Reporters, cultural critics, academic historians, and tech figures themselves have been busy trying to explain a social and economic paradigm shift that’s affected everything from our dating lives to the security of municipal infrastructure. We’re not at a loss for in-depth accounts of the tech industry these days. Yet she remained, by her own account, remarkably clueless about the larger implications of the industry she’d wandered into.įrom March 2017: It’s getting harder to believe in Silicon Valley Then she got a tech job in San Francisco and discovered that the screens she had been staring at weren’t as transparent as they seemed. Though tech had insinuated itself into many facets of Wiener’s life-her waking hours were spent tethered to her computer, working, using the social network everyone hated, writing blog posts, and scrolling her way through images-she hadn’t stopped to think about the people, structures, and forces that had enabled that entwining. Venture capitalists were supporting these companies by shoveling billions of dollars at very young men who promised that their particular app would be the one to usher in a kinder, more connected world-while making its investors millionaires.
“The social network everyone hated” was changing what it meant to be social. An unnamed “online superstore” known for its ruthless efficiency had elbowed its way into publishing and well beyond. She’s not exactly poor, only “privileged and downwardly mobile.”Ī new, more dynamic economy was taking shape on the other side of the country-“not that I was paying any attention,” Wiener writes. “There was no room to grow, and after three years the voyeuristic thrill of answering someone else’s phone had worn thin,” she remembers in typically sardonic fashion. It’s 2013, and she’s a 20-something college graduate who has been working in the sclerotic New York publishing industry, stringing together a meager income as a freelance editor and an assistant at a boutique literary agency. P erhaps the most repeated phrase in Uncanny Valley, Anna Wiener’s memoir of life as a tech-industry worker, is “I did not know.” When the book opens, Wiener’s world feels like one with limited horizons.
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