In the Valley, Wiener is employed in several positions at three different companies: the e-reader start-up, a data-analytics company, and an open-source software company. Initially, Wiener relishes her work; she enjoys contributing to an industry of relentless momentum, a tight-knit community hurtling towards ‘the glimmering edge of a brand-new world’. However, she soon struggles to ignore certain unsettling truths: women are rare (she feels like a ‘concubine’), young white men are deified, and abounding throughout the workplace is a dark triad of ‘capital, power, and a bland, overcorrected, heterosexual masculinity’.

Weiner’s tenure in the Valley spans a key period of societal awakening regarding technology. These are the halcyon days when Facebook’s initial public offering clocked in at $104 billion and a certain NSA whistleblower hadn’t yet taught the world the necessity of data privacy. Weiner’s foray into analytics occurs at a time when harvestable personal information – ‘age, gender, political affiliation, hair color, dietary restrictions, body weight, income bracket, favorite movies, education, kinks, proclivities’ – is newly in vogue. Via Wiener, we see how easy it was for the unprecedented, unregulated accrual of personal information to get out of hand. This bird’s-eye view of data – referred to as ‘God Mode’ – piques Weiner’s conscience, yet she can’t deny the ‘genuine thrill of watching a cross-section of society flow through a system’.

Anna Wiener (photograph via Macmillan Publishers)

Wiener writes vividly, her sentences journalistic in their clarity and exposition. She has a knack for turns of phrase – a party’s bustling hot tub is ‘a sous vide bath of genitalia’ – and her depiction of the Valley is as engrossing as it is unnerving. She is not the first to bring to life the tech industry’s lurid underbelly – see Daniel Lyons’s Disrupted (2016), Emily Chang’s Brotopia (2018), and John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood (2018), among others. Weiner excels though with hawk-eyed observations of the endless quotidian oddities of the tech milieu. Portmanteaus flourish, such as ‘blitzscaling’ and ‘designpreneurs’, and company rhetoric resembles ‘a mash-up of business-speak with athletic and wartime metaphors’. Body-optimisation culture is so normalised it’s almost a requirement of the workplace: her co-workers pop Vitamin D pills, inject testosterone, and ingest cognitive-enhancement drugs called Nootropics.

The Valley’s surreal hybrid culture of immense affluence and stark poverty also attracts Wiener’s focus. The rapid gentrification of San Francisco, fuelled by venture capital and an influx of wealthy entrepreneurs, has resulted in a garish mishmash of ritz and squalor. Streets are littered with ‘minimalist tea kettles’ and ‘champagne bars serving caviar on shrimp chips’, while not far away ‘people were sleeping over steaming grates’. Wiener remarks that every three months or so, some engineer or entrepreneur suggests monetising homeless people by ‘turning them into Wi-Fi spots’. Such inclusions are deftly woven into the backdrop of Uncanny Valley, and Wiener’s writing never feels preachy. It builds slowly, creating an impression of a society disconnected from the world around it.

Foremost, Uncanny Valley is a fly-on-the-wall exposé of Silicon Valley, but beneath it runs an exploration of Wiener’s own identity crisis. Throughout the course of the book, she dithers between her tech-savvy and more ‘analogue’ self, pulled apart by different anchors. Here her writing plateaus. She leaves unanswered certain questions regarding the impact of the Valley – such a heavily optimised, hybridised, digitised space – on personhood, ethics, societal norms. Perhaps these questions aren’t meant to be tackled here, but Wiener’s lamentations about who she was/is/might be feel unanalysed, her observational style ineffective when turned on herself. As blazoned on the cover, Rebecca Solnit praises Wiener as ‘Joan Didion at a start-up’. The latter would have delved further into the grey areas, been more intent on parsing meaning from the Valley’s endemic meaninglessness.

The book’s title, the term ‘uncanny valley’, refers to the innate sense of eeriness one feels when faced with an anthropomorphic representation of a human face – a face that isn’t quite right. In replicating this premise, Wiener succeeds: Silicon Valley’s gleaming façade is stripped back, and we are privy to gears shifting below. It is an absorbing read; though hopefully Wiener’s next book will dig deeper and further probe the unnerving implications of our ever-burgeoning digital reality.