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) 

Could have been better

Well-written and wonderfully read, but what a whiney memoir it turns out to be of an exciting time and place, and also — odd for so good a writer — how inadequate to what she apparently imagines as what should be her rage. I am sorry to say this, and I wanted more from the book.

What's good? Her style is well-wrought, strong throughout. And the reading its terrific.

What's not so good? Well, there is a problem with the narrator: Nothing is quite right for her, and, as she confesses repeatedly, although she is treated very well given her job, she is never convinced that this work in the tech trade is what she wants to do, or that her life or her trade has the virtue she thinks it should have, or that she is any good at it, or that the tech ethos is anything but corrupting. She avoids consideration about the societal implications of her choices, and her condemnations tend to the aesthetic or merely descriptive. She sees a homeless man wearing a sweatshirt from the company she works for, a beggar in swag. “It was the city’s socioeconomic gap personified, I said. It felt even more significant that the man in the light-rail station was black, and not just because San Francisco was losing its black population at a rapid clip. To my knowledge, the company had just two black employees.” Her co-worker listens to her story, described as "a novelistic apparition, a hallucination," and says, “I wonder whose it was … We’re not supposed to give away the hoodies.” I suppose that that's honest in its descriptiveness, and so I should be appreciative; but I wanted more. Stylistically, I found that "To my knowledge, the company had..." not a judgment but an afterthought, an "oh yeah and ..." moment.

Other quibbles: Her verbal pantomime with corporations becomes mere virtue signaling, tossing rocks from behind a fence — Facebook is the “social network everyone hated,” Edward Snowden is “the NSA whistleblower who was back in media,” Microsoft is the “highly litigious Seattle-based software conglomerate.” Her catalogue of offenses — discrimination, antisemitism, racism, sexism — become, in effect, mere lists, as she writes them down but does not engage with them except ironically and as things that make her uncomfortable. In fairness, at this point in the book, which is the second half of it, she is burned out. Not from the work, which she describes as work from home barely getting out of bed, but from her own lack of engagement in it, her uncertainty about what she wants to do with her life.

So, I say it again: the book is wonderfully written, witty through most of it, but the main character is surprisingly more self-centered and shallow than I had expected, and becomes wearying. It is callow when it should be engaged and fierce. Its style sometimes lapses into vacuous word games. All in all it could have been a much better effort for someone with her obvious writing talent. I look forward to her next book, however, which I am sure will be better.

Well written, yet pedantic and boring.

I found the content to be uninteresting.

The most fun I had was tracking down all of the unnamed companies.

Mixpanel - Analytics Company
Github - Open Source Company
Seattle Litigious Company - Microsoft
Social network everyone hates - Facebook

I was and am there

As a user experience designer living in San Francisco, this book 100% resonated with me. Anna Weiner perfectly captures the yearning, ennui and sense of disillusionment my friends and I now share, the feeling that this magical city is slipping away, and the continuing seduction of tech’s promise. Her portrait of startup culture as experienced by the semi-marginalized is startlingly accurate and beautifully written.

The point?

I’m not thoroughly entertained by this book and perhaps I’ve missed the point. A long commentary or critique of work in SF start up culture with snarky asides but little in the way of substance, insight, or suggestions. Not sure what is so relevant about this book or why it’s so popular but then I’m not unfamiliar with news and I tire of criticisms after 6+ hours but that’s just me.

Nothing new

Interested in hearing the same 2-3 criticisms of the tech industry expanded upon for 8+ hours? Well, then this is the book for you. If, however, you’re already aware that tech (1) is dominated by men, (2) breeds homogeneity, and (3) comes with perks that ultimately bring out the worst in millennials, you won’t find anything in this story all that interesting. I don’t disagree with anything Weiner is arguing here, but I also don’t know why she (or anyone else) would write about her experience if it doesn’t offer any truly fresh insight- which is the hook that this memoir is being sold on.

Save yourself some time and just read any of the 1,000+ articles that have been written about problems with Silicon Valley- they offer everything Uncanny Valley does in a far more succinct package.

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!

An insight into Silicon Valley

A fascinating look into the toxic culture of Silicon Valley. There’s rarely anything surprising, but this story is told in fascinating prose that moves through scenes at a pretty rapid clip. Always fascinating, Weiner is here to rattle the industry even if it’s just a scream into an unheard abyss.

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.

Writer decides to embrace Silicon Valley with a sour perspective

This story has been told by a few books. Dan Lyons “Disrupted” plays a much more positive
perspective and I believe I laughed a few times.

This story is about a girl in the publishing industry with no technical background entering the tech industry and feeling the bias of not being technical.

It had a few unique takes in it, but definitely a lot of jealousy and resentment in the writing.

It’s ok.

a worm's-eye account of the latest tech bubble

Anytime unlimited amounts of money start flowing interesting stories will follow. Anna Wiener had an insider's vantage on the tech bubble of the mid-teens but as someone from a publishing and liberal arts, instead of a coding and business, background, brought an outsider's objectivity to this money orgy. Wiener is an excellent writer who has a lovely way with the last word in a sentence--using it to modify her observations with well-timed irony but never predictably nor with a heavy hand. I'm less enamored with what she hopes are fresh observations about the excesses and blind spots of the tech world: that it's a boys' club, that it enables workplace harassment, that all the money has made San Francisco less livable. Nothing fresh here you couldn't get with equal humor on HBO's Silicon Valley. Thus, the memoir serves more to chart a naive young woman's gradual awakening to this unusual world than to expose what we already knew was happening there.