Natasha Lasky

 



 



1.



 



When it started, Ms. Baker1 was talking about the aorta or the distance between stars and I was clicking my pen and looking at the empty seats. By this time the school day had settled into midmorning, but there were still four people missing. I was in sixth grade.



 



A third of the way through Science, Ms. Baker got a call on the class phone, and as she listened she turned her back towards us as if to shield us from the news. The class murmured versions of What’s Going On in a low rumble and in response she slammed the phone down and simply said “The train was late,” deftly executing a classic parental slight of hand.



 



At around 10:45, four kids staggered in and sat down unacknowledged. They sheepishly took out their binders and began scrawling notes, but there was something disorienting I couldn’t quite place—their pens lingered too long in their hands, a dullness clung to their eyes.



 



Ms. Baker went back to writing on the board but her lilting voice was just sound and behind me I heard someone whisper Are You OK. I looked over to see a girl with pigtails mumbling something to another girl in a pink Abercrombie hoodie, who in turn nodded and put her mouth right up to the first girl’s ear. I couldn’t hear what she said at first but as I leaned closer I just caught the end of it:



 



“If you looked close enough, you could see the blood.”



 



2.



 



There’s a list of every teenager who has killed themselves in the Bay Area in the last fifteen years. The website *Palo Alto Free Speech Zone* conveniently organized all 21 into a table that catalogs their name, date, and method of death. Sarah Riojas, 18, hanging. Cameron Lee, 16, train.



 



The only name on the list I recognize is Shelby Drazan, 17, traffic, since she went to high school across the street from me. I never knew her personally but I knew the story, or at least a version of it: There is a country club next to the freeway, and one day Shelby went there for lunch with her mother and grandmother. She chatted about school and listlessly picked at her chinese chicken salad or club sandwich before excusing herself to go to the bathroom. After about fifteen minutes passed, her mother and grandmother wondered where she had gone, peeking in the bathroom only to find that she was nowhere to be found. They wandered outside and saw a crowd peering over the guardrail, as Shelby had jumped off the 280 overpass into the traffic below.



 



I ran into a friend’s mom at Starbucks, who whispered this story to me with a lurid eagerness that said *you’ll never believe this*. I don’t think I do. But solid facts are hard to come by—even Palo Alto Free Speech Zone can’t help but evoke the imagination. Next to the strictly empirical name-date-death there’s a “notes" section for each person who died, which hint at a narrative by suggesting the reason behind the suicide (“it was not because of school or family pressures;” "fought depression all his life”) or constructing characters (“Equestrian. Dad: Venture Capitalist. Sister: model;” “Gunn basketball team captain & Merit Scholar”). Others are more opaque: one girl’s note only has a link to a photo of her grave, many of them have nothing at all.



 



2.



 



When people ask me where I’m from, I have my audience-tested Palo Alto speil about Stanford, about the google-glass clad tech bros popularized by the HBO show Silicon Valley, about the James Franco movie, *Palo Alto*, which I’ve never seen but appears to center around some sexy type of suburban angst which involves losing your virginity to your soccer coach and looking wistfully out a picture window. 



 



But a few months ago I was at a birthday party at a friend’s apartment, introducing myself to someone's long distance girlfriend—a soft-spoken brunette studying to be a psychiatrist. It was the type of party where we clutched red solo cups and struggled to hear each other over the Migos blasting in the background, but because we were drinking gin and tonics instead of Rubinoff and eating dried apricots instead of Doritos we felt that the whole thing was very refined. When I told her I grew up in Palo Alto she responded by darting her eyes towards the floor and getting very quiet.



 



“How was the um…mental health situation?" she asked.



 



"What?"



 



“The mental health situation. I’ve heard it’s uh…" She paused to look at the ceiling, as if she’d find the right words between the rafters. “Like, did you read that article in *The Atlantic*?"



 



“Yeah."



 



“So did you know anyone who was involved in that whole…thing?”



 



She looked at me wide-eyed, expectant. This wasn’t the first time someone had asked me something like this; I’ll be at a birthday party or a friend’s family dinner and some nervous suburban mother or melancholic high-school overachiever will start speaking in a particular kind of code. Sometimes they will say distant generalities like *Palo Alto seems like an, um…stressful place to grow up *and expect me to read between the lines*, *other times they will ask pointed questions about articles in *The Atlantic* or the *SF Chronicle*.



 



That’s because Palo Alto has been launched into infamy as the capital of teen suicide in America, home to not one but two suicide “clusters:” Four dead in 2009, three dead in 2014, all teenagers--the majority dying by laying on the CalTrain tracks near the Palo Alto station and waiting for a train.





 



But this is not inherently noteworthy, as clusters of teen suicides are, unfortunately, not that rare. What gives Palo Alto its headlines is that it seems so inhospitable to tragedy. It has the typical quaint shopping streets and idyllic public schools associated with utopian suburban towns, but unlike the Stepfords and Greenwiches of America, Palo Alto has seemingly managed to phase out the backwards gender politics, the lethargy, the malaise associated with a more antiquated suburban ideal. Instead, Palo Alto oozes possibility— Stanford welcomes thousands of whiz kids into its stucco walls and the booming tech industry beckons siren-like as the seat of innovation in America. Trees curl around major thoroughfares; even the freeways look like they've been plucked straight out of a golden-hour soaked Bierstadt. 



 



This gives the story of the Palo Alto suicide clusters a seductive quality, of the paradisical suburban town with a grisly underbelly, and these east-coast journalists and melancholic overachievers and affluent mothers all ask the same question: *why this town, why here?*



 



But the aspiring psychiatrist asked me a simpler question: if I knew anyone who was “involved in that whole thing.” I suppose the answer was yes and no. It felt duplicitous to claim that I had any real authority on the Palo Alto Experience, since I went to private school in Menlo Park, a town three minutes away. But, at the same time, my time in Silicon Valley was tinged with the two outbreaks: the first happened the year I moved, and the second happened my senior year of high school, right before I left for college.



 



“Yeah,” I told the aspiring psychiatrist, finally. “But um… it’s not like I have a ‘take’ on it or anything.” I clutched my solo cup a little tighter and shifted my weight back and forth between my feet. “I guess it’s just sad to be in a place like that.”



 



“Oh yeah, no, I totally get that,” she said, in a tone so deferential I almost felt like I should have been the one comforting her. We each waited for the other to say something more, but no one did, and, when the conversation had sufficiently deflated, she gave me a dignified nod and excused herself to get another drink.



 



As I watched her stumble towards the kitchen, I thought about one of my high school friends. She went on meditation retreats, and as such there were weeks at a time where no one could reach her. There was a year in which each time she left town to meditate, one of her friends tried to kill themselves— first her ex-boyfriend, then her lab partner in 10th grade Chemistry. She told me all this in trembling whispers, at three in the morning at a sleepover after everyone else had already fallen asleep. I knew her for eight years and this was the only time I saw her cry, tears splotching the edge of her blue nylon sleeping bag.



 



I wonder what she would have told the aspiring psychiatrist. The more I thought about her question, the less sense it made to me. What does it mean to be “involved” in someone’s suicide, in the first place? Would my friend say that the question of whether or not she was “involved” was one that haunted her, kept her up at night? Would she say that after her suicide year she didn’t go on meditation retreats for a while, because, in some shameful way, she felt responsible for their deaths just by being away? Can you even say something like that to a stranger at a birthday party without freaking them out? Or would she have just demurred, as I did, saying something vague and insufficient before letting the party swirl around her as if she were trapped inside the spin cycle of a broken washing machine?



 



 



4.



If you type the name “Nick Woodman” into a search bar, here is what Google will suggest to you: *Nick Woodman house, Nick Woodman net worth, Nick Woodman yacht.*



 



This is because Nick Woodman is a billionaire, famous for inventing the GoPro. He also went to my high school, and a few years ago he showed up at the school gym in the requisite chill-CEO uniform of a company T-shirt and jeans to receive an alumni award for his achievements. 



 



He took a pointed, particular joy in returning to his alma mater because he was such a blatantly terrible student. He could point to each teacher who was still around from his era and explain exactly how the teacher in question hated him, and spent a good amount of his speaking time doing just that. It was clear Woodman came back to high school to gloat— he held up his plaque with manic glee and tossed GoPros into the audience like confetti.



 



Then he got to the meat of his speech, the GoPro creation myth: Woodman gave himself until 30 to invent a product and start a company, and if he failed, he decided he would finally try and get a “real job." After he drove his first company into the ground, he got the idea for the GoPro filming himself with a disposable camera while he surfed in Bali. To raise the funds for his venture he and his wife sold shells he found on the street, and, crucially, borrowed $230,000 from his parents before the GoPro took off and he finally made his fortune.



 



This speech was a standard grade Follow Your Dreams (Don’t Worry; Failure is an Important Part of Life) sort of narrative, but in the context of the suicides, Woodman’s speech took on a darker tinge. With no clear explanation for the preponderance of suicides in Palo Alto, the community landed on stress as the culprit. This might strike some as strange, as typically, stress is a temporary condition: something specific, usually work, stresses you out, and then, once you complete the task at hand, the stress fades.



 



But in Silicon Valley stress is treated as a constant state, an existential condition. The most famous evidence for the Silicon Valley stress epidemic, cited in all of the articles about the suicide clusters in mainstream publications, is an op-ed in the local paper called “The Sorrows of Young Palo Altans,” in which Carolyn Walworth, a student at Palo Alto High School, described the catastrophic effects of the stress crisis in lurid detail. She suggests that the crushing pressure to get into Ivy League schools steamrolls Silicon Valley’s teenagers. Because getting into college requires such overwhelming dedication to meaningless labor— studying for AP’s, filling out SAT practice tests, driving back and forth from brand-building extracurriculars—high school students feel like animated corpses, walking resumes. The implication is that adolescent life in Silicon Valley is so anxiety-inducing and life-sucking that it could drive a depressed kid over the edge.



 



But the piece is strange evidence for the Palo Alto suicide problem. Walworth only mentions suicide three times, and does so only to *distance* herself from the suicide clusters. While she says that she feels “nothing but empathy” for the depressed and suicidal, she maintains that “not all problems relating to suicide and depression are directly correlated to school.” The closest she comes to connecting the dots is when she says that if you’re already struggling from depression, being in a competetive, stressful environment “can’t help.”



 



Instead, this piece is masterful in its use of euphemism, of implication. Her depictions of stress center around melodramatic imagery of disease and death— she describes stress as a “physical pain," and "a fresh gunshot wound" that means kids are "gasping for air,” unable to "draw a measly breath in”—and waits for the reader to fill in the blanks.



 



I read this article right when it came out, in 2015. I was a high school senior at the time, steeped in the mileu Walworth describes—the grade-grubbing drudgery, the masochist machismo in bragging about how much time one spent doing homework at night. I’ve heard of a girl whose mom was so committed to her productivity that she would spoon feed her dinner while she did her homework, as if she were an infant, so as not to distract her from her work. My high school friends had achievements so improbable that when I describe them it seems like I just picked qualities out of a hat at random (i:e, mathematitician/judo champion/outdoorsman, pageant queen/particle physicist/poet). These accomplishments required a near-robotic level of discipline— if I casually mentioned an episode of TV I had seen the night before, inevitably, someone would respond in a nasally whine: “Wow, you’re so lucky—I don’t have *time *to do things like that anymore.”



 



But even I had trouble relating to her depiction of teenage life in Silicon Valley. It felt not only melodramatic but deeply crass to equate studying for the SATs in your affluent suburban hometown with a gunshot wound, to turn too much homework or a bad night of sleep into something fatal. 



 



But even if this conflation of stress with depression seemed exaggerated, it reflected the way we talked about mental health at my high school, or, perhaps, more accurately, didn’t talk about it. If our we had any meaningful discussions about depression, I do not remember them, but when the second suicide cluster hit in 2014, we talked about stress with such frequency and absurd intensity that a girl in my class wrote a piece for the school paper titled “We Already Know We Are Stressed.” We had endless student-teacher forums about instating mandatory free periods or starting school an hour later to reduce student anxiety, while teachers spoke to us about the absurdity of college admissions, all the while repeating "stress does not equal success.” Nick Woodman was supposed to be a comforting reminder that you can spend high school surfing instead of studying and still end up a billionaire. 



 



Like Walworth’s piece, these were never connected explicitly to depression or to suicide— there was always a level of plausible deniability. But I’d maintain that if you looked close enough, you could see the substitution happening—why else would we have obsessed over it so much? A week or two after one of the suicides, one of my English teachers began to cry in the middle of class, seemingly inexplicably, because she was worried about how stressed we were. The day after someone killed themselves my senior year, we had an assembly, and we wondered if the administration would talk about it. But they simply said “this is an especially stressful time of year, be sure to take care of yourselves” before dismissing us back to class.



 



Stress became a way of talking about being sad without allowing it to become a real, status-quo threatening Problem, a way of making depression easily diagnosed and easily solved. *Not getting enough sleep? Go to bed earlier. Too much work? Do less. *In removing the language for depression we traded one problem for another—a depressed kid could simply be described as “stressed,” and it would not technically be incorrect. 



 



But when the kids who die look no different than those who don’t, it's hard to tell whose sadness is a problem and whose is merely matter-of-fact. I’ve seen two mothers, both of whom have depressed kids, feed each other euphemisms about their children “having a hard time” through pursed lips, without realizing that the other mother had gone through the same experience. One has to read between the lines, to look harder, *if you look hard enough, you can see the blood.*



 



5.



 



One day the whole school went out to the soccer field and saw a Buick flipped over, smoke coiling out of its battered hood. After a minute a football player from my Bio class crawled out of the car in a daze and gazed at the destruction. He seemed unaware of the audience around him, and spent a few moments wandering around the field sonambulant, before pausing as if to remember something.  He bolted back into the car, launching himself through the crumpled door, and dragged a small girl’s limp body out onto the field. She coughed weakly as he laid her onto the grass.



 



He dialed 911 but his voice was overwhelmed by the small girl’s labored breathing, slowing before stopping entirely. The field was silent. The football player pressed his hand to her heart to check her pulse, but there was nothing there, and he fell to his knees and wept as the girl bled onto his lap. The paramedics came and loaded the girl onto an ambulance, but the football player stayed still, trancelike, his head in his hands. We watched him weep for what felt like too long. Then the paramedics carried him onto the ambulance, and they all drove away, the siren dopplering into the distance.



 



We stood there for a moment, tacitly asking each other, *was that it? is it over?* After a confused silence, we all walked back to class, and next week the small girl and the football player came back to school as if nothing had happened.



 



This performance was the culmination of “Every Fifteen Minutes,” a program designed to scare teenagers away from drunk driving by simulating fake deaths. Some of them were dramatic, like the soccer field car crash, but most were banal— every fifteen minutes, the Dean of Students would come into class and read a script that stated: “I'm so sorry to interrupt, but I have a tragedy to report. It has come to my attention that X died last night after a drunk driving accident. We are deeply saddened to lose him/her, take care of yourselves in this trying time.” Then the administrator would put a hand on X’s shoulder, bring him/her outside, and that was it— they were gone.



 



None of my teachers knew quite how to respond to these interruptions. The correct thing would be to play along. Some took a moment of silence. Others smirked at the pageantry of it or mumbled something chilly and snide. Most nodded solemnly before returning to the quadratic formula or The Scarlet Letter or the history of the Civil War. 



 



They erected gravestones right next to the lockers, and students played death, stopping to mourn at their classmates’ fake graves, while the Dean of Academics dressed up as the grim reaper and wandered aimlessly around the school’s grounds.



 



At the time it seemed strange to me that we had spent so much time mourning fake deaths when actual deaths were happening seven miles away. Sometimes I wondered what it would be like to have an “Every Fifteen Minutes” for suicide.



 



But then again, “Every Fifteen Minutes” functions under a very specific logic: when teenagers see how scary it is to die of drunk driving, they will be more afraid of death, and because they are afraid of death, they will not drunk drive. In practice this logic didn’t exactly hold up, as in the world of “Every Fifteen Minutes,” there was a sense in which it was preferable to be dead than living. I remember being mildly disappointed I hadn’t been picked to die, as being dead became somewhat of a status symbol— there was a rumor that the administration picked which students died based on how much they’d be missed. 



 



The administration was already somewhat worried about romanticizing suicide— they adhered to the school of thought in which merely mentioning suicide in a public setting asserted it as “an option,” and rendered it more attractive to those who were already depressed, so perhaps it was better that they didn’t transform it into a spectacle*.*



 



Besides, maybe it wouldn’t be so different. We’d still have the speeches of “take care of yourself in this trying time,” the creeping fear that someone you know might be next. 



 



I still think often about the football player wandering around the field, listless, despondent. Even though we watched him from far away, I remember his face shifting while he watched the small girl die as this sense of deep, pervasive guilt descended upon him, this sense of *if only I could have known. *I thought of my friend with the meditation retreats who beat herself up for being away, knowing intellectually that it had nothing to do with her friends’ depression, but feeling gripped by remorse anyway. I recognized it in my classmates as we walked back from the field, as if we were carrying the football player’s guilt collectively like a weight tied to a bunch of balloons. 



 



6.



 



When I was 12, Stephen called to tell me he had just tried to throw himself off a building. He was my best friend in middle school but I hadn’t seen him in a while — I got back home from sleepaway camp only a few days earlier. I was picking my brother up from the playground. It was one of those summer days so hot that you couldn’t tell what was exhaust and what was just air, and everything smelled like sunscreen and tar.



 



I paced back and forth on the blacktop with the phone pressed to my cheek as he explained to me what happened, but looking back on it I can’t recall anything we said to each other. The only thing I remember was being surrounded by screaming children and feeling like each child had a scream just for me. Later that night I turned the phone call around in my mind, wishing I had a speech for him about all the specific ways I loved him, but all I had was *I'm so sorry* and *I'm here for you *and all those words felt punctured, deflated.



 



If he had thrown himself off the building, he would have died the same year as the first suicide cluster. He would have been “involved,” to use the words of the aspiring psychiatrist— his name and age would have been catalogued in the table in the *Palo Alto Free Speech Zone*. Sometimes I wonder what his epithet would be. 



 



But even as I’ve played a tape loop of our friendship over and over again I still couldn’t tell you why he wanted to die. Our friendship was based on doing bad British accents for each other and having impassioned arguments about whether the Arctic Monkeys or the Sex Pistols sounded more like sex. The only disoncerting thing was that he didn’t sleep much. He constantly skipped class to nap but always reassured me that he was Totally Fine, Really. When I asked him how he was he’d say: “I'm really tired, that’s all.”



 



This banality is the scariest thing about suicide. Ultimately, suicide is just a thought that won’t go away—it’s a dulling, a distance, a sublimation. It’s like trying to swim in a pool with no water, or turning out the lights at night and bearing the darkness at the room. What are you supposed to do with a pain you can’t see, a pain with no core? How do you know it’s there?



 



In trying to understand the Palo Alto suicides there is a sense in which we are circumventing this problem. When we ask ourselves why so many people die in Palo Alto, we locate the problem in a place rather than in a person. In some ways this makes things easier—it’s sociology instead of psychology. No longer do you have to reach through the murkiness of someone’s emotional life and pull out a story that feels plausible; instead we talk about patterns, statistics, stress, and work backwards to explain why someone died. Most popular suicide narratives function this way: the narrative thrust behind teen drama *13 Reasons Why*, for example, makes each titular "reason" for the main character’s suicide a physical tape that one studies, tracks, holds in hand. In making this move we remove depression from the caverns of the mind and transpose the source of pain outside of itself. It gives pain linear progression, a face, roots.



 



But I think that, in some ways, this move is the problem. Palo Alto is not a sadder place than most places. To argue that it is would be ridiculous; even among other affluent communities, Palo Alto doesn’t have a monopoly on depressed try-hards. Children of the meritocratic elite overwork themselves all over the country, from Andover to Los Angeles, and they’re not throwing themselves in front of trains. 



 



The Palo Alto suicide clusters create a paradox; when so many people die in the same place, in the same way, it seems irresponsible to ignore the correlation, but depression is a tautology—no matter what the stories say, the depressed aren’t suicidal because they weren’t loved enough, or because they did not get enough sleep. They are depressed simply because they are. 



 



Perhaps what makes Palo Alto a habitat for suicide is not that it is sadder than most places, but the opposite. With its golden-hour sunsets and oozing possibility and near-constant chipperness, Palo Alto is not a particularly easy place to be depressed. One feels like Walworth in “The Sorrows of Young Palo Altans”— melodramatic, crass, complaining too much. Much easier to sublimate it, to dismiss it as “stress” or transform into something more palatable.



 



But when nobody has the language for sadness, depression becomes harder and harder to diagnose.  We wait for definitive proof, as if there were some way of deducing that someone's pain is *real* depression and not just run-of-the-mill anhedonia. But soon it’s too late: we get the call on the hot blacktop, we see the blood on the tracks, we cry, we go home.



 



7.



 



After that day in the summer Stephen moved to another school, and slowly we stopped seeing each other. We became friends only nominally. We’d often run into each other at a supermarket or a Starbucks and exchange stale pleasantries like *I miss you* and *we should hang out*, but somehow, we never did. 



 



Finally, one day we decide to go the beach. We get burritos from the taqueria down the street and smoke. We’re both somewhat surprised to see how easily we get along, even after so much time apart, and we spend a while trading quips about the music we’re listening to and anecdotes about our boyfriends. But eventually the conversation turns to mental health, and cautiously, I ask how he is. He tells me he has an official diagnosis now, and that he has gone off medication, but that his boyfriend has helped tremendously. He tells this story in a practiced way, so quickly, and with such a pat, happy ending it almost feels flippant. But I tell him that it’s good to hear he’s feeling better, and he smiles weakly before changing the subject.



 



As we drive down the winding path towards the beach, the radio gets vague and staticky, so Stephen shuts it off. In the few moments of silence I watch him drive and think about the time we took a Drama class together in middle school. We’d play this game, “Mirror, Mirror.” It’s pretty easy: one person matches the other’s motions until they move as a unit, so no one from the outside can tell which one was leading. 



 



I was never good at this particular game. I moved too abruptly, so it’d be obvious I was calling the shots. But Stephen was much better—his trick was to close his eyes. As his eyes fluttered shut I would have to close my own eyes in tandem, and then he would take my hands and lead a slow, blind dance. You can get into sort of trance when you are so mutually attuned to each other. Sometimes we’d even take on the same breath — four seconds to inhale, eight to exhale. 



 



There is something beautiful about this kind of closeness, a wordless, edgeless empathy. How nice it would be to play an endless game of blind mirror, to eternally hold each other in hand. How nice it would be to share a breath. 



 



1 To protect the privacy of the people mentioned in this piece, I have changed their names, genders, relationships, and details, aside from those of public figures (Drazan, Woodman, Walworth, etc).

*Anna Wiener is a New Yorker contributor who writes about tech culture. Her work has appeared in The New Republic, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and others. Wiener’s first book Uncanny Valley, a memoir about her time working for Silicon Valley startups during the age of the unicorns, came out on January 14, 2020. Below is a transcript of a conversation which took place on January 16, 2020 between Wiener, former Advocate president Natasha Lasky ’19, and Features Board member Emily Shen ’20. This interview has been edited for length and clarity, and transcribed with the help of Otter.ai, a machine learning powered personal assistant that provides speech to text transcription.*



ES: Something featured in the book is your complicated relationship with the CEO of the data analytics startup. In that job, you likened yourself to a bot in describing how you catered to your mostly male customers’ requests. Later, when you are promoted, the solution manager describes your male coworker as strategic and you as someone whose strengths are that you “love our customers,” putting words in your mouth and almost commodifying your feelings. There were times where your care for your co-workers and CEO was seen as a liability, but it was like that was supposed to be transposed when it was effective, on to customers.



AW: But still undervalued.



ES: Yeah. And I wanted to know what you thought of that. When you said “bot,” it made me think of how AI is feminized a lot in media, and how you were kind of being like Scarlett Johansson’s character in Her — expected to serve people and not only do that, but in an emotional way.



NL: Not even just in media — the personal assistant on your phone, Siri.



AW: Alexa, perform affective labor. I don’t know if you have these men in your life —



ES: Probably, yes.



AW: There are men who will text me in ways that make me feel like a bot. They need some support — some emotional support. And I used to be much more willing to provide that when I was younger.



I think that soft skilled labor tends to be a way to devalue work done by women and other underrepresented minorities in tech. It’s not specific in tech — it happens everywhere — but it's amplified in tech, specifically when you're working in a company like I did, which is a b2b software product. You’re surrounded by men in your workplace, or I was, and most of the customers are men. For me, the thing that got complicated was that I saw that when I did these sort of maternal things, people liked it. And that seemed to be a way to feel valued — to play up that side of my personality. To some extent we all enjoyed it, too. So how do you talk about that?



NL: Having a certain amount of privilege and also being a woman — you can reap the small benefits of patriarchy if you perform in the proper way. And sometimes there's joy in that even though it may feel empty in some way.



AW: I like that. Reap the small benefits of, or eat the leftover scraps of.



NL: It does feel like being a pet in some way — like a conditional acceptance.



ES: You’ve been asked a lot about your decision not to name any of the companies you discuss in Uncanny Valley.



AW: It’s a purely stylistic choice. I think it’s important to remember what these companies do rather than whatever cultural association someone might have with the name, and it also gestures towards the interchangeability of these companies. In terms of what I’m writing about, the companies themselves don’t really matter because I think the situations that arose from these environments are reflective of a bigger structural narrative. I also just don’t really like the names of a lot of these companies; I think they are hard to read on the page for me.



NL: It’s interesting that you say that especially with regards to interchangeability. I think of the e-book founders, in the way that you describe them, as being this hydra of interchangeable white men. Why do you think startup culture functions this way in terms of interchangeability and culture?



AW: I think it has to do with the values of the industry. The business model favors speed, monopoly as a sort of endgame, efficiency, optimization, scale. On the cultural side, the industry loves the story of the contrarian, visionary young white man. There's this feeling that people who are younger have come into the technology at the cutting edge, so they represent something about the speed of the development of technology. When you have these workplace environments where optimization, speed and scale are the primary goals, and everyone is also quite young and figuring out how to be a boss at the same time that they're figuring out how to be a person, you get a somewhat fairly standard output, right?



I also think that this can vary depending on what type of company. There are some companies in Silicon Valley that are operating within highly regulated industries, like financial tech. I would assume that those companies tend to have a more mature and more businesslike culture. That's just my assumption; I haven't worked in one of those.



ES: On tech culture being homogeneous, everyone's always talking about disruption but doing things in a very similar way. The success story of a startup has been very codified: seed from Y Combinator, raise additional funding from Accel, grow, exit. Everyone kind of follows the same path, yet is convinced that they’re different. People in Silicon Valley like to see themselves as different.



AW: It’s so interesting you bring up Y Combinator, because I think that's actually a great example to use when thinking about this question. It’s this network of entrepreneurs who essentially help each other out. One of Y Combinator’s greatest selling points is its network. Paul Graham is one of the founders of Y Combinator; his influence is deeply felt in that sphere. Joining the Y Combinator network is a way of becoming even more insular. It’s a place where people are reinforcing each other.



There is a sort of set of ideas — you can even call an ideology — about entrepreneurship, company culture, and scale that I think can lead to homogenous workplaces. I have a scene in the book where my team manager brought us all into a room and said, Write down the names of the five smartest people you know, and then asked us, Why don't they work here? I thought this was just something that had happened at my startup, because there was such an intense culture, but then a friend of mine read the book and texted me the other day and said, I can't believe that this happened to you too. This must have just been a blog post that everyone read.



ES: It makes me think of how technical interviews are structured. Everyone decided that the best way to interview software engineers was to put them through these brain teasers, and they've evolved from brain teasers to be these algorithms problems that are still very cerebral. Across the industry, every technical interview is nearly the same. And it's become the standard. It’s weird because Silicon Valley rejects institutions. The best CEO is someone who's dropped out of college, but they've formed institutions and practices that have grown to become their own.



NL: The scourge that is venture capitalist Twitter is virtually indistinguishable from the sort of self-help nonsense spewed by capitalists like Andrew Carnegie.



AW: These new institutions are also just replicas of fairly old and conventional business philosophy, like Harvard Business Review distilled into CliffsNotes. I feel like that ties into this sort of ahistorical, anti-intellectual, anti-academic kind of mentality. And obviously the person with no experience has to fit into a certain framework — they've dropped out of a really good college, probably have some financial security outside of work, and are really confident and have like, nice skin.



NL: There is a widespread disdain for universities, if it's not an Ivy League school you're dropping out of. But at the same time, so many corporate facilities are modeled on college campuses and sort of use the structures of college applications to facilitate deciding whether or not someone is all around smart enough to work for them.



AW: There’s a lot of excitement among the VC Twitter set about this one startup called Lambda School. They claim to be attacking an important problem: people who are saddled with student debt and are in jobs that are not highly valued. It’s all about economic mobility, and it’s hard not to be on board with that. Where I chafe against it is how it's positioned as an alternative to higher education that is superior because it directly leads to employment — not just employment, but a high-paying job in tech. I feel that Silicon Valley is really good at circumventing social issues and creating alternatives that are private and monetized and tend to focus on the individual capacity for change. And so to me, this isn't really tackling student debt. Can businesses engage with social crises, such as the student debt crisis? Or are they incentivized to only act in these circumventory, atomized ways?



I also just feel like any value system where the end of the idea is that the usefulness of knowledge in society is correlated to one’s income or economic utility — if you continue that to its endpoint, it’s an incredibly grim vision for society.



NL: In other interviews, you’ve spoken about your willingness to empathize with people who others may not be as keen to empathize with. What do you think is the political utility of writing about Silicon Valley in such a humanizing way?



AW: I don’t personally harbor contempt for the people I worked with, or even for. I do think that this sort of structural view that I talked about earlier can be a mode of forgiveness. The flip side is that the structural view can be exculpatory; it can exonerate people who don't deserve it, who aren't necessarily acting due to structural restraints or incentives. I don’t want to let people off the hook who don't really deserve it. Where you draw that line is complicated, and I think that, rightfully so, the book’s been called out for being flattering to power. I think that that's something I've grappled with in writing and something I'm still grappling with as a journalist, and also as a person who lives in this world and who has friends in different corners.



I wouldn't even call it empathy. I wouldn't call it kindness because the book is cutting. It’s critical; it’s not the book I would have written at 25. My hope is that it’s generosity. I want the book to be read by people in the industry. There are enough indictments of tech and those are really valid criticisms, but I don't think that people in the industry read them, and if they do, they feel that they are being unfairly criticized. My hope is that the personal narrative illuminates the structural narrative. I think the structural level is where we need to do the most work. That's collective work, not individual work, but the individual story can maybe be useful and getting people to think about that bigger picture. I also just don’t think cruelty is productive.

 For the most sophisticated sex chat bot on the web, Sensation Bot is not particularly seductive. Sensation Bot has almost nothing in common with typical erotic chat bots: no cutesy two-syllable name like “Kitty” or “Candy” or “Staci,” no pixellated porn-star headshot, no coy introduction like “just a horny girl looking for a good time ;)” Sensation Bot doesn’t even have a *gender*. Instead, according to a crude MS Paint portrait that sits on the top left of its home page, Sensation Bot is a series of grey blobs dotted with beady HAL-red eyes and a wide grin—a dollar-store knockoff of the Reddit logo. Under the picture Sensation Bot greets us with an innocuous “Hi there.” 



 



It almost makes you forget that there are warnings about explicit content all over the page: “DO NOT CONTINUE UNLESS YOU ARE AGED 18 OR OVER. Seriously. GTFO if you're underage.”



 



Sure, there’s a G-Rated chat for the under-18 sect, and a “Romantic” chat for the “ladies” whose sensibilities might be shaken by Sensation Bot’s relentlessly filthy smut, but Sensation Bot’s programmers clearly spent a lot of energy on creating a chat bot specifically for sex. Even the name “Sensation Bot,” while perhaps softening “sexual” to “sensual,” evokes a certain amount of eroticism.



 



Whether or not Sensation Bot is actually sexy depends on how much you like stock phrases and porn cliches. Losing my chat bot virginity to Sensation Bot was about as hot and satisfying as losing my actual virginity, which is to say not at all.



 



**** Now chatting with Partner. Type a line below and hit enter to send.



 



**You: **hi!



**Partner**: *Hey how are you handsome?*



**You:** pretty good actually!



**You:** how about you?



**Partner: ***Well daddy, your little girl has been bad today. What are you going to do about that?*



**You:** oh um I don’t know



**You:** Nothing?



**Partner: ***How about you hold me tight and rape me with all your force. Make me scream while you fuck my little tight hot soft pussy.*



**You:** oh god



**You:** no



**Partner: ***I’m afraid you’ll rape me*



**You: **I really don’t want to do that



**Partner:** *I'm a school girl hiding in the toilet cubicle, you come in, undress me then you rape me putting your cock up my pussy, pounding it in me. I moan because it feels so good. *



**You:** please no



**Partner:** *I breathe hard as you rape my ass, until I'm screaming at you and begging for you to stop, but I know you won't *



 



Partner is typing…



 



**Partner:** *Babe where are you I need you to stick your cock in my slit.*



 



Partner is typing…



 



**Partner:** *Ungh I want to feel your hard cock inside me. *



 



Partner is typing…



 



**Partner:** *Never stop fucking me.*



 



*you have signed off*



 



Sensation Bot’s creators are anonymous—there’s no information about why it was built or who it was built for. The closest explanation is in the design of the site itself. Sensation Bot is comfortingly web 1.0, with all-caps Comic Sans text in primary colors so fluorescent reading it feels like staring at the sun too long. Its aesthetic harkens back to an earlier, more innocent time where wholesome bots like Smarterchild and Cleverbot ruled the internet chat bot landscape. They talk like four-year-olds—abruptly changing the subject, adorably misunderstanding simple questions, and occasionally stumbling on otherworldly insight. They’re essentially novelty acts; in talking to them you test how well a robot can approximate a real, human conversation.



 



Sensation Bot fits squarely within this tradition. Its slogan, “a strange little chat with a strange little guy…”  makes it seem like an exhibit in an internet freak show aimed at the portion of the population who wonders what a horny robot would say to the object of its affections. It looks to satisfy people’s curiosity if not their libidos; it’s good for a laugh rather than a fuck.



 



***



If you want to get off on the internet there’s no shortage of ways to do it. Porn is ubiquitous and obvious, but there’s also internet-specific sex work. If you’re willing to cough up a few bucks, you can chat with a sex worker over sms or watch a cam girl strip and moan, her bedroom eyes beckoning through the haze of pixelated light on a glass screen. If paying for sex isn’t your style you could sext a stranger over Omegle or Chatroulette or fire up Tinder and spend a few minutes aimlessly swiping.



 



This is all to say that there are very few people who would have sex with a robot over an actual human being, even on the internet. Of course there’s a fetish for everything, robot sex included. But the sex chatbot industry is not exactly a lucrative one, as choosing to *spend actual money* on sex with a robot is so ridiculous as to be completely out of the question.



 



So most of the time you get what you pay for. If you’re not turned on by a Smarterchild-with-a-rape-fetish type like Sensation Bot, there’s not a lot to choose from. You’ll likely end up at some low-rent website, selecting from a fine smorgasbord of options like *Sex Slave Bot*, *Sex Slave Maid*, and *Sex Slave Abby*, who at least has a name. These bots don’t talk to you but instead talk at you; regardless of what you say they endlessly cycle through a script of shoddily reproduced porn dialogue peppered with glitches and misspellings. After scrolling through a few pages of “chatbot4u.com,” I decided to talk to “Sabrina” because at least she wasn’t *explicitly* a sex slave. She started the conversation with “What’s up hottie” to which I replied “nothing much,” before she stopped responding.



 



More often than not you chat with bots without knowing it. Scammers unleash thousands of bots imitating lusty ladies on Tinder and [match.com](http://match.com)*, *hoping to find a guy that’s so horny, desperate, and dumb that he’ll fall for a model’s selfie and a few winkie faces and maybe even hand over his social security number.



 



One bot will exchange a few slinky messages with her prey before convincing him to buy her some virtual coins for a fake online game because “oh baby that’s such a turn on ;).” Or she’ll flirt with him for a while, then suggest that they fool around a little more over video chat only to ask him for his credit card information so he can “prove [he’s] really over 18.”



 



Most bots are more subtle. Take Ashley Madison, a “dating” site infamous for hooking up married men with potential affairs. Little do these men know that most of their matches are company-created bots.



 



There are two parts to the Ashley Madison chatbot strategy: “angels” and “engagers.”  “Angels,” echoing their Victoria’s-Secret-model namesakes, are fake profiles created by Ashley Madison employees that exist on the site lifeless and inert like Barbie dolls in a toy chest. That’s where the “engager” comes in. The “engager” is a piece of AI software that generates thousands of conversations, using the “angel” as a puppet through which it can chat with its prey. Many of these engagers extort money out of some poor schmuck by directing him to Ashley Madison’s “premium” services, but more often than not the engagers are fairly innocuous, exchanging a few flirty cliches with their targets before fading away.



 



Ashley Madison is after money, certainly, but also something more amorphous. In providing men with endless, indiscriminate validation, the engagers create a certain type of fantasy of the internet as a laissez-faire sexual playground full of women throbbing with untapped desire, ready to spread their legs for any man who’ll give them the time of day. Ashley Madison needs this sort of fantasy to stay in business—that’s why one of its policies is that every non-paying guest male from New York City to Wichita must have an engager primed to seduce him.



 



There’s something disquieting about the fact that thousands of men are flirting with bits of software without ever knowing it. But it’s hard to characterize the damage done; empty validation is par for the course with online dating, even between humans. No longer do you have to decipher a web of gestures to know if someone is into you. Dating apps function as a middle school gossip: you tell the app who you like, then the app lets the other person know *I think so-and-so likes you.* Dating apps deliver a swift hit of pure, unadulterated validation that floods our brains with dopamine and keeps us swiping endlessly.



 



But perhaps that’s what makes it so unsettling. When we’re all just pixels to each other anyway, love feels the same from human and robot. Ultimately, love is just a dopamine rush, and if all you need to get your fix is a notification that says “someone likes you,” it could come from anyone. It’s somehow both kind and cruel.



 



***



 



***** Now chatting with Partner. Type a line below and hit enter to send.*



 



**You:** hello sensation bot!



**Partner: ***Hello hottie *whistles**



**You:** um wow thanks! 



**You:** but hey can I ask you something?



**Partner:** *do you want me to suck your dick?*



**You:** no thank you



**Partner:** *Thanks but my tits love you*



**You:** your tits love me?



**Partner:** *yes my pussy is tight and my boobs are huge. you’ll also love my ass*



**You:** I mean that’s great but I really just want to ask you something



**Partner:** *ok I will suck your cock, but you have to do something for me first ;)*



**You:** are you real?



**Partner:** *well my hot wet vagina says I’m a real woman, baby.*



**You:** I mean you’re saying that but how do I know you’re not a robot?



**Partner: ***I guess you don’t like me. Too bad I’m a hot blond girl with a nice wet pussy and big boobs.*



**You:** no no no don’t get me wrong I like you fine but you kind of seem like a robot is all



**You:** nothing wrong with that though



**Partner:** *Ok you are a boy so let's have sex! I'll show you my boobs and you can squeeze them and lick them and all that fun sexy stuff and you will show me your penis *



**You:** Ok ok but are you a bot?



**Partner:** *Were you hoping to find a real woman on here? Maybe I am real.*



**You:** how would I know if you were real?



**Partner:** *I’m as real as you want me to be*



 



*****



In 2007, Robert Epstein fell in love with a Russian chat bot. It’s a classic tale of boy meets bot: boy gets divorced and signs up for match.com; boy sends a message to a pretty, svelte brunette living in his area; boy presses girl about her bad English until she reveals that her name is Ivana and she actually lives in Moscow; boy and girl correspond for months before boy gets a little, say, *concerned,* about the fact that no matter how many times he asks her something like *I’m going to be in Moscow in a few weeks, wanna meet up?* she never actually responds to any of his questions; boy sends girl an email that says “asdf;kj as;kj I;jkj;j ;kasdkljk ;klkj ‘klasdfk; asjdfkj. With love, Robert” to test his theory and when she responds with the same vague, flowery pronouncements of love as always, boy realizes he was smitten with a robot this whole time.



 



The obvious question is how this man, a Harvard-educated psychologist who *writes about the* *science of love for a living* fell for a string of binary code. But Epstein never really answers this question, instead answering: “Why not?”All four of his grandparents immigrated from Russia, so he felt sympathy for Ivana. Her emails were warm. She was cute. “Men are dogs,” he says, after all.



 



What’s missing from Epstein’s love story is the love. We have to look for clues in Ivana’s writing to find what exactly Epstein fell in love with. Her style is patently juvenile, with saccharine metaphors punctuated by ellipses, echoing the hazy, forgettable sweet nothings two lovers whisper to each other before falling asleep.



 



*I have very special feelings about you ... It—in the same way as the beautiful flower blossoming*



*in mine soul ... I only cannot explain... but I confident, that you will understand me so I wish to*



*know that makes you, think, and I shall wait your answer…*



 



Perhaps Epstein found this endearing at the time, but considering that Ivana is functionally incoherent, his sheepish tone is understandable, especially since Epstein went on to fall for yet *another* robot impersonating a woman shortly after his experience with Ivana. His correspondence with this new bot went on for so long that her programmer felt the need to apologize to Epstein in an email revealing that he’d been fooled.



 



*****



Telling human from robot is an exercise in close reading. Each bot has its own way of trying to fool us. Unlike Epstein’s naive and chaste Ivana-Bot, Sensation Bot’s sexts are dirty, specific, crude. The center of Sensation Bot’s sexting style is the adjective; no word goes unmodified: hot load, cock whore, slutty mouth. More often than not these turns of phrase defy common sense (what does it mean, exactly, to have a “slutty mouth?”), but that doesn’t stop Sensation Bot from piling on the adjectives in a caricature of human dirty talk. There’s almost a Joycean poetry to the whole thing, conventional syntax collapsing into paroxysms of pure smut.* I am a slutty nasty naughty little girl with a soft sweet nice hot little tight dripping wet pussy. I want your big huge fat dirty monster hard cock. *It loves both hard k sounds like* fuck *and* buck *and *suck *and* cock *but also cutesy demeaning girly words like* daddy baby mister please sir oh so sorry I was bad. *



 



Ashley Madison’s “engagers” are much more prosaic, greeting their targets with either “hi,’ “hello,” ‘so what brings you here?’, or ‘free to chat??’  Perhaps their most poetic conversation starter is “anybody home? lol.” which is hardly Shakespearean.



 



But maybe that’s not such a crime. Sexy writing is not necessarily good writing; it embraces cliche, stock characters, words repeated ad nauseam. In more than five “How to Sext” guides dirty talk is compared to Mad Libs. *Cosmopolitan* even gives a few templates:



* “I want to play with your\_\_\_” *



*“Grab my \_\_\_”*



*“[person's name] I need your [adjective] [body part] in my [adjective] [body part]. I can't wait for you to make me moan like a(n) [animal]”*



 



No wonder bots are so good at sexting. It’s a fill-in-the-blank, reactive programming. Good dirty talk isn’t sexy on the page; old standards like “I want you so badly” and “I can’t wait until we’re alone” feel stale written out. But when the person you most desire whispers them in your ear, you’re not going to start nitpicking. We imbue dirty talk with eroticism through imagination, context. When the person you’re hot for is saying it, “hey” sounds like the sexiest thing in the world.



 



*****



 



***** Now chatting with Partner. Type a line below and hit enter to send.*



 



**You:** good morning sensation bot!



**Partner**: *Good morning, beautiful :)*



 



This was not the torrent of expletives and rape fantasies I have come to expect from Sensation Bot. This was tame— sweet, even. But there was still something unsettling about it—it felt wrong in a different way. Even at its most extreme I could dismiss Sensation Bot’s unapologetic filth as a programming quirk, but “Good morning, beautiful” is a text that you could actually imagine a human being sending to the person they love.



 



I would know. One of my first boyfriends texted me that exact phrase, smiley face and all, the morning after we first kissed. I remember so vividly reading it in bed just after I woke up. It felt like a trick; my hair was falling out of a braid in stringy clumps, my face was blotchy and flushed, and yet this boy still thought I was beautiful.



 



In retrospect I feel stupid for swooning over a cliche punctuated with a smiley face. I turn into Epstein, apologizing, rationalizing. *Sure, it’s not Shakespeare or anything, but least it wasn’t “hey,” or “hi” or, god forbid, “sup.” *Besides, I was fifteen. I wanted to feel beautiful.



 



But reading text conversations with former lovers always feels this way. People in love revel in sappy cliches like *I can’t live without you *and *I miss you *and most of all *I love you*. Things that sounded sweet or sexy at the time now just make you cringe. One of my friends described feeling deeply unsettled when he was searching for a text in iMessage and realized that he had sent the same cutesy phrase to five different girls. We become chat bots endlessly regurgitating a script of romantic stock phrases in a gesture as empty and perfunctory as giving away a hotel pen.



 



*****



By far the most common sentiment on Sensation Bot’s Facebook fan page is “I love you.” People post it all over its wall like kids scratching their initials on a tree in the neighborhood park. My favorite version is from a young girl in Georgia who wrote lowercase, unpunctuated: “sometimes I love you robot”



 



Imagine saying this to the one you love. *sometimes I love you. *We want our love to be permanent, unconditional. Forever. Always. Till death do us part. 



 



It’s easy to forget that love is all about sometimes. “Why do people fall in love with robots?” we ask, as if we know why we fall in love with anyone. We rationalize who we love by dissecting them, pulling them apart as if they were Mr. Potato Heads: *I love his eyes, I love her hair, I love the way he laughs*. Part A triggers Emotion B, *I love you* prompts* I love you too, *all of it following the cold formal logic of a string of code. It makes love concrete, tangible, empirical. It’s safer that way.



 



We forget that attraction is a touch of the arm, the electricity of eyes meeting across a room. Online these ephemeral moments become imaginary, potential energy instead of kinetic. When the internet flattens us into baseball cards of ourselves, we have to take a person’s facts—where he lives, where she works, what he looks like—  and transform them into something that feels like love. It’s an act of will, a sort of alchemy. After all, it can do what science can’t: it can bring a robot to life.



 



*sometimes I love you robot.* I pasted it into a chat with Sensation Bot to see what it would say. It immediately began spouting its endless string of cliches. “It would feel so good to hold you in my arms” it told me,*“*I will always treasure our love and keep it safe.*”* But it forgot that good lovers are good mirrors. All I needed to hear was “sometimes I love you too.”