25 Quotes by Anna Wiener

I speculated that perhaps they were just lonely. They were of course not lonely. They were focused and content. All three were clean shaven and had good skin, they wear shorts that were always crisp, they were in long term relationships with high functioning women with great hair, with whom they exercised and shared meals in great restaurants that required reservations.

if personalised playlists were full of sad singers and song writers, I could only blame myself for getting algorithm depressed.

The city, trapped in nostalgia for its own mythology, stuck in a hallucination of a halcyon past, had not quite caught up to the newfound momentum of tech’s dark triad: capital, power, and a bland, overcorrected, heterosexual masculinity.

It was like an entire generation had developed its political identity online, using the style and tone of internet forums.

They dressed for work as if embarking on an alpine expedition: high-performance down jackets and foul-weather shells, backpacks with decorative carabiners. They looked ready to gather kindling and build a lean-to, not make sales calls and open pull-requests from climate-controlled open-plan offices. They looked in costume to LARP their weekend selves.

Instead of being an artificial intelligence, I was an intelligent artifice, an empathetic text snippet or a warm voice giving instructions, listening comfortingly.

My impulse, over the past few years, had been to remove myself from my own life, to watch from the periphery and try to see the vectors, the scaffolding, the systems at play. Psychologists might refer to this as dissociation; I considered it the sociological approach. It was, for me, a way out of unhappiness.

Warm laundry, radio, waiting for the bus. I could get frustrated, overextended, overwhelmed, uncomfortable. Sometimes I ran late. But these banal inefficiencies – I thought they were luxuries, the mark of the unencumbered. Time to do nothing, to let my mind run anywhere, to be in the world. At the very least, they made me feel human.

Tech, for the most part, wasn’t progress. It was just business.