Uncanny Valley: A Memoir

But I guess I’m a little blurry on the details. Friends With Benefits has a manifesto where they describe themselves as an organization of “creators, rebels, artists, thinkers, and doers.” That sounds great! (I would like to be all those things, though maybe I wouldn’t say it out loud if I was.) And there’s an admirable statement of principles that... See more

And they pretty much all shared, or said they shared, their boss’s utter indifference to grace or beauty. “I’ve observed other tech employees, and these people are different,” said Ian. “They care even less about aesthetics and amenities.” The only sight that the FTX employees all wanted was of their boss. Status in the company was measured by prox

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For me personally, it would have meant the preemptive realization that many of the ideas we theorized at Other Internet had little feasibility beyond the thinkpieces they were contained within, not because they were bad ideas, but because they never had the agency to be implemented.

Today’s ideal workers are cheery and “flexible,” networked and net-savvy, creative and caring. They love their work but hop from job to job like serial monogamists; their hours stretch long and the line between the home and the workplace blurs. Security, the watchword of the industrial ethic, where workers spent a lifetime at one job and earned a p

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