Uncanny Valley: A Memoir Quotes
"It was a year of new optimism: the optimism of no hurdles, no limits, no bad ideas."
"Everything was up in the cloud. The cloud was an unmarked data center in the middle of Texas or Cork or Bavaria, but nobody cared. Everyone trusted it anyway."
"A website that allowed people to rent out their unused driveways raised four million dollars from elite firms on Sand Hill Road."
"It was the dawn of the era of the unicorns: startups valued, by their investors, at over a billion dollars."
"Outside of Silicon Valley, there seemed to be an overall resistance to taking any of it too seriously."
"I was oblivious to Silicon Valley, and contentedly so."
"The only way to have a successful and sustainable career in the publishing industry, it seemed, was to inherit money, marry rich, or wait for peers to defect or die."
"Tech, by comparison, promised what so few industries or institutions could, at the time: a future."
"In the manner of so many twentysomethings living in North Brooklyn... my life was affectedly analog."
"The truth was that we were expendable. There were more English majors with independent financial support and strings of unpaid literary internships than there were open positions at agencies and houses."
"I was very broke. Not poor, never poor. Privileged and downwardly mobile."
"But I wasn’t too worried about my soul. There had always been two sides to my personality."
"San Francisco was an underdog city struggling to absorb an influx of aspiring alphas."
"It was a strange place for young and moneyed futurists."
"The city, 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."
"It was a well-publicized disparity, but one I had underestimated."
"This was the nascent neomillionaire class, I realized."
"I was happy; I was learning. For the first time in my professional life, I was not responsible for making anyone coffee."
"The attendees were clear about what they wanted, which was for their companies to grow."
"It was like watching two ATMs in conversation."
"I found myself at a two-top with him, briefly, drinking something heavily garnished with mint."
"We were all privy to high-level details and minutiae, from the names and progress of job candidates to projected revenue."
"We were doing well—we were always doing well. In a culture where profitability was a bragging right, we had plenty to be smug about."
"Even so, the enemy of a successful startup was complacency."
"He spoke in military terms. 'We are at war,' he would say."
"I tried not to imagine myself in their shoes."
"The sheer ecstasy of the drop made everything around me feel like part of a running-shoe ad or a luxury car commercial."
"I found some enjoyment in its clarity: it was like math, or copyediting."
"There was nothing I needed or desired from software. There was nothing I wanted to hack or build."
"The CEO’s community was the business community, and it would take care of him."
"Being the only woman on a nontechnical team, providing customer support to software developers, was like immersion therapy for internalized misogyny."
"Business was a way for men to talk about their feelings."
"Noah and I met for drinks in SoMa, a few blocks from the office. The bar smelled like a deep fryer, and a fleet of motorcycles hung from the ceiling."
"We’re not software! We’re your friends!"
"I thought, If I’m going to do this job forever, I’d better be rich in five years."
"In a decent acquisition, I might net ten thousand dollars."
"You could describe my position as totally unreasonable."
"Come on," he said. "We worked at a surveillance company."
"The veil between ad tech and state surveillance is very thin."
"They all assume this will just last forever."
"The worst part is that the technology is getting worse every day."
"You’re the smallest problem in his life. You’re allowed to quit."
"Our culture is dying," we said. "What should we do about the culture?"
"It’s a trick question," the CEO said. "The right answer is both."
"Don’t put complaints about sexism in writing."
"We’re expecting big things from you, ourselves, and for the company."
"That is really sad," he said. "I wonder whose it was. We’re not supposed to give away the hoodies."
"A world of actionable metrics, where everything could be optimized, prioritized, monetized, and controlled."
"Sometimes I would worry about my internet habits and force myself away from the computer, to read a magazine or a book."
"Oh, I would think, turning the page. This author is addicted to the internet, too."
"Just me and my id, hanging out, clicking."
"Customer ticket after customer ticket: like swatting flies."
"I refreshed the newspaper. I refreshed social media. I refreshed the heavily moderated message board. I scrolled and scrolled and scrolled."
"In any case. Time passed, inevitably and unmemorably, in this manner."
"It could be a good chance to own something, I said, unconvincingly; I couldn’t imagine the CEO ever letting an employee own anything."
"It was strange to be back, but with tech money."
"The city was beginning to look like a generic idea, perhaps sprung from the mind of a real estate developer, of what a wealthy metropolis should be."
"The nature of cities was to change, I knew."
"People argued about whether burnout was real, but also about burnout’s economic rewards."
"Fuck-you money: it was a catchphrase, a motivation, a lifestyle."
"To live in? I asked. What about community? People didn’t come from nowhere. What about the local economy?"
"In June, the seed accelerator announced a new initiative. The accelerator was looking to build a new metropolis, entirely from scratch."
"A modest yearly budget for home office improvements would be useful."
"Flights over four hours long could be booked in business class. I would do a better job representing the company if I could nap on the flight."
"We could get signed up for one of those snack subscription boxes."
"I’d like to see more flexibility in the fitness benefit. I’m not comfortable in gyms, so paintball makes up the majority of my physical fitness regimen. It’d be nice to use the benefit to pay for equipment, and paint."
"This is exactly what I’m talking about. Read this, then tell me you still want to give these people any power."
"I’ve been living like someone in her twenties for over a decade. I’m almost forty. Why am I going to three concerts a week? Wasn’t I supposed to have children?"
"What does this all look like when everyone gets older? When does this stop being fun?"
"I’m not exactly sure what you’re asking for. This is really slow work. It could take months, and there’s no guarantee."
"It was no wonder San Francisco was referred to as a city of Peter Pans; no wonder so many people tried to live in the perpetual present."
"What if we were given a blank slate? What problems could we fix?"
"The idea is to follow lean-startup methodology. The city will start small, like an early startup that has to cater to the first hundred users, rather than the first million."
"It was so unimaginative. There was so much potential in Silicon Valley, and so much of it just pooled around ad tech, the spillway of the internet economy."
"You’re underestimating what you might have that they don’t."
"I think you’re underestimating what you might have that they don’t. That’s sweet. But bigger than that, I think. Just something worth considering."
"If winter did come, I wondered what that would mean for him."
"It wasn’t just about a means of solidarity or longevity for them. It’s just about personal leverage."
"I would work twice as hard as my male counterparts to be taken half as seriously."
"I was always making unprompted arguments against privatization, picking fights."
"I had turned twenty-nine that summer, and I was starting to want things I had not wanted when I was twenty-five."
"Look, I would say to Ian—a baby! Like we were bird-watching. Like I had just seen a shooting star."
"It was always winter in San Francisco, I thought; it was always winter. Mark Twain."
"I wondered what would happen if he and his friends went on to run the industry, as it seemed they might."
"It was easy to forget that anyone was getting older, or that anyone ever would."
"It’s just about personal leverage. When I was exposed to asbestos, nobody doing comp-sci at an Ivy League was showing up to help."
"We were too old to use innocence as an excuse. Hubris, maybe. Indifference, preoccupation. Idealism."
"The city will start small, like an early startup that has to cater to the first hundred users, rather than the first million."
"I wondered whether I would become a liability."
"There was so much potential in Silicon Valley, and so much of it just pooled around ad tech, the spillway of the internet economy."
"It was strange to see him form a public identity on social media—strange that he had followers, a fan base—and from time to time, he would endorse publications or policies or positions that surprised me."
"I was starting to think the one we already had was doing enough damage."
"The majority of users engaged with the site as intended."
"I was so used to him pushing a counternarrative, cheering me up, making the future feel new."
"I felt a deep gratitude for them, their willingness to tackle flare-ups; their good humor and curiosity about the matted underbelly of the internet."
"Most were smart and nice and ambitious, but so were a lot of people."
"The novelty was burning off; the industry’s pervasive idealism was increasingly dubious."
"It was still the era of the attention economy. Everyone in the pool. Alone, together."
"Tech, for the most part, wasn’t progress. It was just business."
"It was a barrage; it persisted for days."