Is it too much to say that every sculpted page will be studied by future generations? (No.) Anna Wiener is the Joan Didion of start-up culture and then some.” -Ed Park

“ Uncanny Valley is a sentimental education for our accelerated times, a memoir so good it will make you slow down. “A rare mix of acute, funny, up-to-the-minute social observation, dead-serious contemplation of the tech industry’s annexation of our lives, and a sincere first-person search for meaningful work and connection.” -William Finnegan “ I’ve never read anything like Uncanny Valley, which is both a searching bird’s-eye study of an industry and a generation, as well as an intimate, microscopic portrait of ambition and hope and dread. Anna Wiener writes about the promise and the decay of Silicon Valley with the impossibly pleasurable combination of a precise, razored intellect and a soft, incandescent heart. Her memoir is diagnostic and exhilarating, a definitive document of a world in transition: I won’t be alone in returning to Uncanny Valley for clarity and consolation for many years to come.” -Jia Tolentino Unsparing, darkly incisive, and haunting, Uncanny Valley is a revelatory interrogation of a world reckoning with consequences its designers are only beginning to understand. Wiener’s storytelling mode is keen and dry, her sentences spare-perfectly suited to let a steady thrum of dread emerge.” -Jennifer Szalai, New York TimesĪdapted from Anna Wiener’s widely read and celebrated essay in n+1 Issue 25, Uncanny Valley is a rare first-person glimpse into Silicon Valley’s reckless startup culture at a time of unchecked ambition, rapacious greed, unregulated surveillance, and accelerating political power. With wit, candor, and heart, Wiener deftly charts the tech industry’s shift from idealistic self-appointed world savior to democracy-endangering liability, alongside a personal narrative of aspiration, ambivalence, and disillusionment. One of the New York Times’s 10 best books of 2020

Uncanny valley anna wiener review