Resonant Thoughts: Anna Wiener’s “Uncanny Valley” (2020)

“Listening to EDM while I worked gave me delusions of grandeur, but it kept me in a rhythm. It was the genre of my generation: the music of video games and computer effects, the music of the twenty-four-hour hustle, the music of proudly selling out. It was decadent and cheaply made, the music of ahistory, or globalization–or maybe nihilism, but fun” (66).

“The platforms, designed to accommodate and harvest infinite data, inspired an infinite scroll. They encouraged a cultural impulse to fill all spare time with someone else’s thoughts. The internet was a collective howl, an outlet for everyone to prove that they mattered. The full spectrum of human emotion infused social platforms. Grief, joy, anxiety, mundanity flowed. People were saying nothing, and saying it all the time” (187).

“The tech industry was making me a perfect consumer of the world it was creating” (196).

Anna Wiener, Uncanny Valley: A Memoir (2020)



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