Uncanny Valley
by
49/99
Critics' Rating Index
6/99
Readers' Rating Index
91/99
Scholars' Citation Index
99/99
Volume of Reviews
93/99
Volume of Reader Ratings
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About This Book
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-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.
Reviews
"She is not preoccupied with making herself look good or clairvoyant, refusing the temptation to rise to the tenor of jeremiad."
"Equal parts bildungsroman and insider report, this book reveals not just excesses of the tech-startup landscape, but also the Faustian bargains and hidden political agendas embedded in the so-called 'inspiration culture' underlying a too-powerful industry ..."
"The big-picture takeaways of Uncanny Valley are compelling, though they are not Wiener's alone ..."
"Her real feat is exposing her own persistent failure to register the big picture."
"Wiener's admission that she did not like to think about the societal implications of her choices is inadequate, and the degree to which aesthetic judgments supersede ethical or moral considerations grows wearying ..."
"Wiener's storytelling mode is keen and dry, her sentences spare — perfectly suited to let a steady thrum of dread emerge ..."
"But though Wiener's feelings of betrayal are strong, Uncanny Valley is not an embittered tell-all about San Francisco start-up culture."
"Uncanny Valley may be a defining memoir of the 2020s, and it's one that will send a massive chill down your spine."
"It withholds a lot — mostly the names of people and companies — and replaces them with generic formulations: 'an app for coupon-clipping,' 'a search-engine giant down in Mountain View.' It's as if the book is trying to switch our brains back to factory settings ..."
"The entrenched sexism of Silicon Valley is one of several endemic ills that Anna Wiener examines at unsparingly close range in Uncanny Valley, her absorbing, unsettling, gimlet-eyed memoir of time served in tech ..."
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