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Uncanny Valley

A Memoir

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About this listen

‘Joan Didion at a startup’ Rebecca Solnit ‘Impossibly pleasurable’ Jia Tolentino ‘This is essential reading’ Stylist

At twenty-five years old, Anna Wiener was beginning to tire of her assistant job in New York publishing. There was no room to grow, and the voyeuristic thrill of answering someone else’s phone had worn thin.

Within a year she had moved to Silicon Valley to take up a job at a data analytics startup in San Francisco. Leaving her business casual skirts and shirts in the wardrobe, she began working in company-branded T-shirts. She had a healthy income for the first time in her life. She felt like part of the future.

But a tide was beginning to turn. People were speaking of tech startups as surveillance companies. Out of sixty employees, only eight of her colleagues were women. Casual sexism was rife. Sexual harassment cases were proliferating. And soon, like everyone else, she was addicted to the internet, refreshing the news, refreshing social media, scrolling and scrolling and scrolling. Slowly, she began to realise that her blind faith in ambitious, arrogant young men from America’s soft suburbs wasn’t just her own personal pathology. It had become a global affliction.

Uncanny Valley is a coming of age story set against the backdrop of our generation’s very own gold rush. It’s a story about the tension between old and new, between art and tech, between the quest for money and the quest for meaning – about how our world is changing forever.

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Critic reviews

‘I've never read anything like Uncanny Valley , which is both a searching bird's-eye study of an industry and a generation as well as an intimate, microscopic portrait of ambition and hope and dread. Anna Wiener writes about the promise and the decay of Silicon Valley with the impossibly pleasurable combination of a precise, razored intellect and a soft, incandescent heart. Her memoir is diagnostic and exhilarating, a definitive document of a world in transition’ Jia Tolentino, New York Times-bestselling author of Trick Mirror

Joan Didion at a start-up’ Rebecca Solnit, bestselling author of Men Explain Things To Me

‘This was the memoir I'd been waiting for. A witty, unique perspective and fresh insight showing us the behind the scenes of the tech industry in a new thrilling way’ Emma Gannon

Uncanny Valley is a generation-defining account of the amoral late-capitalist tech landscape we are fatally enmeshed in. …Insightful, compelling and urgent’ Stephanie Danler, author of Sweetbitter

Uncanny Valley is an addictive combination of coming-of-age story, journalistic memoir, and brilliant social critique. This is a stunningly good book. I loved it’ Dani Shapiro, author of Inheritance

‘This much-anticipated memoir of Anna Wiener's time spent working in San Francisco's booming, seductive tech industry is guaranteed to make you think differently about the role apps command in our everyday lives’ Vogue

‘Wiener’s compulsive debut memoir chronicles her journey from proud late-adopter to true believer, forging on into burnout territory and beyond. It’s a wry, crisply written tale of optimism and hubris, idealism and misogyny. While it often reads like sci-fi, it’s also a kind of horror story, one in which we are all – through inattention, if nothing else – complicit’ Daily Mail

All stars
Most relevant
Loved the audio book, everything from about it. Cramed with insight into the early day some of today's biggest companies. The booked is crammed with great moments of humour and whit. An excellent ride along with someone who was there and is open about her past on many fronts. A good listen , get it learn something and enjoy.

Love this audio book

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This is a polemic for our times, cutting, quick-witted, self aware and self-deprecating. Especially in the final straight there are some devastating acknowledgements of the vacuity of youth, absurd expectations for what are really simple ideas, and the casual (again, youthful) insouciance of these tech entrepreneurs of the long range effects and consequences of their cargo cult.

Excellent narrator, too.

great polemic

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It rattles along but really it felt like a magazine article stretched into a book.

Engaging narrator, thin content

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I loved this. It's an account that rings totally true and it's pretty shocking - even if you think you know how toxic the tech world is. I loved the personal details and the ups and downs. Loved the frankness and the humour. As a picture of contemporary Silicon Valley life it's amazingly real and instructive. I've recommended this book to several people and I'm still thinking about it.

Hair-raising account

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If she hates the tech industry so much why does she stick with it?! I repeatedly asked myself this while forcing myself to reach the end of this extended moan from the author. The book outlines the typical misogynistic environment of the tech industry and is basically a long ramble about the injustices and hardships the author encountered on her life journey. I can't believe I made it to the end- zoning out helped. It's well read at least...

Neverending dullness

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