Uncanny Valley: A Memoir

Written by Anna Wiener

Narrated by Suehyla El-Attar

‘Joan Didion at a startup’ Rebecca Solnit ‘Impossibly pleasurable’ Jia Tolentino ‘This is essential reading’ Stylist

At twenty-five years old, Anna Wiener was beginning to tire of her assistant job in New York publishing. There was no room to grow, and the voyeuristic thrill of answering someone else’s phone had worn thin.

Within a year she had moved to Silicon Valley to take up a job at a data analytics startup in San Francisco. Leaving her business casual skirts and shirts in the wardrobe, she began working in company-branded T-shirts. She had a healthy income for the first time in her life. She felt like part of the future.

But a tide was beginning to turn. People were speaking of tech startups as surveillance companies. Out of sixty employees, only eight of her colleagues were women. Casual sexism was rife. Sexual harassment cases were proliferating. And soon, like everyone else, she was addicted to the internet, refreshing the news, refreshing social media, scrolling and scrolling and scrolling. Slowly, she began to realise that her blind faith in ambitious, arrogant young men from America’s soft suburbs wasn’t just her own personal pathology. It had become a global affliction.

Uncanny Valley is a coming of age story set against the backdrop of our generation’s very own gold rush. It’s a story about the tension between old and new, between art and tech, between the quest for money and the quest for meaning – about how our world is changing forever.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Release date: Jan 14, 2020
• ISBN: 9780008296889

Anna Wiener

Anna Wiener is a contributing writer to The New Yorker. She is the author of the memoir Uncanny Valley, which was a New York Times bestseller and selected as one of the New York Times top ten books of 2020. She lives in San Francisco.

Reviews for Uncanny Valley

[bangerlm · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Very well written, interesting, engaging and the audio version is well narrated. I can imagine it has been a bit frightening releasing this memoir. Stylistically some people complained about her use of aliases, but I liked it, and can see why legally it is probably prudent.

It is a bit of a coming of age story, and at the beginning, she is so optimistic, it made me question if I have wasted opportunity, haven't cashed in my B.S. in Computer Science for as much as I could have. But as her story progressed I felt more affirmed in the decisions I have made.

I had read Ellen Ullman's Life in Code last year, and it is interesting how somewhat parallel narratives look decades apart.

[castlelass · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Anna Wiener’s memoir about her experiences in working for fledgling technology companies in Silicon Valley. She leaves a job in publishing in New York and moves to San Francisco for a job at a start-up in “big data” analytics. She also works for an open-source software development company. Weiner’s outlook changes significantly during her four years in Silicon Valley. She starts out somewhat naïve and optimistic but over time, she begins to see the downsides, which ultimately leads to a change in careers.

The focus of the book is the shift in viewpoint from the idea that technology is contributing to progress to that of using data for marketing, sales, and mining personal information. Along the way, Weiner describes the male-dominated culture and the mindset that employees should be willing to sacrifice their personal lives for business goals. She is forthcoming about her own weaknesses and employs plenty of self-deprecating humor. Highly recommended to women in the tech industry and those interested in the current trends in data analytics.

[bornanalog · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Wiener fleshes out some of the details of a story that most people are familiar with only in its broad outlines: the social and cultural damage wrought by a tech sector that has tried--often not very hard--to mask its hunger for profit behind a veneer of social utility. Many of the elements here have in fact been described in detail elsewhere: the toxic culture of bro-grammers, the treatment of women in tech, the messianic delusions of boy-king founders, the pernicious effects of venture capital throwing millions of dollars into the laps of people in their teens and early twenties who in many cases dropped out of college. Wiener's strength is her ability to weave all this into a prose that crackles; I haven't felt like a book would furnish me with this many dinner party one-liners since reading Zeisler's "We Were Feminists Once." Like Zeisler, Wiener is not emptily snarky; at regular intervals the humor will pause and moments of genuinely moving insight into our current human moment emerge.But the comparison with Zeisler occurred to me for another reason. One thing I want from a memoir is not simply to learn about the world or events that the memoir describes, but about the author. And this book leaves you with a lot to ponder about Wiener. The most problematic aspect for me was her claim to be a feminist. I have no doubt that in her own mind she considered herself to be so at the time. But it appears to be the kind of feminism that I see all the time in many of the students I teach: a vague individualized notion of inherent rights. Wiener is in fact a perfect illustration of what Zeisler describes as the emergence of consumer feminism that sells a notion of individual empowerment rather than collective action. When it comes to acting like a feminist, rather than just believing she is one, Wiener's actions are consistently at odds with her beliefs. As a reader, you can play a game where you count the number of times she uses some variant of the phrase "I waited for them to notice me; they never did" or list the instances where she otherwise passively waits for things to happen to her. Despite, by her own account, being subject to repeated victimization as a woman and seeing other women endure the same, there is little in the way of trying to build a collective response.Also fascinating is the degree to which Wiener's narrative highlights some of the larger cultural ills of which the startup culture is just one facet. Chief among these is a truly extraordinary level of wasteful consumerism. Another fun game with this book is to count the number of times Wiener reports buying a service, device, or item of clothing that by her own account she never ends up using. One of her chief concerns is with the degree to which so much of our social media tech has become addictive mainly because it was deliberately designed to be so (the analytics firm she worked for rolled out a package that they called--with the complete lack of irony in which Silicon Valley specializes--Addiction). You would think, then, that she might have had cause to reflect on the extraordinary reliance on alcohol and cigarettes that fuels both the work and social scenes she inhabits.Lastly, while she is legitimately and thoughtfully critical of the entitlement bubbles in which so many tech workers are encased, she doesn't seem particularly aware of the dynamics of the broader culture of which she is a part. She is a bicoastal denizen and the lives of she and her friends in New York and San Francisco have a lot in common: regular recreational drug use (Ecstasy, Acid, etc), artisanal this-that-and-the-other, chi-chi restaurants, services for entirely made-up problems, obscure bands, performance art, etc. I want to be very clear, that I don't myself have a problem with any of these things. But it only takes a little imagination to realize that there are large swathes of the country where someone would learn that, say, a guy has a job as a "cuddle therapist" providing emotional solace for older men, and think WTAF? One of the unintentional side-effects of this book, then (unless, I guess, you are a twenty-something living in the New York and San Fran fantasy worlds) is to help us see some of what divides us at the moment. The daily life that she describes, even the "healthy" version, is one that is so far removed from the reality of much of the US population as to be taking place on a different planet.These may seem like criticisms, but they aren't really; hence the high star rating! It is Wiener's openness and honesty in describing her life that makes these issues visible. My only regret is that she herself doesn't seem to notice them and reflect on them which would have made for an even better book. While I think this book will remain valuable as an anthropological account of startup culture, I suspect its real value going forward will be its portrayal of a certain type of smart, compartmentalized, analytical but not terribly reflective twenty-something product of late US capitalism.

[akbouterse · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Gosh I really enjoyed this book! I liked the writing style and elements that others didn't enjoy. I liked the fact that her sociology undergrad degree really seemed to shine through in the way she approached her thinking about tech and Silicon Valley. Wiener is clearly an excellent writer. The way she can craft a sentence is just technically and artistically very impressive and I would love to read some more of her writing for the New Yorker.

I was slightly nervous going into this even though I know I am very interested in the topic. I rarely read memoirs and when I have read books about Silicon Valley they usually focus on specific companies or the economic system that built them and were not as much about one persons individual work experience. Because the writing was so phenomenal, I fell write into it. I think there are some parts of Wiener's writing style that some people may find annoying like that fact that she does not name the companies but just describes them and leaves the reader to try to figure it out.

I think if you're a person like me who is somewhat obsessed with the machinations of Silicon Valley I think you'll enjoy getting to read from the perspective of someone who worked in that environment and has some critiques of how the whole system works. I would definitely recommend this book.

[josephking6602 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Well-done ... enjoyable & really funny; it would have been better, ibelieve, if she had more character development. Overall, recommended

[kitlovestea · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

It was interesting to read the experiences of someone who had very little interest in technology outside of everyday use, as she navigated the innards of start-up culture. I definitely got the impression the book was talking to people who similarly didn't have any interest in or familiarity with the sector beforehand, though, and as such, I didn't really read anything new to me. It would be a pretty good introduction to the bizarre cultural bubble of that particular chunk (both in space and time) of start-up culture, though.

Recommended for anyone interested in the tech sector's cultural influence, but who may not necessarily be sure where to begin.

[bostonbibliophile · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Interesting enough, well written but no big surprises. I read at least one book of California history each year and this counts. Recommended for people interested in the tech industry, San Francisco or womens' memoirs. Like I said no big surprises but worth your time. Very fish-out-of-water, NYCer tries on the West Coast. Spoiler alert: it doesn't work out.

[bobbieharv · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I'd read her essay in I think it was the New Yorker, so much of this was familiar and the end seemed padded. An interesting perspective, however, about male power, especially in tech, and the resulting diminishing of women. I enjoyed the personal side about her relationships.

[aditkumar-303749 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The best I’ve read about this period in San Francisco to date, but it seems like the passage of time and expanding to book length diluted the bite of the n 1 essay

[rivkat_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Working at several tech startups in the last ten years, Wiener writes about the difficulties of being a highly educated but ultimately disposable cog, and a female one at that, trying to find a workplace to love while the owners never invest the same amount of care in their employees or users. As has often been reported, it’s striking how Wiener tries to avoid any proper names (so Facebook becomes, repeatedly, “the social network everyone hates”); I’m not sure it adds a lot to the book but it does tie into her point that she spent too much time looking for stories when she should have been asking about systems.

[pomo58 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Uncanny Valley: A Memoir by Anna Wiener is a personal glimpse at the world of big tech when start ups were happening at what should have clearly been seen as an unsustainable rate. First, for all the "bros" who are slamming this for being limited to what she experienced and for addressing how she felt about what was happening around her, this is a freakin' memoir. Look that word up. This isn't a research based expose, this is a memoir. Are you that stupid or that insecure? Okay, back to your regularly scheduled programming.Wiener was definitely not the typical start-up employee, whether in gender or in training. As she made her way she had what I think any rational person would have, conflicting thoughts and feelings. Wow, these benefits are great, wow, these people are truly vile and juvenile. Wow, they could really do harm to a lot of people with their lack of either ethics or basic human compassion. But, again, wow, these perks are great. It is real easy to stand outside and pretend we would have either turned our back and walked away or, conversely, gone all in on the vile culture that has, indeed, helped to dismantle our democracy. Wiener lets us inside her head as she navigates her life.Yes, this is written rather episodically, but I think for a memoir that is focusing on her experiences in a toxic environment it works. There is, to be sure, plenty of humor. But underneath everything is the foundational bro-culture that gave emotionally stunted boys far too much money and power and now we are all paying the price.Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via Edelweiss.

[chasidar_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Not sure what all the fuss was about. It was okay but it didn't actually say anything.

[tytania-2 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

It kept me reading. I liked the coy refusals to name any company, making us feel like we might be living in a similar but other world: the "social network everyone hated," the "search engine," the "litigious corporation based in Seattle." At one point she not-name-drops my favorite blogger, "a libertarian economist" and describes him in a not altogether flattering light. I wrote to tell him about it, and he responded, yes, "the book is fiction in a number of respects." She's not the only one who can be coy. My interest waned a bit when I realized that nothing was really going to happen.