It had become a global affliction.' And so she left San Francisco and returned to Brooklyn.įor more on this important subject, see my two essays on 'Techtopia' ( part 1 and part 2), which include my reviews of a dozen books on our technological society. I understood my blind faith in ambitious, aggressive, arrogant young men from America's soft suburbs as a personal pathology, but it wasn't personal at all.

Strike three.Įventually Wiener 'started to realize we were swimming in the Kool-Aid.' In fact, she observes, 'an entire culture had been seduced. Then, as a perceptive critic, she calls out the many incantations of the subculture's techno-optimism, wealth creation, inflated self-importance, and especially its insider jargon (unicorn, ecosystem, disruption, work fast break things, ask forgiveness not permission, pitch deck, pivoting, first-mover advantage, reducing friction, growth-hack, and my favorite, Down For the Cause). As a woman, she experienced the misogynous bro-culture that is endemic in Silicon Valley. Wiener is a humanities person who calls herself 'affectedly analog,' and her three jobs were in the non-technical end of these startups (eg, customer support), which is to say that she was at the bottom of the technocratic meritocracy. I actually find it hard to imagine a person so young being so perceptive about her experiences, and then having the remarkable skill to write about it with insight and sardonic humor. I did my dissertation on a sociologist of technology (1985), and lived at ground zero of Silicon Valley for twenty-five years (Palo Alto), and concur with the effusive praise.

This best-selling memoir about her four-year experience was named a 'top ten' book by numerous outlets like the NYT, WaPo, NPR, LA Times, Elle, and Amazon. She later moved to a data analytics company, and then to a startup that hosted software development. Anna Wiener, Uncanny Valley: A Memoir (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), 279pp.Īnna Wiener was twenty-five when she left her poorly paying job in the New York publishing industry that always felt 'on the brink of collapse,' and moved to San Francisco, where she took a job at an e-book startup for $20 an hour and no benefits.

Uncanny valley a memoir review