Uncanny Valley and Garbage Language
Recently I read the book, Uncanny Valley written by Anna Wiener. I picked it up because of some rave reviews and it was featured in many top-10 non-fiction books of 2020.
It is a memoir about a person who works in the publishing industry of New York venturing into the tech scene. She tries her hand at a flailing tech startup in New York. She then moved to San Francisco. She works for Mixpanel as customer support and then quits to join Github. She seems to strike a chord and befriend Patrick Collison of Stripe. She opines a lot about the scene of SFO. She about Tyler Cowen, Julia Galef, and various people and shares her view.
The book is very well written. The author seems to be a down-to-earth person but she seems like a bickering person. Someone who is an outsider with some strong views and couldn’t come to digest the changes in Silicon Valley. I could not resonate with a lot of the problems she was facing.
I had the same problem with a graphic novel-based memoir, Good Talk. I could understand their point of view but I don’t resonate or agree with the writer’s judgment. I totally didn’t understand the point of why this book was celebrated so much. Is it because she is against the grain and criticizing Silicon Valley? Or is she an insider in the New York publishing coterie who knows how to market and distribute a book well? I persisted through the book to find out views that are something new and that are not already acknowledged by the intellectuals of Valley.
She complains a lot about the garbage language that the tech startups in San Francisco use. She might have taken a snapshot of that and captured it in her book. But I think she misses the point of emergence. Language evolves, morphs, and grows. Personally, I might not like using the term “Let’s double click on that” or “Let’s pin that down for a moment” but what is wrong with it?
When I was new to the startup scene, I was curious about the term “copy text” or “copywriter”. I was baffled at that term and used to ask what the fuck it was. But slowly learned what it is and I see that it’s a remnant of the publishing and advertising industry. I might have hated that term for a day or so.
My point is: in my son’s generation terms like “outro” are commonly used and people get it. We all are aware of the introduction music or intro title. But people simply get that the “outro” is related to the end of the video and move forward. They don’t ruminate about this term and classify it as a garbage language. Many people still are finicky about using the term “pre-pone” and emphasize using the term “advance” or “reschedule”. But the joke is on us, as people who “prepone”, the “outro” music is moving forward and do give a damn about me and likes.