Crawling Out of “Uncanny Valley”

silicon valley

This piece about start-up life in n+1 is exactly as strange, surreal, disturbing, depressing, and wonderful as everyone has been telling you. Go read it, if you haven’t yet.

Uncanny Valley

I am still emerging from the haze of my last full-time gig — I moved from a tiny, struggling literary non-profit to a whiz-pop start-up, and I basically walked around with my jaw on the ground for the first three months. I once took a selfie with a plastic canister full of individual packs of Veggie Straws. I recently told a friend I simply didn’t have the “emotional bandwidth” for a difficult conversation.

Most start-up offices look the same — faux midcentury furniture, brick walls, snack bar, bar cart. Interior designers in Silicon Valley are either brand-conscious or very literal. When tech products are projected into the physical world they become aesthetics unto themselves, as if to insist on their own reality: the office belonging to a home-sharing website is decorated like rooms in its customers’ pool houses and pieds-à-terre; the foyer of a hotel-booking start-up has a concierge desk replete with bell (no concierge); the headquarters of a ride-sharing app gleams in the same colors as the app itself, down to the sleek elevator bank. A book-related start-up holds a small and sad library, the shelves half-empty, paperbacks and object-oriented-programming manuals sloping against one another. It reminds me of the people who dressed like Michael Jackson to attend Michael Jackson’s funeral.

Everything seems remarkable until you realize it’s only remarkable in its lack of remarkability. You learn that, too: how to use words that mean nothing, how to repeat the same nonsense until it finally attains meaning. I was so earnest about my emotional bandwidth! I really felt that was the truest description of my inner modality!

The conference room has a million-dollar view of downtown San Francisco, but we keep the shades down. Across the street, a bucket drummer bangs out an irregular heartbeat. We sit in a row, backs to the window, laptops open. I look around the room and feel a wave of affection for these men, this small group of misfits who are the only people who understand this new backbone to my life. 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?”

I’m very grateful for that job, for the people I met, for the money I made (truth), for everything I learned, but man: it’s weird out there.


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