Inside Tech’s Fever Dream
Perhaps 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. 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. “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. She’s not exactly poor, only “privileged and downwardly mobile.”
A new, more dynamic economy was taking shape on the other side of the country—“not that I was paying any attention,” Wiener writes. An unnamed “online superstore” known for its ruthless efficiency had elbowed its way into publishing and well beyond. “The social network everyone hated” was changing what it meant to be social. 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.
Though tech had insinuated itself into many facets of Wiener’s
