Uncanny Valley

Uncanny Valley by Anna Weiner

As seductive and stylish as the tech industry she chronicles, Anna Weiner’s memoir Uncanny Valley looks from the outside in and the inside out at startup and tech culture in 2010s Silicon Valley. Originally working as an underpaid assistant in the precarious New York publishing industry, Weiner moved to Silicon Valley because, even though she doesn’t want to admit it to her counterculture, artistic friends, “I was ambitious...I wanted my life to pick up momentum, go faster” (35). Once in San Francisco (or, in what she quickly comes to realize is the husk of a place that was once San Francisco and was now in the process of becoming something else entirely), Weiner becomes swiftly less of an outsider and more of an insider, though she maintains her salty, observant perspective. As a woman among gobs of men and as a non-technical worker in an industry that lionizes engineers, Weiner’s sense of existing on the periphery is strong even as she writes self-deprecatingly of the way she metaphorically scrolls down and agrees to Silicon Valley’s terms of service without actually reading them. While she spends some time castigating companies and anonymous workers for racist and misogynistic practices, policies, and comments, this is not a polemic. It is very clearly a memoir written from within the experience of a European Jewish US American, cisgendered, straight perspective: even as she writes of being condescended to, she is unflinching in detailing how easily she fell into the blindly capitalist and blithely “color blind racist” world of Silicon Valley, and all that it proffered to her.

Loosely tracking from a position of almost feverish starry-eyedness to one of increasing—but still almost ambivalent—critique, Uncanny Valley lacks an entirely satisfying arc. Weiner’s choice to end the book on the eve of the 2016 election felt like too little too late in terms of political consciousness—though perhaps this was her point—but also opportunistic, borrowing the drama of Trump’s election to compensate for the lack of an innately satisfying conclusion. It is within the memoir, which sometimes reads like an endless millennial essay complete with a repetitive but fashionable sentence style, that Weiner’s real moral and human sensitivity shines through: “The endgame was the same for everyone: Growth at any cost. Scale above all. Disrupt, then dominate. At the end of the idea...a world freed of decision-making, the unnecessary friction of human behavior, where everything...could be optimized, prioritized, monetized, and controlled....Unfortunately for me, I liked my inefficient life. I liked listening to the radio and cooking with excessive utensils; slivering onions, detangling wet herbs...Engaging with strangers. Getting into it” (135). An impressive, imperfect, enraging, and utterly readable first book.