Wiener was skeptical of all the chipper sloganeering she encountered, though she depicts herself as someone who didn’t relish the prickling sense of alienation and tried hard to fit in. She worked for a few months at an e-reading app that seemed safely connected to her literary interests, though she noticed that the CEO misspelled Hemingway in his pitch to investors (adding a superfluous “m”) and accidentally typed a private message into a companywide chat room complaining that Wiener was “too interested in learning, not doing.” She moved to the Bay Area, joining an analytics start-up and later an open-source platform.Īnna Wiener, author of the memoir “Uncanny Valley.” Credit.

It was this promise that initially sustained her. At the literary agency, she was subject to the low pay and genteel exploitation of a shrinking industry even more alluring than the offer of a better salary was tech’s “optimism and sense of possibility,” how it “promised what so few industries or institutions could, at the time: a future.” Money was certainly part of her original decision, but not all. In her extraordinary new book, “Uncanny Valley,” Anna Wiener recounts what made her, a 25-year-old woman with an “affectedly analog” life in New York City, abandon her job at a literary agency in 2013 to work for tech start-ups, and what eventually - five years later - made her leave the industry. Two decades ago, the novelist and former software engineer Ellen Ullman anticipated that the internet would bring about the “suburbanization of existence” - a libertarian idyll or libertarian hellscape, depending on how you might fare in an increasingly private and privatized world. The journey from feeling to wanting to procuring used to take deliberation and time now the experience has been squeezed into a seamless moment of scrolling and clicking, without any obligation to interact directly with another human being. Even at the end of a decade marked by surveillance capitalism and Russian trolls - a period of time when techno-utopianism curdled into disillusion - Silicon Valley has shown itself more than capable of delivering on one of its core promises: a frictionless convenience, at least for those who can afford it.

Uncanny valley a memoir review