Uncanny Valley: A Memoir

The CEO did not acknowledge that the reason millennials might be interested in experiences—like the experience of renting things they could never own—was related to student loan debt, or the recession, or the plummeting market value of cultural products in an age of digital distribution. There were no crises in this vision of the future. There were

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 it did not come naturally to me.

would bend to them. I assumed they had people to impress, parents to please, siblings to rival, rivals to beat. I assumed their true desires were relatable: community, or intimacy, to simply be loved and understood. I knew that building systems, and getting them to work, was its own deep satisfaction—but I assumed everyone wanted more. I was always

As a software engineer, Ian had never encountered a job market with no space for him; he didn’t know what it felt like not to have mobility, options, not to be desired. He loved what he did and could easily command three times my salary. No company would ever neglect to offer him equity. He was his own safety net.

I did not see that I was in good company: an entire culture had been seduced. I understood my blind faith in ambitious, aggressive, arrogant young men from America’s soft suburbs as a personal pathology, but it wasn’t personal at all. It had become a global affliction.

They gave inspirational talks about the toxicity of meetings and waxed poetic about the transcendence of collaboration. They parlayed their personal experiences into universal truths.

For a long time, I harbored the belief that there was a yearning at the heart of entrepreneurial ambition, a tender dimension that no one wanted to acknowledge. Some spiritual aspect beneath the in-office yoga classes and meditation apps and selective Stoicism and circular thought-leading. How else to explain the rituals and congregations, the conf

I was radiant with projections.

It seemed more likely that biohacking was just another mode of self-help, like business blogging.

Homogeneity was a small price to pay for the erasure of decision fatigue. It liberated our minds to pursue other endeavors, like work.