(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Anyone who needs to apply for a visa to enter USA – or know someone who has to – know that the US authorities have full access to all of the applicant's electronic tracks. Including private conversations on, for example, messenger. It is only a kind of sarcastic courtesy when the authorities ask for access to one's profiles on social media. They already have that access, and use it if it suits them.
The state of God is the setting in which a worker in the tech industry has access to everything you yourself have access to on your screen. We know very well – now after several revelations of what states and companies know about us – that it exists, but perhaps not exactly that the tech industry calls it the "state of God". But why not, it is in a way an obvious nihilistic spot from an industry that may operate in the cloud, but to that extent is profane.
A deceitful lifeline
Anna Wiener was a frustrated publishing worker in New York who, despite her educational credentials and job seniority, still answered other people's phones and brewed coffee in a self-eating industry. Cultural snobbery and 20th-century authoritarian leadership structures could not hide the fact that the Titanic was on the decline and Wiener wanted off. A start-up that claimed to be preoccupied with books for the people became her first deceptive lifeline.
After a brief but fateful first affair with the tech industry, she landed in Silicon Valley, San Francisco, far from her countercultural friends and free-floating in a world that was both deeply foreign to her and irresistibly enticing. Full of confident millennials with millions of investment capital behind them. Unlike the world she came from, where provable skills were no guarantee of being rewarded for her hard work, Silicon Valley was a place where provable skills were not at all necessary to rise in the ranks of rocket speed.
From the old economy with its tiring well-known mechanisms of oppression and exploitation, to the tech economy of the future with its utopian fantasies
and low-threshold revolving door policy.
Uncanny Valley. A Memoir is Anna Wiener's time portrait of the 2010s, written as a confessional literary analysis of the sociality, urban culture and political economy that grew with and fed tech industry in the years when most of us were chained to online life. It is at once a generational portrait, a critique of capitalism, a gentrification analysis and a psychological journey of discovery. The book is misanthropically hopeful in its characteristics of the individuals, if you can call them that who populate and try to take power over the new future – where addiction is projected as something positive, and where productivity is a goal in itself, no matter what Producer.
Self debriefing
The author goes just as ruthlessly and at the same time empathetically to her own complicity in the social upheaval she has long tried to believe can bring something good with her, as to the people she meets in and around companies that produce data analysis software and platforms for sharing – yes, by whatever – companies that produce applications that reinvent ancient practices and products in the cloud. Those who create new services that no one knew they needed, but suddenly can not live without.
Anna Wiener's ability to observe, analyze and narrate is unique, and wonderfully entertaining. I sat several times laughing out loud while reading. In that way, reaching the end of the road in her narrative was both sad and relieving – relieving, because the environment that Wiener describes is something of an ordeal to get to know so closely. Also for Wiener himself. Treating her experiences in literary form has clearly been a necessary debriefing for her to be able to get out on the other side of the tech industry with sanity and self-respect intact.
In every way a nightmare
"It was the beginning of the unicorn era," as Wiener describes the early 2010s, when she jumped ship – from the old economy with its tiring well-known mechanisms of repression and exploitation, to the tech economy of the future with its utopian fantasies and low-threshold revolving door policy. And, it turns out, its unscrupulous approach to what the technology can be used for. By both companies and by states and their intelligence services.
When Edward Snowden's leak triggered the National Security Agency scandal around the world, it was something that was noisily omitted in the part of the tech industry that Wiener was in. She herself was most noticeable in the detail that NSA employees had used the state of God to spy on spouses, colleagues, friends, and family members.
“It was a nightmare in every way. But it was not difficult to imagine ", writes Anna Wiener, who at this time knew only too well what the tech industry she had become financially, socially and emotionally dependent on was doing. Besides, what other players could do with the software that flowed out of the eerie valley on the west coast of the United States.
In New York, Wiener writes, she had never thought about the fact that there were people behind the Internet. In San Francisco, this fact was impossible to forget. Uncanny Valley is an inciting (self) portrait of these people – as individuals and as a collective phenomenon – and of the world they created between each other and around them. A portrait that also shows how often these people get in doubt about what they are doing, and how surprisingly often they do not, or actively choose to ignore, their feeling that this, this is not entirely good.
