I was very interested to learn more about all of this!
One thing that frustrated me was everything was coded and I didn’t know which social media or which big company the author was talking about. I had my guesses but was never sure.
It spans from the last turn of the decade almost until the last presidential election.
The book does explain the tech terms nicely, and it was cool to see how algorithms for things like Instagram were developed. I did learn a lot.
It did also feel a little long, but painted a nice photo of behind the scenes of a startup in San Francisco!

When we first meet Anna Weiner in this memoir, she is an underpaid Brooklynite trying to eke out a decent living in publishing. She and her friends are trying to figure out if the shabby glamour of book publishing is worth the low wages, the long hours, and the very unclear career path forward. So when she has the opportunity to jump ship and move into the tech world, she jumps. She is skeptical about San Francisco and the tech world, but seduced by high salaries and the optimism of tech. For years, she works in offices where people wear hoodies and ride ripsticks. She sells consumer data to companies, she moderates discussion boards that grow increasingly sexist, antisemitic, and racist, she befriends billionaires. Part of the pleasure of this memoir is an inside look at truly bonkers work life (she doesn't name names presumably because of NDAs, but a lot of companies aren't that hard to figure out). The other part is much more chilling - how a fast-scaling, male-driven, hyper-competitive bubble industry has gotten so much power that it's become one of the most powerful organizing principles of life in this country. We're at a point where you can't really opt out of the internet, smartphones, monolithic tech companies. A really engaging read, but one that will have you very freaked out about our future.

Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley has one of the best book titles of the season. The title is a term from robotics that hit the mainstream with reviews of the unsettling animated Polar Express in 2004: it refers to an inflection point on the curve of emotional response to things that appear human. Highly abstracted images, like a cartoon, get positive responses, as do authentic humans. Representations that come close to being human but don’t quite make it land in the uncanny valley, and appear repellent.

In this case, the term’s a play on Silicon Valley and its startup culture, where Wiener spent several years working. The implication is that its denizens are almost human…but not quite. The term also, however, applies to the book’s proximity to memoir. It’s literally a memoir insofar as it recounts the author’s lived experiences, but never quite connects the dots between her personal journey and the environment it moves through.

It’s understandable, of course, that Wiener might want to hold herself at a distance even in the pages of her own book, since a recurring motif of her account is the commodification of personal information. One of the author’s tech jobs is at a company that helps other companies analyze their users’ behavior so as to best exploit it for profit. In perhaps the book’s most chilling moment, she reveals just how easy it was not just for those companies to peer into their users’ lives, but for employees of her own third-party company to do so.

“It was assumed,” she writes, “we would only look at our customers’ data sets out of necessity, and only when requested by customers themselves; that we would not, under any circumstances, look up individual profiles of our lovers and family members and coworkers in the databases belonging to dating apps and shopping services and fitness trackers and travel sites.” For an author who came from, and subsequently returned to, the New York writerly world, that kind of experience is bound to give a new meaning to “omniscient third-person.”

The result, though, is an account that feels coolly distanced from both its author and its subject. In a wistful passage, Wiener writes about the peers who declined to follow her remunerative path. “My friends’ world was sensuous, emotional, complex. It was theoretical and expressive. It could, at times, be chaotic. This was not the world that analytics software facilitated. It was a world I wasn’t sure I could still call mine.”

Yet, she remained in her adopted industry for years. She started dating a man who worked in robotics and was contractually forbidden from telling her how he spent his days; and befriended a CEO who interrupted one dinner to casually close a deal that turns him into “one of the world’s youngest billionaires.”

A deal for what company? You can figure it out if you really want to, but one of the book’s conceits is that it virtually never names any of the companies Wiener worked at, interacted with, or even patronized as a mere customer. The reasoning might have been to distance Wiener’s story from the name-dropping, logo-popping environment she describes (and there may have been legal incentives to do so), but the effect is to turn the book into a giant crossword puzzle with clues of varying difficulty.

You can probably name “the home-sharing platform” and “an on-demand ride-sharing startup” and “the search-engine giant” and “the microblogging platform,” and no extra points for identifying “a renowned private university in Palo Alto.” It might be a little more challenging to identify “a gaming company that made a viral farming simulator,” and you may or may not have had recent cause to wake up on a Sunday morning and slug “a viscous liquid jacked up with electrolytes — sold as a remedy for small children with diarrhea.”

Affectations aside, though, Uncanny Valley provides an insider’s view of the decade our utopian online aspirations came crashing down to earth. The book ends with that crash, as the 2016 election makes uncomfortably clear that platforms described as inspiringly transformative or, at worst, purely neutral ultimately facilitated the rise of untethered right-wing populists with the potential to cause almost unfathomable damage to human civilization.

No amount of venture capital can close Pandora’s box now, and Wiener acidly argues that it was always naive to think that it could. The world, she suggests, has fallen prey to the technically dazzling but morally empty machinations of businesses that couldn’t even root toxic masculinity from their own ranks, let alone solve the problems of society more broadly.

It’s a stark vision, and an important observation, but the book remains tough to parse because its author holds herself so persistently at a remove from the world she willingly inhabited for much of the 2010s. The details pile up, but the broader picture remains elusive — which is relevant because Wiener is our proxy in this uncomfortable environment. If we could understand why this world was able to hold her, we could better understand its hold on us.

When she does look inward, she arrives at a bracing insight. “My obsession with the spiritual, sentimental, and political possibilities of the entrepreneurial class,” she writes, “was an ineffectual attempt to alleviate my own guilt about participating in a globally extractive project, but more important, it was a projection: they would become the next power elite.

“I wanted to believe that as generations turned over, those coming into economic and political power would build a different, better, more expansive world, and not just for people like themselves.”

In this her first book, Anna Wiener has nailed the world of tech culture from her vantage point of being an insider yet feeling like an outsider. She moves to San Francisco after being a Brooklynite for most of her 25 years and experiences the dislocation blues acutely like most people. For those of us on the outside, it's not really clear what her high paying job entails or what the startup produces. For that matter, what do any of the startups she eventually works for do to amass the enormous paydays and perks that their employees enjoy.

What this reader got from this book was not a deeper understanding of those roles, but of what it meant for a book loving person finding herself working for an industry that is attempting to dismantle that industry, and what it means to be a woman in a mostly male-driven industry. I have been a resident of the Bay Area for over 35 years and found her depiction of San Francisco to be dead on. Two friends who have lived here since the early 70's pointed out that it "wasn't their city any more," thanks to the impassable streets, the endless construction, the disappearance of businesses that had occupied the same locations for decades.

"The city, trapped in nostalgia for its own mythology, stuck in a hallucination of a halcyon past, had not caught up to the newfound momentum...". Making way for housing, restaurants, and bike stands that cater to the tech community -- "... I was stuck in an industry that was chipping away at so many things I cared about." Weidner's insecurity in never quite feeling a part of this world doesn't keep her from being a solid observer.

Anyone interested in the start-up culture of Silicon Valley will want to check out this debut from Anna Weiner, who left a job in book publishing in her mid-20s to join a big-data company in San Francisco. Weiner delivers a compelling and sharply written reflection of her experience in an industry that can be both promising and reckless. Part memoir, part insider’s report, this timely release serves as an intimate and candid critique of our digital age.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for sharing an advance copy of this upcoming memoir. I know it’s getting a lot of buzz on 2020 reading lists. Although memoir is not one of my favorite genres, I found this interesting and had no problem finishing it. As another reviewer stated, it’s about first world problems, for sure, which makes it a little hard to take at times. And despite the author’s attempt to come to terms with herself about why she stayed in an industry she eventually realized she didn’t like, I still had trouble understanding some of her feelings and decisions about her bosses and coworkers. Overall, I still found it a bit self-indulgent, but that’s how I feel about most memoirs. I don’t think I have the patience for the navel-gazing.

An insightful look into the mindset so many startups seem to be suffering from, valuing efficiency over operational security. There were many times I found myself thinking, "That sounds eerily like my office." However, the author failed to justify why she continued to work in the Bay Are when she seems to despise it, and the harmful effects of tech outside of security concerns.

The author's sojourn in Silicon Valley is simultaneously disturbing and banal, like an episode of "Black Mirror." Wiener works in customer service for two different tech firms, after starting her working life in publishing in New York City, then washing out of an e-book startup. When she tries to bring her book-loving personality and natural talents to the e-book world, she intercepts a chat in which she is pilloried for "learning, not doing." This is actually viewed as a drawback.

When this creative soul is transplanted to Silicon Valley to work for young, hyper, tech dudes presiding over startup companies, rolling in millions in venture capital and crippled with Messiah complexes, Wiener must do customer service 7/365 on her own phone. She is obliged to go on weird corporate retreats. She feels devotedly loyal to the CEOs and tries to ignore the growing warning signs that all is not well, in San Francisco, in modern tech, and in her own soul. Her life evolves pretty much as expected and she experiences discrimination in this men's world. After all, women are "good at" customer service by nature, aren't they? It's not like she's writing code or anything. I feared that these egotistic males who wanted to "move fast and break things" would break Wiener as well, but, as one would guess from the fact that she has written a memoir, they didn't.

Some readers may observe that this memoir enumerates strictly first-world problems: poor baby, earning six figures.

I, however, was inspired to wonder, along with the author, why we let these young men take over our entire lives and invade our privacy to such a massive extent. Are they worth either the power or the billions that we have given them? Are their cool tools worth it? How much power do they really have? The new Twenties should mark the end of our dreamy infatuation with these companies, their products, and the men who get preposterously rich creating them. This insightful memoir could not be more timely.

Uncanny Valley

Anna Wiener is a young woman with an English degree and no technical experience. Her memoir starts as she enters the heady and often overly optimistic world of start-ups. Sky high budgets, charismatic founders, lots of misogyny and non-diverse hiring make for a work bubble that glorifies the technological boom and downplays the downsides of the new world.

Wiener is good at evaluating her own process and beliefs as she moves from job to job as a support person, a role that doesn't garner a lot of respect even though she refuses to hide in the background of the companies where she works. She discusses with care and detail how the tech economy can isolate people and push out the middle class in cities where tech takes over.

This is book is compulsively readable and asks readers to consider whether a predominantly online life has value or instead leaches life from our lives.

Highly recommended.

A phenomenal read – I blitzed through this, in no small part thanks to the sharpness of Anna Wiener's writing and her witheringly perceptive assessments about Silicon Valley. She turns a critical eye not only toward brogrammers and venture capitalists, but also toward herself, and the way she interrogates 21st-century tech culture and her own complicity in its myth-making is what makes this book such a relentless and riveting read. I think if I had read this while I was still living in the Bay Area, I would've had a mental breakdown, but in hindsight, it has helped me sort out some of my conflicted feelings about San Francisco and its surrounding tech bubble.

This memoir of working in Silicone Valley was very enlightening. The author deftly showcased the culture and it was nice that she had an outsider (of sorts) point of view. Not a flattering view but one that puts the reader in the world.