) 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,” she writes, substituting foreboding generalized descriptions for proper nouns, a choice she maintains throughout the book. (Metadata is defined, comprehensibly and elegantly, on. 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. introduces Wiener, a new hire, to his favorite dictatorially motivational phrase: “Down for the Cause” (DFTC). “Tone = DOOM,” I wrote in the margins, and that was before an up-and-coming C.E.O.

It’s more that everything over there is as absurdly wrong as we imagine. It isn’t that those of us with skill sets as soft as our hearts don’t need to know what’s going on in “the ecosystem,” as those “high on the fumes of world-historical potential” call Silicon Valley. Wiener was, and maybe still is, one of us far from seeking to disabuse civic-minded techno-skeptics of our views, she is here to fill out our worst-case scenarios with shrewd insight and literary detail. I’m much more interested in metafiction than metadata, not least because I’m confident I can explain what metafiction is.īut when I started reading, I realized that former liberal arts majors who halfheartedly resist the app-enabled future - mainly through willful ignorance and sweeping complaints - are the intended audience for this book. Wiener reports on technology for The New Yorker I’ve only written about technology to say that I think social media is very bad. At first, I didn’t understand why I was asked to review “Uncanny Valley,” Anna Wiener’s memoir about working for Bay Area start-ups in the 2010s.

Uncanny valley memoir