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Maybe someday
46
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
12/100Critics
35/100Scholars
92/100Author:
Anna Wiener
Publisher:
MCD
Date:
January 14, 2020
In her mid-twenties, at the height of tech industry idealism, Anna Wienerâstuck, broke, and looking for meaning in her work, left a job in book publishing for the promise of the new digital economy. She moved from New York to San Francisco, where she landed at a big-data startup in the heart of the Silicon Valley bubble: a world of surreal extravagance, dubious success, and fresh-faced entrepreneurs hell-bent on domination, glory, and, of course, progress.
What The Reviewers Say
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.
... a different sort of Silicon Valley narrative, a literary-minded outsider’s insider account of an insulated world that isn’t as insular or distinctive as it and we assume. Wiener is our guide to a realm whose denizens have been as in thrall to a dizzying sense of momentum as consumers have been.
Compared to the most sensational details on companies like WeWork or Theranos that have come out in recent years, there is nothing shocking or revelatory in Wiener’s account of startup life and culture. That’s also maybe the point. Rather than shocking and lurid details, recognition and familiarity play a key role in the experience of Uncanny Valley.
[Wiener] was seen as dispensable; her memoir is anything but. If Silicon Valley had seen her potential, she would not have become one of the finest, most assured writers about the internet today. I read it in one sitting, overcome with the eerie sensation that my own life was being explained to me.
