Uncanny Valley: A Memoir

During Wiener’s first summer at the company, news breaks that NSA contractor Edward Snowden has leaked classified information revealing an enormous global surveillance program run by the U.S. government. Wiener feels confused about the news, saying, “It was hard to know with whom to sympathize, or whom to fear” (83). The startup fails to engage the issue at all, in part because it doesn’t see itself as part of the surveillance economy. The company grows quickly, and Wiener’s department expands after an aggressive hiring push in which no women are hired. She develops a friendly rapport with the “overqualified millennial men” new to her team, often playing the role of an older sister or mother, offering guidance.

Wiener notices a hierarchy between technical and nontechnical employees, with the latter seen as less valuable and pressed to prove their worth. Though she is skeptical of this hierarchy, she notices herself articulating the same skewed value system as she assists in the hiring process. A manager calls a meeting asking Wiener’s team to imagine their five smartest friends and to answer the question “Why don’t they work here?” (89). With a note of melancholy, Wiener realizes that her friends would be deeply skeptical of the analytics company’s environment, preferring a more “sensuous, emotional, complex […] theoretical and expressive” world—a world that now feels distant from her own.