Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener

Author:Anna Wiener
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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In the spring, the startup released a new feature, a report called Addiction. Addiction graphs displayed the frequency with which individual users engaged, visualized on an hourly basis—like a retention report on steroids. It was an inspired product decision, executed brilliantly by the engineers. Every company wanted to build an app that users were looking at multiple times a day. They wanted to be sticky—stickiest. The Addiction charts quantified and reinforced this anxiety and obsession.

Our communications director had left for a larger tech company with well-established, family-friendly benefits and policies, and had not been replaced. With her departure, I became the de facto copywriter. When I asked for a raise to reflect the extra work, the request was flatly denied. “You’re doing this because you care,” the solutions manager said—and I must have cared, because I kept doing it.

To promote Addiction, I ghostwrote an opinion piece for the CEO that described, dryly, the desirability of having people constantly returning to the same apps, multiple times an hour. Addiction allows companies to see how embedded they are into people’s daily lives, I wrote, like it was a good thing. The piece was published on a highly trafficked tech blog under the CEO’s name, and on our company blog under mine.

The novelty of Addiction was exciting, but the premise made me uneasy. Most of the company was under the age of thirty, and we had been raised on the internet. We all treated technology like it was inevitable, but I was starting to think that there might be other approaches. I already tied myself in dopamine knots all too often: I would email myself a link or note, feel a jolt of excitement at the subsequent notification, then remember I had just triggered it. App addiction wasn’t something I wanted to encourage.

The branding also vexed me. I knew multiple people who had decamped for pastoral settings to kick dependencies on heroin, cocaine, painkillers, alcohol—and they were the lucky ones. Addiction was a generational epidemic; it was devastating. The Tenderloin was five blocks away from our office. There had to be higher aspirations. At the very least, there were other words in the English language.

I brought up my qualms to Kyle. It was like nobody at the company had ever been around someone with even a casual drug habit, I said. It was like substance abuse was an abstract concept, something that they’d only read about in the papers, if any of them bothered to read the news in the first place. It wasn’t just insensitive, but sheltered, embarrassing, offensive. We may as well call our funnel reports Anorexia, I said. Let’s start calling churn rates Suicides.

Kyle listened patiently while I ranted. He took off his floral cycling cap and rubbed the back of his head. “I hear you,” he said. “The question of addiction is a big thing in gaming. It’s nothing new. But I don’t see any incentive for it to change.” He pushed the miniature skateboard under my desk back and forth with the tip of his sneaker.

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