Contributed by Megan Richard
This book offers a real look inside the workplace and the type of world we live in. It shows the life of a woman who decided to leave a glamorous job to a start-up company and the struggles she faced after doing so.
Book Synopsis
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.
Reviews
To her credit, the author conveys the allure of working in a vibrant, growing industry--widespread optimism, good compensation, the feeling that your work might actually matter--while also laying bare the tech industry’s delusions of grandeur, ethical blind spots, and embarrassingly cult-like self-understanding. - Amazon Reviewer
Interesting insight into the gold rush years of Silicon Valley and the generation that witnessed it. The world changed on their watch. - Amazon Reviewer
Wiener’s storytelling mode is keen and dry, her sentences spare―perfectly suited to let a steady thrum of dread emerge. - Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times
The quality of Weiner’s on-the-ground observations, coupled with acuity she brings to understanding the psychology at work, makes the book illuminating on a page-by-page basis. - John Warner, Chicago Tribune
About the Author
Anna Wiener is an American writer, best known for her 2020 memoir Uncanny Valley. Wiener currently writes for The New Yorker as a tech correspondent.
Source: Amazon and Wikipedia
