno-scam had reached its peak. Wiener found her niche among battalions of fellow-hopefuls: “The mark of a hustler, a true entrepreneurial spirit, was creating the job that you wanted and making it look indispensable, even if it was institutionally unnecessary. This was an existential strategy for the tech industry itself.” And the central figure in this cultural drama was, still is, the charismatic visionary like her new CEO: “‘We are making products,’ the CEO said, building us up at a Tuesday team meeting, ‘that can push the fold of mankind.’” Intoxicating stuff - quite literally.

The costs of attaching oneself to this kind of life with its revolutionary veneer, it’s flattering salary, and its faux, misogynistic camaraderie only become apparent after one is hooked. Like crack-cocaine, one needs more and more just to feel normal. There seems no lethal limit to the commitment required: “All anyone is asking is for us to pour our hearts and souls into this unstoppable adventure.” This sort of idealism, of course, has its own jargon, used repetitively to create tribal solidarity: “Down for the Cause: the phrase was in our job listings and our internal communications. It meant putting the company first, and was the highest form of praise.”

What is required is, as in dogmatic religion of any sort, is “the mass suspension of disbelief.” And as in religion, a transformation, a metanoia, slowly takes place - not like the fall of St. Paul from his horse but just as decisively. Wiener describes the process in excruciating detail. “Work had wedged its way into our identities. We were the company; the company was us.” A management theorist’s dream - the company’s interests written on every heart as if these interests were their own. The process by which this ideal corporate state was achieved is simple and known to the military-minded for millennia: “… keep people busy until they forget about the parts of their life they left behind, … the twenty-four-hour hustle”~

The culture of Silicone Valley is certainly not unique in the corporate world - Wall Street firms and big management consultancies are similar. But arguably the most successful execution of ideas about the business corporation that have been developed over the last half-century or so is in these high-tech star-ups which combine financial chicanery, managerial manipulation, and technological hysteria. This is the intellectual legacy that the boomer generation gave its professional progeny. This legacy has impoverished life in incalculable ways. What could be more telling than Wiener’s observation that “The sole moral quandary in our space that we acknowledged outright was the question of whether or not to sell data to advertisers.”

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