Drawn into the tech world, a 20-something wonders why she—and the rest of us—didn’t wise up to the grandiose myopia sooner.
Is it weird that a C.E.O. can be considered up-and-coming? Yes, but of course everything about the new nearly normal is weird, and Wiener is a droll yet gentle guide. Divided into two parts — Incentives and Scale — Uncanny Valley begins across the country, where 25-year-old Wiener is a low-paid assistant at a small New York literary agency, “oblivious to Silicon Valley, and contentedly so.”
I did not know that it was nearly impossible to use the internet at all without enriching the online superstore or its founder, I only knew that I was expected to loathe both, and I did — loudly, at any opportunity, and with righteous indignation.
An article about an ebook start-up in New York attracted her interest. She interviewed for a job, and was hired in early 2013. It wasn’t a good fit and she was soon fired. But Wiener had caught the bug. She landed a job as a customer-service associate at a thriving start-up in San Francisco that made a data-analysis tool. It was the hottest of products in an era when ever more finely articulated data about consumers had emerged as the most valuable commodity of all.
In publishing, Wiener writes, “nobody my age was excited about what might come next. Tech, by comparison, promised … a future.”
After nearly two years of being “Down for the Cause”—as the young CEO demanded—she began to wonder about the psychological and social effects of tech, yet continued to drift through the Valley.
The book details Wiener's decision to quit her job as a freelance copy editor and literary agency assistant in New York in order to move to Silicon Valley in San Francisco. Wiener, who felt restricted by the publishing industry's restrictive norms and shrinking revenue, feels out of place amongst the tech executives and engineers in her new surroundings yet content with her rising wage and generous work benefits. After switching between several companies, she finally settles on the open-source coding company GitHub as a customer service representative. Despite the demeaning nature of her work and the stressful nature of investigating potentially inflammatory or illegal posts on the site, she decides to remain due to the company's various perks, such as being able to work from home. Throughout the book, Wiener ruminates about the moral implications of data collection and manipulation amongst technology firms.
| Publisher | Author | Link |
|---|---|---|
| New York Times | Lauren Oyler | A Tech Insider Stylishly Chronicles Her Industry’s ‘Uncanny Valley’ |
| The Atlantic | Ismail Muhammad | Inside Tech’s Fever Dream |