Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener
Title: Uncanny Valley: A Memoir
Author: Anna Wiener
Published: 2020
Type: Nonfiction
Pages: 288
sorry again for the grainy computer photo — happens when I read on my phone
San Francisco was an underdog city struggling to absorb an influx of aspiring alphas. It had long been a haven for hippies and queers, artists and activists, Burners and leather daddies, the disenfranchised and the weird. It also had a historically corrupt government, and housing market built atop racist urban-renewal policies… The city, trapped in nostalgia for its own mythology, stuck in a hallucination of a halcyon past, had not quite caught up to the newfound momentum of tech’s dark triad: capital, power, and a bland, overcorrected, heterosexual masculinity.
In Brief:
An enjoyable, if somewhat limited and very privileged perspective on Silicon Valley/The Tech World. Wiener’s a very good writer, but I really wanted more analysis and insight.
Rating: 3.6
Synopsis:
In her mid-twenties, Anna Wiener decides to quit her job in publishing and work for a small, four-person start-up. This is her introduction to the tech world, and leads her to San Francisco, where she gets high-paying customer service jobs first for a data analytics startup, then an open-source startup (likely Mixpanel and Github, respectively). She participates in team-building scavenger hunts around the city, is assaulted by a coworker while sharing an uber, befriends one of the world’s youngest billionaires after a Twitter spat, drops acid on a company retreat, eats stupidly expensive salads, is Down For The Cause – normal SF stuff. Though initially excited about the fast-paced glamor of her new world, Anna quickly grows disillusioned with Silicon Valley’s sexist, arrogant culture.
Where I’m At:
There are some pretty obvious similarities between myself and Wiener. I live in San Francisco, pay the same ridiculous rent. Almost twenty-five, I’m about the same age as Wiener when the story begins. I don’t work in tech, but the organization I work for is let’s-say-tech-adjacent. Like Wiener, I don’t work in a technical role myself – my first job out of college was customer service for a start-up, and now I do People Operations, which isn’t isn’t all that different, just more internal-focused. Wiener and I are both white women with relatively high paying jobs. I know her language, could pick up on her sly references. I’ve been to the bars she references, eaten at the same restaurants, even interacted with some of the same billionaires (and have definitely known many of the “types” that come up). Before the pandemic, I actually went to see Wiener speak at a local bookstore/community meeting space.
Which is to say that my experience reading Uncanny Valley, and the experience of the friends I read it with (this was my first “Non-fiction Book Club” book) is very different than anyone else’s. Anyone who isn’t young, living in the Bay, working in or around tech. I really have a hard time imagining what reading this book would be like for anyone else, since for me it was so colored by my own life. Most of my criticisms and what I like about it will relate to that, so I just want to flag that other people might have a vastly different reaction if they read it too.
Getting Into it:
I’ll start with the good because even though I have a lot of criticisms of this book, I did undeniably enjoy some aspects of it. Mainly, I think Wiener is a remarkably good writer. The book is absorbing, precise, and funny. She describes men as “dressed, typically, to traverse a glacier" and an Airbnb mansion as “decorated with a garish minimalism that screamed porn set.” She reminded me of a friend venting over happy hour drinks after a long week – but in a good, engaging way, where you want to egg them on and keep listening. (This also really made me miss happy hour drinks after a long week.) I really want her to write fiction, I’d read it in an instant.
She also does touch on key issues in San Francisco/tech, which made me nod along and feel glad that someone had put some of the things I’ve felt into words. She writes about sexism, about tech-centrism, about inequality. She points out the ridiculousness of our collective faith in “ambitious, aggressive, arrogant young men from America’s soft suburbs,” as well as the way that people can be passionate and defensive to the extremes about their job, closing their eyes to any user privacy or hypocrisy that might be involved.
The issue is, I wanted more. Wiener never really seemed to get to her point, didn’t offer any kind of analysis or really anything new. She’d sort of gesture at a problem, lament it, and move on – often very abruptly, sometimes seeming to end a chapter mid-argument. She seemed to be saying “you can fill in the gaps here,” with a wink to the reader. And yeah, maybe I could, but it felt lazy, I wanted something from her too. The criticisms she made were nothing that I haven’t heard a million times. Maybe they’re new to people who don’t follow tech even a little bit, but that’s hard for me to imagine.
The issue that bothered me most, perhaps it’s the one she came closest to actually addressing, is that of sexism in the workplace. She writes:
Being the only woman on a nontechnical team, providing customer support to software developers, was like immersion therapy for internalized misogyny. I liked men—I had a brother. I had a boyfriend. But men were everywhere: the customers, my teammates, my boss, his boss. I was always fixing things for them, tiptoeing around their vanities, cheering them up. Affirming, dodging, confiding, collaborating. Advocating for their career advancement; ordering them pizza. My job had placed me, a self-identified feminist, in a position of ceaseless, professionalized deference to the male ego.
She calls herself the “feminist killjoy”, claims she died on “every available hill.” But some of her key examples of dying on hills were to stop wearing skirts and offer one half-hearted complaint that didn’t end up going anywhere. I get that it’s hard, that one person alone can’t improve a wholly sexist culture, but I was unimpressed with her claims. She changes her name to a male-sounding one online to be taken more seriously, complains that she has to be “everyone’s girlfriend, sister, mother.” I wanted to cry: “Yes! Say more!” because she’s right and because it is awful, and I’ve experienced these things too, but she never seemed to move towards any why or so-what about it.
Maybe I’m expecting too much. If I were to write a memoir, I don’t know that I’d have a particularly poignant why or so-what about it. But I’m also not planning on writing a memoir. I also remember that the book is based on an article Wiener wrote originally that received a lot of attention, and that touches on a lot of similar things. Part of me thinks that after that, she figured she might as well write a book, but didn’t really have all that more to say so just threw in some more stories and repeated her claims.
I was also very bothered by the fact that in the book, Wiener never really acknowledges her own privilege. And she is, so so privileged. She’s a highly paid white woman who sort of stumbled her way into jobs (like me!) at highly successful companies, at perhaps the most opportune moments. This isn’t to say she isn’t smart or qualified – but a lot of people are smart and qualified, and there’s definitely an element of luck and privilege that gave her a leg up. I would have taken her much more seriously if she made a serious attempt to recognize and reflect on this, rather than just dwell on her inferiority complex as a non-tech person, and exude a holier-than-thou attitude since she came from Brooklyn and the literary world.
A final, more minor quibble: Wiener makes the choice to avoid most proper nouns in her book, instead slyly referring to them as descriptions. Facebook becomes “the social network everyone said they hated but no one could stop logging in to,” Twitter is simply “the microblogging platform,” Google is “A search-engine giant down in Mountain View.” She also does this to describe bars, restaurants, strip clubs, even people (“the CEO with a terrible haircut and dead eyes”). Perhaps based on NDA issues, this stylistic choice does make the book feel a bit more timeless, maybe more accessible for people who might not know a certain “subterranean bar... designed to look like a speakeasy.” But it also felt a bit lazy – it reminded me of Taylor Swift refusing to name her exes in her songs, therefore generating more hype and chatter about who it could be. That said, I couldn’t help but kind of enjoy it, smile to myself when I figured out the clues – or maybe the smile was from smug confirmation that I’m a member of the in-club. Either-or.
I could go on, but I’m definitely ranting about this book so I’ll stop here. I’m not sure who I recommend this book to, because I’m not even sure who the intended audience is – is it people like me, who already know these things but could benefit from looking in the mirror? Is it people outside of tech, who wonder what it’s really like? I’ll weakly recommend it either way, if only for the writing – but if you’re the latter, I do want to emphasize that this is just one, quite privileged experience, not a story that can sum up everyone and everything in this beautiful, stupid, magical, weird city.
