Uncanny Valley: A Memoir

Research showed little correlation between productivity and extended working hours, but the tech industry thrived on the idea of its own exceptionalism; the data did not apply to us.

A prominent venture capitalist had declared in the op-ed pages of an international business newspaper that software was eating the world, a claim that was subsequently cited in countless pitch decks and press releases and job listings as if it were proof of something—as if it were not just a clumsy and unpoetic metaphor, but evidence.

I was radiant with projections.

Good interface design was like magic, or religion: it cultivated the mass suspension of disbelief.

Being the only woman on a nontechnical team, providing customer support to software developers, was like immersion therapy for internalized misogyny. I liked men—I had a brother. I had a boyfriend. But men were everywhere: the customers, my teammates, my boss, his boss. I was always fixing things for them, tiptoeing around their vanities, cheering

His time was no more valuable than my time, his life no more important than anyone else’s life—except, by the terms governing the ecosystem, it was.

envied their focus, their commitment, their ability to know what they wanted, and to say it out loud—the same things I always envied.

We sat in our apartments tapping on laptops purchased from a consumer-hardware company that touted workplace tenets of diversity and liberalism but manufactured its products in exploitative Chinese factories using copper and cobalt mined in Congo by children.

I wasn’t sure why anyone should be so eager to hand the keys to society over to people whose primary qualification was curiosity.