In “Uncanny Valley,” Anna Wiener tries to find career fulfillment in startup dystopia, annaesilman writes
Photo: Dina Litovsky If you’re a young woman who writes nonfiction books, you will, at some point, be compared to Joan Didion. Or, as author Rebecca Solnit anointed Anna Wiener on the U.K. cover of her new book, Uncanny Valley: “Joan Didion at a startup.” Over Japanese macro bowls in one of the few remaining untrendy restaurants on San Francisco’s Valencia Street, the 32-year-old writer grits her teeth at the comparison. “That’s very flattering, but imagine Joan Didion a start-up.
The book is a portrait of the “people behind the internet” at a pivotal moment in American culture. It’s also a coming-of-age story, one that turns on a set of familiar questions: What kind of life do I want to live? What are my personal goals, what do I believe in, and how do I balance the two against one another? Wiener is an insightful and reflective narrator, and yet still she finds herself blindly accepting Silicon Valley’s mythmaking as infallible truth.
As Wiener’s tech career ramped up, she participated gamely in company ski trips and donned cringey company T-shirts that proclaimed: “I Am Data Driven.” She was intoxicated by the sense of forward momentum the industry provided, even though the job itself left much to be desired.
The reader is unlikely to indict Wiener for her 20-something myopia — in part because many of us have been equally eager to drink Silicon Valley’s Kool-Aid, and in part because she has written such a thoughtful and self-reflective book. Whether or not she wants to be indicted is harder to parse.
She is self-aware enough to be critical of this impulse, seeing it as an “ineffectual attempt to alleviate her own guilt” and avoid placing blame and accountability where they are due. Yet it’s an impulse she can’t quite get shed. “I’m still constantly making up excuses for people who don’t deserve it, don’t give a shit about me,” she confesses. A few minutes later, when we’ve changed the topic, she returns to the idea, still concerned about her moral flexibility.
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