When I finished high school, just in time for the 2009 recession, our national problem was finance. The tech industry didn’t seem to register. I knew one rather ambitious student who was hell-bent on going to Stanford, and I remember being slightly puzzled that he chose it over the Ivy League.
Times have changed. Now tech bros, not finance bros, are the objects of our collective contempt. Elements on both the Left and the Right talk about “breaking up” Silicon Valley. Americans are uneasy with both the tech industry’s financial and political power and its sway over every aspect of our lives. People around the world seem to feel similarly: When Amazon recently announced an expansion in India, protesters accused it of being a second East India Company.
It was only a matter of time before a book genre emerged: the Silicon Valley disillusionment account. The titles convey the mood — Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (Dan Lyons); Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley (Corey Pein); Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley (Antonio García Martinez). This month, Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley: A Memoir joins the ranks.
Expanding on a 2016 essay in N+1, Uncanny Valley recounts Wiener’s experiences after leaving the New York publishing world for jobs at an analytics startup and then an open-source software company in the Bay Area. Her career change is motivated partly by necessity — she feels that the media is imploding and publishing is a dead end — but also by her naive acceptance of the tech industry’s claims that it is making the world more transparent and democratic.
In California, Wiener instead finds explosive gentrification and tech companies whose rhetoric about openness masks cultish corporate cultures and rigid social codes. As a woman and a nontechnical employee (she works in customer support), she feels undervalued. “Flat structure, except for pay and responsibilities,” a fellow female employee complains. “It’s probably easier to be a furry at this company than a woman.”
Although it’s not hard to guess Wiener’s employer, she never tells us. The companies and public figures that flit through the pages of Uncanny Valley are never directly named. Instead, they are given elaborate, sometimes unflattering epithets: “a social network everyone said they hated” or “the highly litigious Seattle-based conglomerate.”
It’s a legal workaround but also a clever literary conceit. In Wiener’s highly dissociative, almost numb prose style, Silicon Valley becomes a foreign land whose customs and beliefs appear surreal:
Wiener is out of place and increasingly miserable. She is troubled by the surveillance power of the applications she works for and by the blitheness of her coworkers; she copes by diving further into the internet:
This is a mood that Michel Houellebecq or Ottessa Moshfegh could capture in fiction — the despair of life in a world with every stimuli and consumer palliative but very little feeling, a land where young people spend most of their waking lives on corporate campuses, “pouring themselves bowls of free cereal from human bird feeders, crushing empty cans of fruit-tinged water, bored out of their minds but unable to walk away from the direct deposits.”
Wiener has a deft, nicely vicious knack for description (“human bird feeders”), and Silicon Valley is ripe for satire. But while Uncanny Valley is almost obsessively attuned to the tech industry’s ironies, it doesn’t have much of a sense of humor. There is fairly little dialogue, and the characters, such as they are, are interchangeable. If Wiener had eccentric or grotesque coworkers, we don’t meet them. If she sat through meetings so lacking in self-awareness as to be riotously funny (and she must have), we don’t get to read about them. She’s almost too introspective for her own good, serving her experiences up as grim political warnings rather than dark comedy.
The result is a rigorous, shrewd, and quite beautifully written memoir, but also a curiously bloodless one. Perhaps that’s intended — a careful pairing of content and form. Or perhaps Wiener found her material so on-the-nose as to be beyond parody. Or maybe, having just escaped, she’s still shaking off the numbness of this brave new world.
J. Oliver Conroy’s writing has been published in the Guardian, New York, the Spectator, the New Criterion, and other publications.
