Avery Arlene Wayne

Last weekend, I finished UNCANNY VALLEY by Anna Weiner in true elementary school fashion: a sandwich in one hand because I didn’t want to stop reading while I was eating dinner, then nestled under my blankets, promising myself to go to bed every thirty minutes but not being able to until I was done with the book.

I do have to admit that I’m an ADDICT for technology books— anything obliquely related to data crimes, surveillance, start ups, San Francisco, Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, and nap pods is probably going to be way up my alley. But this book will probably appeal to everyone…. It’s heavy on the tech, but it’s also a sort of ode to early aughts Brooklyn during the era of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, warehouse shows, and Dunham’s Girls; a Didion-esque examination on San Francisco during the tech bubble; a tableau of the publishing industry in the 2000s, and proof that people have been talking about “the death of the novel” forever and ever. 

I find that books about technology, especially those all-too-quotidian stories where the woman has worked at Amazon for eight years, tend to range from the self-flagellating, where the author is indicting tech culture on a mass scale– like, screw surveillance, revealing data crimes, etc etc– OR they are technoutopian and GIRLBOSS with it (like, they talk about quitting one particular tech industry job just to find a better tech-related job and work there instead). Example:  “I worked at Amazon for eight years and these are the horrific and twisted things I experienced in the nap pod”  or the opposite “I quit Amazon because it sucked but now I work at Peter Thiel’s new company and I’m so much happier because there are twenty women working here instead of three”. 

Anna Wiener, though, creates an entirely new category. Her prose is concise and stylish writing, and every word and sentence seems carefully considered: it follows that every joke has a lot of punch, and the comedic timing is excellent. It is wry and sarcastic, and above all, self-aware— especially compared to some of the other tech memoirs about similar companies saturating the market. She never falls into didactic, binary condemnations of tech, nor does she let some of the less savory characters get off easily for their obsessions with full self-optimization. Above all, it is observational rather than judgmental. 

I also appreciate how subtle all of the references to Google and Facebook and Amazon— it heightens the focus on the characters and the people when there’s not explicit references to the company, because the aim becomes more about storytelling than namedropping. Some people were annoyed about this, and maybe it’s a little pretentious— see this glossary for full explanation of all the oblique references—but overall I find that, compared to books that build their entire marketing strategy on condemning Amazon or Google, this strategy actually allows the excellent prose and the character development of the narrator to anchor the book instead of morbid curiosity about who’s who and which company she’s referencing.

Wiener also shines when offering bite-sized commentary on topics like content moderation and data privacy (before it became a little more mainstream with the publication of books like Wylie’s Mindfuck). Yes, acknowledging the issues with things like data privacy is not the same as taking action on them…. one review makes the point that part of the reason these types of books are so popular in Silicon Valley is because they lull tech workers that benefit from structural inequities into complacency: by reading Uncanny Valley and agreeing with Weiner, they are allowed to have their cake (read and agree with a book that denigrates the industry, showing their solidarity with those affected by said structural inequities) and eat it too (make a lot of money from their jobs). But I find it’s important to remember that Wiener was always in an HR-adjacent background, and that this is a memoir, not a tech-nonfiction book that is seeking to offer solutions for the inequities inherent to the tech industry.

Some have said that this book doesn’t really offer anything new, and that it’s just a privileged girl’s take on privilege in Silicon Valley. Which, yes, is exactly what this is. She acknowledges this, and mentions multiple times that she wouldn’t have gone into publishing in the first place if she hadn’t grown up without money worries. But if you at all enjoy Wiener’s n+1 piece that served as the jumping off point for this novel, and incisive, aloof wit, and the idea of a San Francisco version of Didion’s South and West, then I would fully recommend this book!