A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES‘S 10 BEST BOOKS OF 2020. Named one of the Best Books of 2020 by The Washington Post, The Atlantic, NPR, the Los Angeles Times, ELLE, Esquire, Parade, Teen Vogue, The Boston Globe, Forbes, The Times (UK), Fortune, Chicago Tribune, Glamour, The A.V. Club, Vox, Jezebel, Town & Country, OneZero, Apartment Therapy, Good Housekeeping, … Club, Vox, Jezebel, Town & Country, OneZero, Apartment Therapy, Good Housekeeping, PopMatters, Electric Literature, Self, The Week (UK) and BookPage. A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and a January 2020 IndieNext Pick.
“A definitive document of a world in transition: I won’t be alone in returning to it for clarity and consolation for many years to come.” –Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
The prescient, page-turning account of a journey in Silicon Valley: a defining memoir of our digital age
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. 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.
Anna arrived amidst a massive cultural shift, as the tech industry rapidly transformed into a locus of wealth and power rivaling Wall Street. 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.
Part coming-of-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. 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.
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.
more
I’ve been looking forward to reading this book for four years, ever since I read an excerpt in n + 1. It did not disappoint. This book is not an exposé, though it did detail some things that shocked me. It feels like a bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story that details both the joy and the disillusionment of starting your career. Wiener not necessarily trying to take any kind of definitive stance on tech, or tell anyone how to fix the lack of diversity, inequality, sexism, and other problems that have been a fixture in startup culture. The book is an attempt to describe what it looks like to be a woman in tech, and particularly a woman in a non-technical role working in Silicon Valley.
Uncanny Valley is one of the best books I’ve read in awhile — a funny, engrossing, and penetrating memoir of Anna Wiener’s experience deep inside the tech industry. A book that feels like it could become the decisive account of Silicon Valley culture in the 2010s.
I’ve never read anything like Uncanny Valley, which is both a searching bird’s-eye study of an industry and a generation, as well as an intimate, microscopic portrait of ambition and hope and dread. Anna Wiener writes about the promise and the decay of Silicon Valley with the impossibly pleasurable combination of a precise, razored intellect and a soft, incandescent heart. Her memoir is diagnostic and exhilarating, a definitive document of a world in transition: I won’t be alone in returning to it for clarity and consolation for many years to come.
Described as ‘Joan Didion at a startup’, Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener recounts the author’s time working in Silicon Valley and chronicles the unique ecosystem she found there.
While it is a truth universally acknowledged that every female non-fiction writer of quality will at some point be compared to Joan Didion, Wiener doesn’t shrink under the comparison. She tackles the contradictions and fallacies that exist at the heart of startup culture and exposes the cynicism and thoughtlessness of many of its highest paid workers with a clear eye and a sharp wit. The anecdotes recounting the raging sexism, the callous treatment of staff, the enormous wealth gap in San Francisco and the casual disregard for what people are using their tools for are funny – albeit not in a ‘ha ha’ way, more in a ‘laugh so you don’t cry way’. In many ways Uncanny Valley is also a story about the modern workplace more broadly. I personally found the war between Wiener’s anxieties about achieving power, prestige and financial security and her desire to do work that made a difference and to be valued for her empathetic and emotional capabilities to be highly relatable.
All in all this is a captivating and engaging memoir that gives us a rare insight into the people behind the internet.
Uncanny Valley is an addictive combination of coming-of-age story, journalistic memoir, and brilliant social critique. This is a stunningly good book. I loved it.
The writer has a first-person experience as a woman working in Silicon Valley in the early 21st century. She is self-deprecating while being snarky, emotional while being truthful. She makes stunning observations about how social media and other technologies have become an addiction, and she makes an excellent argument for thinking of technology companies as business ventures no different than railroads and airlines. Elevating them to spiritual or artistic endeavors is not only wrong-headed, but possibly dangerous. It gives them too much power, and as she points out with anecdotal evidence, the young, white, anti-intellectual men of the tech industry are not people we should trust with our private thoughts or dreams. They are just people who want to make lots of money.
Nails Silicon Valley ethos and life.
Anna Wiener gives us a birds eye view into the start up culture of Silicon Valley Where data is king and those controlling data can measure consumer behavior and even create what should be desired. The writer states those in their twenties and thirties bored unable to walk away from direct deposits were so unimaginative .There was so much potential in Silicon Valley much of it pooled around ad tech .The author writes as someone who preferred above board processes it scared the shit out of me .It also inspired hope. One must ask the question sometimes isn’t the random ,chaotic experimentation more delightful than the perfectly programmed algorithms
Absolutely ripped through this book in one sitting (on a long haul flight). An engrossing and thought provoking account of a young woman’s experience working in tech.
A fascinating fly-on-the-wall account of the rarified, yet dysfunctional world of Silicon Valley start-ups and the tech bros that run them. Her writing is great and the book feels more like a novel. I highly recommend.
A fantastic haunting memoir about what really goes in Silicon Valley and who is really reading your emails…
Uncanny Valley is a generation-defining account of the amoral late-capitalist tech landscape we are fatally enmeshed in. With grace and humor, Anna Wiener shows us the misogyny, avarice, and optimistic self-delusion of our cultural moment, wrapped up in the gripping story of a young woman navigating the blurred boundaries of a seductive world. Insightful, compelling and urgent.
Like Joan Didion at a startup.
A rare mix of acute, funny, up-to-the-minute social observation, dead-serious contemplation of the tech industry’s annexation of our lives, and a sincere first-person search for meaningful work and connection. How does an unworn pair of plain sneakers ‘become a monument to the end of sensuousness’? Read on.
Uncanny Valley is a sentimental education for our accelerated times, a memoir so good it will make you slow down. Is it too much to say that every sculpted page will be studied by future generations? (No.) Anna Wiener is the Joan Didion of start-up culture and then some.