Uncannily Like Home

In 1970 Masahiro Mori coined the term "Uncanny Valley" to refer to the point, after a steady climb in empathy toward robots, where people begin to revile the bots for looking too much like themselves. Author Jenn Shreve in the nov/dec issue of Adbusters put together a wonderful story about how the valley can appear in the opposite way, when our lives become more and more robotic.

"I started to wonder what it would be like if the uncanny valley was an actual place. Who would live there? And what would it take to finally push them to the point of revulsion? When I started to create this fictional place, I found it was not all that different from the gated, suburban communities many live in now. My nameless protagonist wakes up one morning to find himself disgusted with his life. The story is his attempt to cut through the unreality of his life and finally live and feel like a real human being again."

The story is now released in pdf.

Thanks to Boing Boing