February 2021
Favorites of the month: Uncanny Valley and Shakespeare in a Divided America:
What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future
Imagine: You have just landed on a strange, alien planet. You had to leave Earth – not because you wanted to, but because you weren’t making a livable wage; there was no opportunity, no future, no pathway to success. This new planet promises everything Earth cannot: Money, stock options, perpetual sunshine; a fresh start. But there are critical drawbacks. You will have a tough time understanding the language and an even tougher time trying to fit into the culture. There will be no gray – no nuance, no abstraction – only numbers that can be tracked, systemized, and monetized; life will be all about “progress,” though it will ill-defined and always subject to erasure. In pursuit of acceptance, you will try to change and remold yourself, but everyone around you will make you feel like a valueless and utterly expendable token.
In her exceptional breakout memoir, Uncanny Valley, Anna Wiener takes us to such a planet, recounting her experiences as a native New Yorker transplanted to Silicon Valley’s booming tech bubble. After graduating college and working for a couple of years at a small literary agency in New York, making virtually no money and on the brink of existential crisis, Wiener moves to San Francisco, finding herself at an analytics startup and later GitHub (described sub-rosa as “a public platform with millions of open-source software projects”). When she arrives to the Valley, Wiener experiences significant culture shock: “I’d never been in a room with so few women, so much money, and so many people champing at the bit to get a taste.” Half the time, she cannot understand what people are saying, with her friends and colleagues favoring a martially inspired and comically literal lexicon filled with invented words like “blitzscaling” and “upleveling” and “co-execute.” As a woman in a world filled with men, she finds herself suspended in a state of “ceaseless, professionalized deference to the male ego”; she suppresses her conscience to avoid being seen as an overly sensitive (and an overly burdensome) “feminist killjoy.”
Looking back, Wiener writes that Silicon Valley seemed like a giant “F YOU” to convention. It was run by men who “had dropped out of school and become their own bosses” – men who believed that mere curiosity qualified them as twenty-first century Messiahs who “knew how to fix everything.” Fancying themselves as the irrefutable “good guys,” these men saw disruption and innovation as fundamentally beneficial things. They marketed their products as liberalizing and compassionate tools for connection, community, and democracy. They ignored the bad actors as peripheral “edge cases,” dismissing the problematic social implications of their technologies as unrelated and marginal fringe.
As she paints Silicon Valley as a monochromatic, male-dominated, and ego-laden Neverland, Wiener offers a prophetic glimpse into the world the tech industry is creating (and manipulating) for us. Reflecting a fetish of “measurable self-betterment,” Wiener writes, this world promises an optimized life “without friction” where everything is accessible and where no time is wasted on “silly” things like food, entertainment, transportation, or even connection with other humans. Sources of inspiration and community are ubiquitous, and yet they feel intangible, empty, and dispensable. So motivated by cultivating the perfect “public image” or “personal aesthetic,” we become like disembodied and immaterial avatars of our own selves, unable to find grounding or truth unless otherwise aided (usually, in Wiener’s case, by alcohol or drugs).
In this sense, Wiener’s “uncanny valley” is not so much a strange, alien planet or an oracle into a distant future, but a mirror of our own present. Through Wiener’s eyes, the world of Silicon Valley can seem laughably unworkable – like having a robot as a therapist, doctor, or boss. But in reality, the world of Silicon Valley is becoming increasingly and alarmingly our own. As tech infiltrates, imbues, and replaces, Wiener seems to be telling us, the line between the real and the artificial will begin to fade; as we rely more and more on robots, we will risk becoming them too.
In the early nineteenth century, the theater served as New York City’s central meeting place: Seats cost less than a quarter, and with no such thing as advanced bookings or a prohibitive dress code, everyone was free to partake in the thrills of the stage, including the plays of William Shakespeare. By the 1840s, theaters like the Bowery, the Broadway, and the Olympus had become the one place, wrote Alexis de Tocqueville, where American “minds, as well as fortunes, [were] brought more nearly together.” As the very materialization of Tocqueville’s democratic vision, these establishments used Shakespeare’s plays as transcendent tools for connection and, in doing so, rendered the Bard as the foundation of our country’s common language and common creed.
In his exceptional book, Shakespeare in a Divided America, scholar James Shapiro offers a deep and expansive look into this language and creed, positioning Shakespeare’s plays as a source of “rare common ground” and, perhaps, an antidote to our divisions. From our nation’s founding, when Loyalists and Patriots each appropriated Hamlet’s famous conjecture – “To be, or not to be” – as license for war, Shapiro charts the long and ongoing history of Americans’ affection for Shakespeare, framing his works as a powerful – and a uniquely American – type of “secular scripture.” Shapiro tells us that, for many early Americans, the United States was seen as the place where Shakespeare’s “inspiring legacy came to rest and truly thrived.” Certainly, while the English were “slow to recognize the appalling grandeur of the genius of her immortal bard,” reported the New York Herald in 1877, Americans “read those lessons of the poet and witness her historical plays” with more depth and resonance, having not been “trammeled” by certain “monarchical surroundings.” Aiding early Americans’ adoption of the Bard as their own was their peculiar “linguistic heritage.” According to Henry Cabot Lodge, writing in 1896, Americans were better able to absorb Shakespeare’s plays given that American English was (theoretically) more comparable to Shakespearean English. The language that the explorers “brought with them to Virginia and Massachusetts,” Lodge wrote, “was…the language of Shakespeare, who lived and wrote and died just at the period when these countrymen of his were taking their way to the New World.”
As Shapiro situates Shakespeare as a key ingredient of American identity, he discusses the role his works have played in our cultural life, revealing the many ways in which they have been either invoked to conjure our better angels or weaponized to aggravate our most vulnerable fault lines. Abraham Lincoln, for example, often alluded to the “crown / That rounds the mortal temples of a king” (Richard II), keenly understanding the weighty implications of leadership. As Lincoln shouldered the tremendous burden of reconciling the sin of slavery with the sanguinary costs of civil war, he identified with the torment experienced by characters like Claudius and Macbeth, for whom life was “but a walking shadow, a poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage.”
Of course, while Lincoln had an “extraordinary” appetite and affinity for Shakespeare, so too did his assassin, John Wilkes Booth. “When Caesar had conquered the enemies of Rome and the power that was his menaced the liberties of the people,” Booth wrote in the spring of 1865, “Brutus arose and slew him. The stroke of his dagger was guided by his love of Rome.” Recently, in 2017, Breitbart founder Steve Bannon echoed Booth’s literal interpretation, invoking the Ides of March as he dreamt of toppling Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell – the supposed “Julius Caesar” of Washington’s political “establishment.” That same year, Central Park’s Delacorte Theater staged a controversial adaptation of Julius Caesar, in which Caesar was not-so-subtly depicted as Donald Trump. Shapiro tells us that the play’s director, Oskar Eustis, worked hard to incorporate different perspectives, maintaining that the assassination was not to be seen as a cathartic “liberation,” but a “horrible tragic event that leads to terrible results.” “Like drama,” he said on opening night, “democracy depends on the conflict of different points of view. Nobody owns the truth. We all own the culture.”
Throughout his book, Shapiro includes these variances of interpretation (and application) to show that Shakespeare is not “owned” by any one person or group. Shakespeare, he writes, was himself the “product of an Elizabethan educational system that trained young minds to argue in utramque partem” – that is, on both sides. As such, his plays have a way of catering to competing perspectives, reflecting the truth as a varied, ambivalent, and experientially determined spectrum. Shapiro presents this potential for interpretation as an inherently good thing and, in doing so, advances Shakespeare as a vehicle for unity. The plays of Shakespeare, he writes, are the “common property of all Americans” and “a touchstone that unites highbrow and lowbrow” as well as left and right.
Shakespeare in a Divided America is an excellent, fascinating, and deeply moving book, encapsulating so much of what makes Shakespeare so immortal and so universal. To this day, more than ninety percent of high schools in the U.S. teach his plays; and each summer, nearly 150 different Shakespeare festivals are held in each of the fifty states.
Of course, the fact that James Shapiro is an English professor at Columbia University, a member of the board of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and the Shakespeare Scholar in Residence at New York’s Public Theater compels us to consider his arguments with a grain of salt. The number of popular books, movies, and musicals that find (at least part of) their roots in Shakespeare – i.e., Brave New World, The Lion King, She’s the Man, 10 Things I Hate About You, West Side Story, etc. – is undoubtedly remarkable, but to say his plays are socially curative (or even widely accessible) may be a bit of a stretch. Shapiro does an excellent job of unearthing the many ways in which Shakespeare has been interpreted, celebrated, and reimagined throughout our history, proving, in a sense, that we can all have a piece of the Shakespeare “pie.” Nevertheless, he does not provide a compelling example of Shakespeare’s twenty-first century applicability or appeal, nor does he ever clearly articulate how Shakespeare can help us heal. Shakespeare’s plays are brilliant, fun, thought-provoking, and disruptive, but I do not know if they are as accessible or as unifying as they once were. And while I agree with Shapiro that we should encourage everyone to have a piece of the Shakespeare pie, I do not believe that “openness to interpretation” is always an inherently good thing. Not unlike the Bible or the Constitution, Shakespeare’s plays have been used as basis for anti-miscegenation and anti-immigration laws, toxic masculinity, domestic abuse, and presidential assassinations. Surely, ground that is “common” is not always solid, let alone good.
That being said, while Shapiro does not clarify how Shakespeare can help us “mend our bitterly divided land,” he does prove – brilliantly and unquestionably – that Shakespeare is an elemental, irrevocable, and ever-revelatory part of our cultural DNA. He isn’t going anywhere any time soon, and we shouldn’t want him to.