Uncanny Valley

A Memoir

By: Anna Wiener

Narrated by: Suehyla El-Attar

Length: 8 hrs and 45 mins

Publisher's summary

A New York Times Best Seller

"Narrator Suehyla El-Attar has a strong voice for this memoir of a woman's journey into the mostly male world of tech start-ups in Silicon Valley. She is energetic, funny, and swift while telling the story of Anna Wiener's acculturation from book publishing in Manhattan to the dot-com boom in San Francisco." (AudioFile Magazine)

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice and a January 2020 IndieNext Pick. An Amazon Best Book of January. One of Vogue's 22 Books to Read this Winter, The Washington Post's 10 Books to Read in January, Elle's 12 Best Books to Read in 2020, The New York Times' 12 Books to Read in January, Esquire's 15 Best Winter Books, Paste's 10 Most Anticipated Nonfiction Books of 2020, and Entertainment Weekly's 50 Most Anticipated Books of 2020.

"A definitive document of a world in transition: I won't be alone in returning to Uncanny Valley for clarity and consolation for many years to come." (Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion)

The prescient account of a journey in Silicon Valley: A defining memoir of our digital age.

In her mid-20s, 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.

A Macmillan Audio production from MCD

©2020 Anna Wiener (P)2020 Macmillan Audio

Critic reviews

New York Times Book Review Notable Books of the Year, 2020

Chicago Tribune Best Books of the Year, 2020

Los Angeles Times Holiday Books Guide, 2020

Esquire Magazine Best Books of the Year, 2020

Amazon.com Best Books of the Year, 2020

Vogue Magazine Best Books of the Year, 2020

"Narrator Suehyla El-Attar has a strong voice for this memoir of a woman's journey into the mostly male world of tech start-ups in Silicon Valley. She is energetic, funny, and swift while telling the story of Anna Wiener's acculturation from book publishing in Manhattan to the dot-com boom in San Francisco.... El-Attar's easy narrative style keeps us listening." (AudioFile Magazine)

Paradigm Enriched

Born in 1947, TV didn’t arrive in my little valley until I was 9. Rotary wall, party line phones, inter... what? But I now have a fancy phone that I can ask questions and get lucid answers, WiFi runs my home and Entertainments. Anna, bless you for filling in much for me; a paradigm changer for sure. Thank you for your crisp, clear, vocabulary challenging, witty writing. Well done!

Wonderful insight lovely writing

Some pearls in this book, especially in the beginning. The “bingo” episode is priceless. Wonderful view into Silicon Valley from a woman’s perspective and from the perspective of someone who hasn’t drunk the kool aid. In the end, a reminder of the value of three dimensions.

Wonderful narration

Great book and content - really thought provoking and the narrator (Suehyla) did a fantastic job to bring the book to life

Extremely well-written, unabashed narrative which induces thought provoking insight

Defiantly original. Anna takes on an outsider’s “insider” view on what it’s like working in Silicon Valley’s hottest start-ups and living inside one of the most esteemed “ecosystems” of our times.
I also really enjoyed the thought-provoking questions about the role of technology in society and what influences millennial desire among others, that she poses through satirical prose.

excellent tale

Provocative and insightful. a tale about power, money, idealism, and the seduction of a generation. About wanting to belong and the price of the tech world on its employees.

It's a Memoir, Not a Diatribe

This is a beautiful, beautiful book. I enjoyed it so much. Anna Wiener writes of her own life, and how curiosity took her from a role as personal assistant in the New York's publishing industry to the center of Silicon Valley life. She writes so personally, exposing all her own naïveté and fumbly social skills without holding anything back.

Perhaps, judging by the title, I had expected this to be a breathless exposé of the wrongdoings of the tech industry. Certainly, we've seen lots of those. But this book isn't that. It's just a memoir, and, because of that, it is so much more enlightening than a book that has a point to hammer home. I had also thought that it might be about how artificial intelligence and robotics can unnerve people when it gets to be too similar to how humans look and act (known as the "uncanny valley") but it has nothing to do with that either.

Instead, it is a well-written story of a woman who comes to the Silicon Valley boys' club looking for work, finds it, performs it well and wonders, the whole time, what is really going on in this strange place. The tech industry's infamous misogyny is on display, to be sure, but only because Anna experiences it firsthand and is affected by it, as are the women around her. But I like that the book never devolves into a diatribe, partly because the author herself holds her own point of view so gingerly, always willing to question it and change her mind. The vignettes of her dating life or the struggle to find affordable living in San Francisco just make the story more charming, and do not detract from the study of one of the most important industries of the past fifty years. If anything, they reinforce it.

I have worked in the tech industry for almost forty years, part of that in the Valley, and I found myself going through a similar transformation to what Anna experienced. But it was still a new experience for me reading this book (listening to it), because she is so much more contemplative, introspective and questioning than I'll ever be. And that makes for a great book. Are the giants of Silicon Valley a) heroes who are delivering a new economy and lifestyle for us all, or b) are they nothing more than the latest version of robber barons, or c) are they just a bunch of self-important goofballs clowning around and lucking into money while they build stuff that is largely useless and won't have any kind of lasting importance? Anna Wiener thinks to ask these questions. And I'm really glad she does.

Also - kudos to Suehyla El-Attar for the narration. She brings this important, personal story to life in every line. I actually wrote her name down in case I need someone to narrate my next audiobook. She's really good.

Prose is solid; author is a jerk

So tiresome and yet so well written. The author would be charming if not so insufferably critical and self-indulgently lacking in agency.

Perhaps the best audio book read I've ever heard.

A solid funny overview of what Silicon Valley and the tech industry has become.

Outstanding narrator made this a pleasure to listen to

Damn that was good.

Read or listen to this book. It’s like clearing the fog and seeing the world you’ve been living in. I realized I’d been hoping that the world, and the powerful men who run it, were better-managed, more just, more curious, more complex than they are. It’s scary to admit that meritocracy is a cover for self-interest. It means no one is in charge and planning to benevolently save the world.

It’s also an honest account of work as a young woman, underestimated, exploited, and treated as expendable in both the stodgy publishing industry and in tech.

This book asks what else is possible once we realize how little truth there is to the stories powerful people tell about their genius or righteousness.

Engaging must read!

I enjoyed listening to this book. it was a lot to digest! The tech industry is like any other corporation, turning a profit. its just younger players making the same deals as their corporate fathers before them.
That's what businesses do.