Reading: Uncanny Valley [the essay] By: Anna Wiener Spring 2016
The men ask me questions like, “How would you calculate the number of people who work for the United States Postal Service?” and “How would you describe the internet to a medieval farmer?” and “What is the hardest thing you’ve ever done?” They tell me to stand in front of the whiteboard and diagram my responses. These questions are self-conscious and infuriating, but it only serves to fuel me. I want to impress; I refuse to be discouraged by their self-importance.
I absolutely would just leave the fucking room. I hate that these kinds of assignments have been cropping up in social science textbooks and resources, where kids are being asked to basically learn these skills because they supposedly “show critical analysis.” They are bullshit, just like the empathy tasks we were asked to do once upon a time and still to this day.
Or maybe I'd just be like “I would simply ask the USPS how many people work for it because calculating it seems tedious when someone else has already done that work” or “A medieval farmer wouldn't give a shit about the internet.”
Venture capitalists have spearheaded massive innovation in the past few decades, not least of which is their incubation of this generation’s very worst prose style. The internet is choked with blindly ambitious and professionally inexperienced men giving each other anecdote-based instruction and bullet-point advice. 10 Essential Start-up Lessons You Won’t Learn in School. 10 Things Every Successful Entrepreneur Knows. 5 Ways to Stay Humble. Why the Market Always Wins. Why the Customer Is Never Right. How to Deal with Failure. How to Fail Better. How to Fail Up. How to Pivot. How to Pivot Back. 18 Platitudes to Tape Above Your Computer. Raise Your Way to Emotional Acuity. How to Love Something That Doesn’t Love You Back.
God, these are so many of the reasons that I have hated existing online. These sorts of things that leaked out and into the mainstream, that basically became part of the “news” blogging back in the day and are still being rooted out.
I hate all of this, and it feels like the opening to what we've got now with the generative AI “writing” and whatever else.
On the other side of the table, our manager paces back and forth, but he’s smiling. He asks us to write down the names of the five smartest people we know, and we dutifully oblige. I look at the list and think about how much I miss my friends back home, how bad I’ve been at returning phone calls and emails, how bloated I’ve become with start-up self-importance, how I’ve stopped making time for what I once held dear. I can feel blood rush to my cheeks.
“OK,” my manager says. “Now tell me: why don’t they work here?”
The irony is that so many industries got hit with these kinds of hustlers. I remember sitting in a school in the same year this was published where a principal basically did the same shit. And if we named anyone outside the school, we were told that we didn't care about “our community” enough.
A few years later, I'd be working at a school where everyone kept (correctly) complaining that our school manager who doubled as an HR representative was not taking complaints seriously (because she wasn't). The school's owner hired an HR representative whose resumé supposedly, according to him, included a slew of high fashion brands and whatever... but he always said he worked in marketing. He loved “unconventional” trainings, like asking us to bring our favourite spoons (without clarification) to meetings (and then getting upset with us because, since he wouldn't give us answers about why we needed a fucking spoon, some of us thought it'd be a stereotypical HR grouping mechanic and brought absurdist spoons instead). He talked about how some of us were “getting off the train at the next station,” but he also forgot how trains worked while trying to make that analogy and ended up implying that we were being shoved off (which was... actually a more true analogy for those of us who were harassed and chased out by him and the school manager).
He made me read the dumbest book to date... something referencing The Little Prince and him tying his shoes, which basically said we should let our bosses abuse us.
Tech likes to think they're special, but they aren't special for this. This shit's everywhere. They're more special for the thing that I think is most insidious: creating “campuses” and treating themselves like second schools with playgrounds and whatever else that keeps workers on their properties and in their pockets, which grants them a lot more beneficial coverage (or at least used to).
Amusingly, I think I have the book that came of this somewhere in my backlog. Perhaps I'll read it. I'm not sure.