Uncanny Valley — Dinaburg Writes

by Anna Wiener

For the first two thirds, I actively loved this book. The Brooklyn-to-San Francisco transfer spoke to me on a personal level. Ditto the narrator’s “road-not-traveled” law school fantasy (though with a through-the-looking-glass vibe, as I have the law license, mountain of debt, and utter disregard for the legal profession that the author would have likely accumulated had she opted down that primrose path). Even after the final third burdened itself with the desire to carry a larger metaphor for society, I still love Uncanny Valley. It is another of the books I wish I wrote, in the genre I adore; the travelogue where time, not distance, is the medium.

Maybe I’m just a sucker for north Brooklyn warehouse party culture in the early 2010s:

I sat atop busted amplifiers and cold radiators in Bushwick practice spaces, paging through back issues of prestige magazines, watching various crushes suck on hand-rolled cigarettes and finger their drumsticks and slide guitars, listening attentively to to their noodling in preparation for my feedback to be solicited, though it never was. I went on dates with men who made chapbooks or live-edge wood furniture; one identified as an experimental baker. My to-do list always included archaic chores like buying a new needle for the record player I rarely used or a battery for the watch I never remembered to wear. I refused to own a microwave.

The underpaid office worker bildungsroman hits too close to home for me. It probably strikes the majority of my age demographic. Any book burnished by The New Yorker’s indelible house style has space in my heart. Whatever the case, I went into Uncanny Valley thinking it was a book for me, and as I read each page they proved that assumption, 200 times over:

I was perhaps still afflicted by the shortsightedness of someone whose skill set was neither unique nor in high demand. A sense of my own disposability had been ingrained since working in the publishing industry, and quitting without a plan was unfathomable. Every month since graduation was accounted for on my resume. Sabbaticals, for anyone other than a college professor, were a novel concept, and one I could not trust.

When it moved away from the intensely relatable and started branching wide in what felt like an attempt to carve out a cultural moment writ large, it lost the unique voice in favor of demotivational poster clichés:

Nobody was guaranteed any future, I knew. But for those who seemed to be emerging from the wreckage victorious—namely, those of us who had secured a place in an industry that had steamrolled its way to relevance—the meritocracy narrative was a cover for lack of structural analysis. It smoothed things out. It was flattering, and exculpatory, and painful for some people to part with.

These relatively banal overarching conclusions aren’t what I was prepared for over the last hundred pages. With such a internally driven opening, Uncanny Valley had room to avoid TED-talk moralizing, or data-driven soundbites. It’s not that I think they’re wrong; I don’t. It’s just that I don’t see San Francisco as syndoche for Silicon Capitalism. It doesn’t fit. The ceaseless grind against the worst excesses of SF…I don’t know. The city she describes is delineated by about a quarter mile, mostly SoMa, SOuth of MArket Street, the place I like least. I walked past her second office hundreds of times in my two years here, heading down to my wife’s office, to yoga class, to play Magic: The Gathering in some glass-walled conference rooms. It’s the city-est portion, the Midtown East of San Francisco. Any story about New York that is bound between 55th and 59th Steet is not going to make NYC sound like anything but an Office Max.

How can a memoir of someone in their 20s never touch Golden Gate Park? I spent a considerable percent of my twenties in New York’s Central Park, playing dumb games, arguing about beer prices with bodega owners, and generally being a nuisance. Maybe that wasn’t her life, or maybe the book didn’t have room for it. But unless the story of San Francisco you’re telling is completely atypical—or purposefully dire—you need that park.

Uncanny Valley is too...bleak. Too focused on office life, maybe? It’s a memoir of tech culture, sure, and it could stay there. If the office is all you want to talk about, then only talk about the office. But the last hundred, hundred and fifty pages feel like potshots, like last-words-in-an-argument, like someone who doesn’t expect any of the 890,000 people living in SF—minus the 10% actually participating in the Venn diagram of robotics or programming that seem to encompass the entirety of the pages—would never pick up the book, would never say “That’s not my experience, that’s not my city.”

This concentration of public pain was new to me, unsettling. I had never seen such a shameful juxtaposition of blatant suffering and affluent idealism. It was a well-publicized disparity, but one I had underestimated. As a New Yorker, I had thought I was prepared. I thought I’d seen it all. I felt humbled and naive—and guilty, all the same.

This is not my experience. In New York I road the subway at 5am to go to work. I spent a lot of time deep in the outer boroughs, on film shoots and construction sites: not just Williamsburg, not Manhattan, not places where enclaves of gentrified coolness or the reach for every tourist dollar intensified policing to its most extreme. This isn’t meant as a slam. It’s just that NYC is huge. It shuttles its suffering off to the outskirts, hides it underground. Nearly 2200 unhoused people sleep in the subway every night. NYC is an ideology and an image, a persona that subsumes you much like a career. If someone asks what you do, most people say their job. Another response is “I live in NYC.” SF doesn’t have this. It doesn’t need it:

New York held my whole life, but the city I had grown up in no longer existed. There were some holdouts—the cat-smelling bookstore where I had worked during college breaks, certain cultural institutions—but the neighborhoods I had known as a child were now dotted with restaurants playing overdetermined playlists and boutiques trading on a branded locality that I found comical and alienating. The new version of the city was inscrutable, baffling. Who wanted this? Who was it for?

The nature of cities was to change, I knew. I tried not to feel entitled: I was aware that my parents, who had moved to Brooklyn in the early 1980s, had once been the outsiders rewriting the borough, just as I had spent four years contributing to the erosion of Polish and Puerto Rican Greenpoint. I knew that I was doing the same thing out west, no matter how many times I tried to tell myself that it was temporary. Acceptance of complicity, on both coasts, was still a passive act. It ameliorated nothing.

I know the author sees nostalgia as both a disease—“The city [San Francisco], trapped in nostalgia for its own mythology, stuck in a hallucination of a halcyon past, had not quite caught up to the newfound momentum of tech’s dark triad: capital, power, and a bland, overcorrected, heterosexual masculinity.”—and as a panacea—“The new version of the city [New York] was inscrutable, baffling. Who wanted this? Who was it for?” She carries the romanticism of New York with her, and to me (and I say this because I did it, too, for months) tries to make SF into NYC. San Francisco is a place, not a lifestyle. Beyond a rental market that is fundamentally hostile in a different way than NYC, it is not challenging to life in the Bay Area. Being able to scratch out a living here is not an identity. Not an accomplishment. When you hear writers that are New York writers, when you hear Fran Lebowitz say, "When people say, 'Why do you live in New York?' you really can't answer them, except you know that you have contempt for people who don't have the guts to do it," you know that simply doesn’t apply anywhere else. No other city wants to shrug you off like New York, not other city makes you feel like just surviving is an achievement, like leaving is quitting, like the ability to make it there gives you the skills to make it anywhere. But New York moves on without you. Finding out whether you can move on without it is when this book is at its best.

Uncanny Valley is still wonderful with a fascinating view of living and working in the Bay Area’s tech industry bubble. It’s just not The Human Condition. The only time it stumbles is when it tries to be.