美国国家公共电台 NPR Interview: Anna Wiener, Author Of 'Uncanny Valley'（在线收听）

Interview: Anna Wiener, Author Of 'Uncanny Valley'

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

When Anna Wiener was a 20-something, she left her job at a literary agency in New York and moved to California to join the high-tech world of inflection points, designpreneurs, blitzscaling, upleveling and disruptors, the world she came to see from the inside as destructive, intrusive, dominating and dangerous. Her memoir is "Uncanny Valley." And Anna Wiener, who writes about Silicon Valley online for The New Yorker and other publications, joins us from the studios of KQED in San Francisco. Thanks so much for being with us.

ANNA WIENER: Thank you for having me. What a delight to hear you say the word designpreneur, Scott Simon.

(LAUGHTER)

SIMON: Well, it's the first time I've said it. And it does raise the question, how would you describe the Internet to a medieval farmer?

WIENER: Oh, my God. You can run from yourself, but you can't hide.

SIMON: Yeah. Well, we should explain. This was a question you actually got, right?

WIENER: Yes. This was a standard interview question at one of the startups that I worked for. It's a question that I asked many a young person looking for a job that had nothing to do with farming or really understanding how the Internet functions. So (laughter)...

SIMON: So what was the whole idea behind a question like that, or was there an idea?

WIENER: It's actually one of these things that looks absurd on its face but was quite useful to ask people in an interview. A question like that reveals how people see the world and whether they explain things with a systems view or in terms of a social dimension or - you know, whether someone says, it's like a gigantic book, or if they start explaining, you know, packets, that actually tells you a lot about how someone thinks.

SIMON: So how does someone with your literary bent wind up in Silicon Valley anyway?

WIENER: I was working in book publishing and, at 25, was sort of just trying to find my place in the world and trying to find a career path that felt like it had momentum. I wanted to be in an industry that felt exciting and felt like there was a future. And tech ticked all of those boxes.

SIMON: You said that big data just became mesmerizing.

WIENER: Oh, yeah. I found that looking at these datasets for different products really showed me what people were doing on the Internet in these digital spaces. And it told a story about how people were engaging with otherwise intangible products. So I think data is also often used to confirm one's assumptions or confound one's assumptions. And so for me, I just found that actually quite compelling on a storytelling level.

SIMON: Is it also a little - forgive me - voyeuristic? I mean, a lot of people aren't aware of the fact that we're being monitored.

WIENER: Oh, absolutely. And I think that that is one of the questions that I want to raise in the book, which is that I think not only do most people not know that their data is being collected and stored indeterminately but that there are these third-party tools, like the company that I worked for, that if you're using an app, the app is sending that data to these other companies. And so some of them could be quite small and could have employees who can access those datasets.

SIMON: I want to note before we go any further that some of the largest tech companies in America (laughter) - the largest, in fact - are among NPR's funders. I'll just mention a few - Amazon, Google, Lyft, Uber. Why don't you in this book mention the companies for which you worked? I mean, and you can guess a lot of them. I will...

WIENER: (Laughter).

SIMON: Yeah.

WIENER: Yeah. They're not - it's not a secret. It's quite easy to find out where I used to work. And I was hoping that by not naming companies and by referring to their functions it would drive home what these companies actually do, whether it's absurd or frightening. And I also just didn't think it mattered. I do think a lot of these companies, and also executives, are interchangeable in a certain way.

SIMON: The work environment, as we must say these days, that you describe - not even a patriarchy so much as an adolescent boy hierarchy.

WIENER: (Laughter) It's like going to summer camp. First are the perks you see, as there were in my office - skateboards and rip sticks (ph) and all of these snacks, you know, as if we couldn't feed ourselves or something. That is largely about attracting employees and retaining them. It's also, I think, about this idea that things are done differently in Silicon Valley, a way not to recognize that these are businesses rather than, you know, fun endeavors. But I think that - or, you know, world historical missions. And if anything, it sort of is a cover for some of the somewhat darker side of these companies.

SIMON: Which includes its treatment of women.

WIENER: Yes. It's funny. Some people have been asking me, like, what was it like to be a woman in Silicon Valley? And it's sort of like, what is it like to be a woman anywhere? But I think that (laughter) I feel like I had a relatively positive experience given the range of things that have happened to women that I know. I think that I was subject to quite a bit of sexism. But I do think that you see it everywhere. You see it from sexist asides to the undervaluing of soft-skilled labor, what's understood to be emotional work rather than strategic work. There's also the sense of a boys club that is impenetrable. And you are just constantly trying to prove yourself. There's also this culture of, like, having an open bar in the office and taking employees on, like, largely unsupervised vacations and a sort of rowdy, irreverent culture that doesn't always acknowledge people who might be vulnerable in those spaces.

SIMON: What began to shake your belief in what you were doing?

WIENER: I was working at this data analytics startup. And I enjoyed that work to a certain extent. But I wasn't paying much attention to the economy or the ecosystem that that company was a part of. And, obviously, there's a big distance between product analytics and the NSA, but when Edward Snowden's revelations came out, I had been on the job for a few months and I didn't connect the dots that there was something that has now come to be understood as surveillance capitalism and that it might have echoes in the government and - or does have echoes, you know, in the government. That, to me, in hindsight, was a moral test for the industry - the Snowden revelations. And the fact that nothing happened sort of tells you everything about where we are now.

I just started to feel that the - there was such a gap between my expectations and the narratives that Silicon Valley was promoting and what I actually saw on the ground that it made me feel like I was foolish or wrong. And then when the election happened and, suddenly, there was all this scrutiny on tech, I started to feel that my instincts and my sort of unsettled feeling about the industry was - perhaps there was more reason for that.

SIMON: Anna Wiener - her book "Uncanny Valley" - thank you so much for being with us.

WIENER: Thank you so much.