Uncanny Valley
Ratings71
Average rating4
15
Ratings71
Average rating4
'Joan Didion at a startup' Rebecca Solnit 'I've never read anything like Uncanny Valley ' 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.
Reviews with the most likes.
Having just made the switch from the publishing industry to the tech industry last year, this one hit home (granted, I am in a very different kind of tech – but still). Weiner takes the jargon and conventions of the tech industry (which I'm afraid I have adopted in my day-to-day), and holds it up to the light to show how empty that language is – and how empty emotionally, and maybe ethically, startup culture can be. Reading more like a really long essay in the New Yorker, this has less of the usual intimacies of a memoir, which makes that subtitle feel like a misnomer. Truly, this is a journalistic expose of the machismo driving the explosive development of Silicon Valley, and how that un-tempered, white-male energy has created what one should conclude are some pretty hefty ethical and societal problems. It is poginant, well-written, and troubling. I'd certainly recommend it, especially for anyone in tech.
In the future, when people ask me what it was like working in Silicon Valley, and why I left, I'll be able to point them to this book, which contains a some of the answers. My own time overlaps with the time covered in the book, and I found myself nodding in agreement many times.
I'm not surprised this book doesn't have a higher rating on here, because it presents a controversial view of the tech industry and if you disagree with that view then it's easy to find reasons to dislike the book. That being said, I thought this book was great. The writing is a little stylistic, but in a good way, and the author is clearly very smart. She clearly put a lot of thought into this book.
One sentence synopsis... A Silicon Valley outsider's astute observations about tech industry in all it's high-minded (and sometimes absurd) dreams and delusions. .
Read it if you like... ‘Silicon Valley' the show, Joan Didion, Jia Tolentino. If you have worked in the Bay Area you'll find yourself nodding and laughing at a lot of Wiener's descriptions. She's got a large dose of bitter ex-New Yorker in her, but taken with a grain of salt this memoir is a pretty specific, detailed representation of a specific time to be living in San Francisco. .
Further reading... the book is written so that all the company and character names are obscured. I found it entertaining to read up on what companies Wiener is actually writing about. My best guess is the book start up was Oyster and the developer loved acquisition was GitHub, but if anyone's read it and has another idea I'd love to know.
