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Uncanny Valley review

I really loved this book. Not only is the subject matter of corporate intrigue and the tech industry always compelling to me, but the writing was so beautiful and spare and darkly funny. I loved the way she would explain a phenomenon and then tell an anecdote to bring it home, setting up a perfect shocking or hilarious (usually both) punchline to end a paragraph or a chapter. Or she would leave a sentence hanging without explaining why the reader should care about it, just letting the effect speak for itself. It reminds me of the improv advice to assume your partner is extremely intelligent, only in this case it’s the reader. I guess the worst case scenario is that they won’t get it, which is not that bad and they’ll just move on. But in the best case, they really get your point AND they feel smart because they feel like they came up with it on their own. So even if 50% of your points land, it’s still worth it. 

Beyond the style, I learned some new things about the tech industry that I hadn’t thought about, and had some other suspicions confirmed. More than that, though, I liked that it was clearly a memoir--a story of her personal experience that sometimes reflected broader truths about tech but not always. I loved her brutal honesty about her own ambivalence and naivete and related to it deeply. She made clear that one of her main motivations for trying tech were the difficulty of surviving in New York on a publishing assistant’s salary, but was also intrigued by the role of tech in society and attracted to the idea of herself as an entrepreneur. Later on, she confessed that a big part of her reason for staying on was that the corporate cultures, while draining, were also thrilling. 

I felt the same thing working in international development. Apart from the ambiguous and colonial ethics of the entire industry, the challenges--even the mundane ones--made life exciting and bonded me to my peers in a way that I have not experienced since. In retrospect, those friendships probably are not worth the price of my burnout, anxiety, and humiliation, but at the time it felt pretty good and I still have lots of fond memories alongside the shitty ones. It is hard to tell such a complicated story without seeking to extract some universal truth out of it, but I guess that’s what makes it a memoir rather than history. 

I don’t know how much of it is a coincidence of timing, that we both made a transition around the 2016 election, or if we both made a transition at a similar age, but I definitely felt a shift in my own ideas around work after the election. I felt like maybe I had been overly optimistic to think that putting faith in bosses to guide me in the right direction would turn out well, or that I had been naive to imagine that we wanted the same things out of life. It took me a while to learn that people willing to employ you almost always expect to get more out of you than you do out of them. Maybe that was naivete about the nature of work in general, or maybe it was the process of growing up and learning to empathize with others, learning that their motivations are completely separate from mine.

I hadn’t thought about the fact that this coincided with the election or what that event meant for my life or my work. In a way, the fact that so many people did not care revealed how different their motivations were from mine. But for those who did care, many dealt with anxiety through self-reflection, which in the author’s case I guess led her to quit tech. I don’t know if that happened for me, but I definitely saw a similar effect after my mom’s death, when it forced me to reconcile with my fundamental aloneness and self-reliance. Maybe this is an era where the entire world is feeling more alone and less communitarian and that has bled into my life. 

#uncanny valley #tech #bookstagram #booknerd #bookish #books

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Let them eat capital

In Capitalism, Alone, Branko Milanovic describes capitalism in historical context, tracing its evolution from classical capitalism which was isolated in Western Europe and North America, to the current state where capitalism is virtually unchallenged as the dominant global system, with slight variations across countries. 

The part I found most compelling is his description of the US, where what he calls “liberal meritocratic capitalism” dominates. This system is different from classical capitalism as Marx envisioned it in that the distinction between a working class that derives all of its income through labor and an elite that derives all of its income from capital is disappearing. In the US, the elite still derive most of their income from capital, but they also derive some income from labor, thus the term meritocratic. Because the returns to capital are greater than the returns to labor, total income of the elite, and thus interpersonal inequality, has grown substantially in recent decades, and will continue to grow in the absence of systemic change. In addition to capital share, the elite in the US maintain power through control over educational and political institutions, buying expensive degrees and political influence for themselves and their children. 

This analysis leads Milanovic to recommend not only wealth and inheritance taxes, but also policy interventions that would lead to greater ownership of capital by the middle class, such as a government guarantee on equity. Currently, equities are a risky investment because the company could go bankrupt and the investor could lose everything, but under this proposal, the government would guarantee that investors would at least break even as long as they own below a certain amount of equity, say $1,000. This would encourage middle class households to diversify their assets and redistribute highly lucrative capital holdings away from the elite. This policy is smart because it addresses the root causes of inequality, which is the asymmetric returns to capital and labor. From this perspective, policies like income tax and a universal basic income seem to address only the symptoms of inequality, not the underlying causes. 

The timing for this book is pretty perfect, as we are currently choosing a Democratic presidential candidate, and policies related to inequality are among the few differences in the current slate of candidates. The late Andrew Yang was the only candidate to recommend a universal basic income, but both Warren and Bernie have more nuanced plans to combat inequality. Warren proposes a wealth tax and Bernie proposes an inheritance tax, which both effectively accomplish the same thing, but neither addresses the root causes of inequality. In addition to progressive wealth and inheritance taxes, the next president should propose a guarantee to returns to equity for the middle class. This is the only way to reverse the rise in inequality in the US and prevent some of the worst effects of capitalism on our society. 

#inequality #economics #socialism

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The Other’s Gold Review

Shocker! I loved this one too. When I started it, I kinda thought that it would be a cheesy girl book (which I was 100% ready for after Uncanny Valley) but as I went along it became nuanced and dark in ways I hadn’t expected. Maybe it was still a bit cheesy--a main theme seemed to be the beauty of everyday friendships, which smacked of Little Women or Our Town a bit. 

The difference is the bad things each of them did. Ji Sun had sex with Lainey’s husband, Alice pushed her brother off the tractor, Lainey bit her daughter’s face, Margaret kissed a teenager-child. These things are all unambiguously bad and unforgivable, and it seemed like the author wanted to explore not only how each of them lives with herself after, but how the ones who know about these things reconcile them and move on. They don’t forgive or justify any of them, but they do paint a full picture of each of them, and in a way bring them closer. The clear message is that everyone does fucked up shit at some point, and if we want to love each other unconditionally, we must find a way to live with that. 

Going back through the book, actually Ji Sun’s “bad thing” was falsely accusing her professor of sexual assault, although to me it seems like having sex with Lainey’s husband is actually way worse. The professor definitely raped several other girls and I don’t think Ji Sun’s action had malicious intent or a bad outcome. He got what he deserved the same way he would have had she not accused him. But the author seems to want us to think that this was really bad, driving it home again later when Ji Sun meets another accuser many years later and the other woman gets mad at her for not knowing a third woman, who unbeknownst to Ji Sun was the second woman’s girlfriend, had killed herself. Again, this doesn’t seem that bad and I’m not sure why the author included it. Was she trying to make Ji Sun seem selfish? Was that also what made her make the false accusation? If so, what would she theoretically have been gaining from that? I’m not convinced. Ji Sun to me consistently seems to be one of the most likeable characters, so much so that she begins to seem flat compared to the others with all of their flaws. 

I also found the author’s depiction of Lainey’s involvement in Occupy to be confusing. I can’t tell whether I’m supposed to think that Lainey is progressive or impulsive, although I guess it could be both. If that was what the author was going for then it might have hit home harder if there had been one story to illustrate two sides of the same coin, as there are elsewhere, than one morally ambiguous story. 

OK so maybe I liked it for the wrong reasons. My inner cheesy teenage girl loved the drama but my inner author found it nuanced and satisfyingly dark but ultimately shallow and disorganized in the same way that Conversations With Friends was. 

#book review #bookblogger