I usually avoid reading about tech, but the excerpt on n plus one made me laugh out loud. That said, Wiener has a sharp wit, with some good turns of phrase. Instead, this felt to me like watching a Hollywood movie caricaturing Wall Street. Why are they this way? Why does the tech ecosystem reinforce such insular behavior? Wiener seems more interested in condemning tech than understanding the underlying psychology.įor a non-fiction book, I wanted more nuance. Everyone thinks they're crushing it, they don't ever think about the consequences. For example, almost all the characters are reduced to tech bro archetypes. The narration felt very distant, like someone who's chipping away at a core truth, but can't quite get at it. Just when you think a subplot is developing it peters out, or is muted by a lack of elaboration (eg Pizzagate). I never felt that invested in the narrator (Weiner), or what would happen in the broader world she's inhabiting. But this felt too much like a long-form essay extended into a book, with little narrative arc. Wiener is a very good writer, and I really liked the original essay that inspired the book. Unsparing and incisive, Uncanny Valley is a cautionary tale, and a revelatory interrogation of a world reckoning with consequences its unwitting designers are only beginning to understand. With wit, candor, and heart, Anna deftly charts the tech industry’s shift from self-appointed world savior to democracy-endangering liability, alongside a personal narrative of aspiration, ambivalence, and disillusionment.

Part coming-age-story, part portrait of an already-bygone era, Anna Wiener’s memoir is a rare first-person glimpse into high-flying, reckless startup culture at a time of unchecked ambition, unregulated surveillance, wild fortune, and accelerating political power.

But amid the company ski vacations and in-office speakeasies, boyish camaraderie and ride-or-die corporate fealty, a new Silicon Valley began to emerge: one in far over its head, one that enriched itself at the expense of the idyllic future it claimed to be building.

She moved from New York to San Francisco, where she landed at a big-data startup in the heart of the Silicon Valley bubble: a world of surreal extravagance, dubious success, and fresh-faced entrepreneurs hell-bent on domination, glory, and, of course, progress.Īnna arrived amidst a massive cultural shift, as the tech industry rapidly transformed into a locus of wealth and power rivaling Wall Street. In her mid-twenties, at the height of tech industry idealism, Anna Wiener-stuck, broke, and looking for meaning in her work, like any good millennial-left a job in book publishing for the promise of the new digital economy. The prescient, page-turning account of a journey in Silicon Valley: a defining memoir of our digital age

Uncanny valley by rachel anna wiener