Uncanny Valley
2020 • 9 pages
Ratings52
Average rating4
15
Ratings52
Average rating4
‘Joan Didion at a startup’ Rebecca Solnit ‘Impossibly pleasurable’ Jia Tolentino ‘This is essential reading’ Stylist
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.
