An eye-opener about the machinations of San Francisco tech start-ups. The author transforms from being a wide-eyed Silicon Valley initiate to being thoroughly institutionalised through the start-up ethos. The author focuses on gender and race divide in the tech industry, the economic injustices, bullying, homelessness and tech-snobbery. All the stereotypical Valley office perks are covered – office pingpong tables, free bars, digital nomadism, parties, drugs, in-house baristas and company “holidays” to Tahoe and Napa. It also introduces the current hot topic of big data and its nefarious applications of which the author has a great deal of first-hand knowledge. I took ages to read it between other books, but when I did pick it up I was fascinated.

On the blurb, Rebecca Solnit writes of Anna Wiener that she is like 'Joan Didion at a startup', and whilst the sentiment rings true that Wiener has indeed caught the essence of what makes the modern era such a scary place to be, the Didion comparisons do her no favours. Indeed, Wiener is operating in a different mode entirely. Personally invested in the story in a way which Didion never allowed herself to be, 'Uncanny Valley' depicts a world of confusion and avarice, lyricism and conscience, which otherwise might have been handled with a sort of journalistic detachment. It is this emotion at the heart of the book which reminds us that for all the seduction of technology, we are human after all.

it took me ages to get through this book - I loved the first quarter and had really high hopes but then it just didn't really go anywhere. I work in digital myself and find the start up scene fascinating so there were some really great insights. I loved the insider peak at the operations of an analytics startup, especially the discussion around data privacy issues. I also appreciate the chat about sexism in the industry.

It didn't feel like this really needed to be a memoir. I wasn't interested in the author's lifestyle and relationships etc, which to be fair wasn't a big part of the book, but because of the approach it felt like it had to be mentioned regularly. I just didn't really understand what the book was trying to do. And the philosophical chapters at the end totally lost me.

Some interesting observations and her outsider perspective works well but it lacks real insights or even any well disguised scandal/gossip about life working in this industry. She starts to broach issues of women’s experiences of sexism but this is pretty generic and shallow and doesn’t really go anywhere. I probably was expecting more ‘drama’, but perhaps the limitations both of the mundanity and reality of working life, in any sector, plus the restrictions of her keeping everything pretty anonymous can feel frustrating, and her broader observations on wider work culture just didn’t really compel. To be fair her writing style is very good and it’s not without some interesting snippets.

This is incredibly well written and really insightful for someone completely unattached to the world of Silicon Valley. I understand the author was disillusioned throughout most of the novel but it did at times make it hard for me to really connect with them as a character. Overall I found it interesting especially looking at the gender politics.

As someone who has spent time living in California and making many trips to San Fransisco and the Bay area, I loved the descriptions of the city and the places that Anna visits. However I only ever spent a few hours of one afternoon visiting 'Silicon Valley' and cycling round the Google HQ campus. This was in early 2012 back when not everyone had automatically had an iPhone and the idea of 'apps' was still a little exotic. I wonder if I had been the author's age at this time I would have had a similar graduate experience to her- attempting to give it a go in a career that I 'loved' (films, publishing) before being seduced by the tech industry. In a way that is exactly what happened to me but 7 years later. When reading Uncanny Valley I spotted all of the tech and startup language that was dazzlingly new to me in January 2019 when I began- like the author- a non-tech job at a tech company. It's easy to see the brightly coloured decor, casual dress code, free fruit and beer on Friday evenings as a step up and away from previous workplaces. But these 'benefits' only ever really seem like perks to the young- and they are there to help keep you in the office for 12 hours a day...

I really saw myself in the author, especially when she writes about her days working for the 'space cat' company blurring into a never-ending series of 'tabs'. I look at my laptop when I'm working and there will be at least 30 tabs up on my internet browser as I constantly shift between working and looking at things I've saved to read later.

If you are interested in the myth of Silicon Valley, start up company culture and just how much technology has changed our lives I urge you to read Uncanny Valley.

I had actually read the essay that inspired this book so I jumped at the chance to read it. Unfortunately whilst I had loved the essay the book dragged and clarified the same main insights i.e men who work in Silicon Valley are mainly white, middle-class arrogant men. I felt like the reader already knows this and was looking for the revelation moment, this didn't come. The book was enjoyable enough but I wouldn't highly recommend.

Whip-smart, and offers great insight. I couldn't put it down - I loved the author's voice. I hope she writes more.

I think i expected something along the lines of Bad Blood by John Carreyrou when I first preordered the book, that it was not.
More of a stream of experiences working in start-up companies in Silicon Valley without a major plot.
I did enjoy it and found the writing genuinely amusing however it did lack draw, without a main hook to the storyline my attention did falter.
Personally, it wasn't my type of book but I would imagine anyone interested in start-up culture would find it an interesting read.

A very necessary story, well told. A gripping and eye opening look at a world we all engage with but few really enter.

"We didn't think of ourselves as participating in the surveillance economy. We weren't thinking about our role in facilitating and normalizing the creation of unregulated, privately held databases on human behaviour."

Weiner writes with personality and a wry outlook but this quotation epitomises the startling naivety evinced in this memoir. She's 25 when it opens, coming up to 30 when it closes in 2018, and yet even while watching the 2016 US election unfold, the furore about leaked emails and Russian intervention gets this response: 'I couldn't bring myself to engage. I didn't know what I was looking at and didn't want to.' It's honest - but it limits the scope and interest of this book somewhat, this determined head-in-the-sand attitude about the business she's in.

Instead, this concentrates on the tribulations of a young women in the workplace: interesting but not unexpected: misogyny, racism, trolling. The insight into young tech start-ups run by twenty-something men with millions of venture capital in their pockets but no previous job or managerial experience is well-conveyed but overall this is an interesting read that could have been so much more.

For a non-fiction book, I wanted much more that what Wiener provided; the prose is definitely witty, however the novel lacked the desirable subtlety and, thus, read a lot like a Wall Street caricature.

A book that gives you an idea of the inner workings of Silicon Valley.
Interesting to say the least.
Thank you to both NetGalley and publishers for giving me the opportunity to read this book

A fascinating look inside the world of Silicon Valley and the start up culture that thrives within it. I really enjoyed reading this book!

The absurdity of start up culture and the bubble it exists in couldn't be better described than from someone who never meant to be part of it in the first place and whose creeping sense of dread kept her on the periphery.

[Review first published in New Scientist.]

There is perhaps no better precis of the tech industry than the dictum, “Ask forgiveness, not permission”. Facebook’s erstwhile internal motto, “Move fast and break things”, was a variation of this theme – although it changed in 2014 to the comparatively anodyne “Move fast with stable infrastructure”.

The attitude has enabled the unprecedented expansion of tech companies into global giants, but the mantra is double-edged. The process of building digital conglomerates more powerful than nation states has been possible only because they have played fast and loose with the rules.

Tech companies have been fined for collecting personal information from children (Tik Tok, 2019, $5.7 million by the US Federal Trade Commission) and breaching anti-trust laws (Google, 2018, an eye-watering €4.3 billion by the European Commission). They have, in the case of Cambridge Analytica, been implicated in mass data harvesting that critics say undermines the tenets of democracy. The list goes on.

In the memoir Uncanny Valley, Anna Wiener explores the collective hyperconfidence and laudatory self-narratives that have enabled the tech sector’s meteoric growth. Wiener, who now writes for The New Yorker, spent several years working in the tech industry: first at an e-book company in New York, before moving to San Francisco to work at a data analytics firm, although it remains unnamed in the book.

None of the big tech companies are named, either, but the sobriquets are unequivocal: there’s the “social network everyone hated”, the “search-engine giant”, and the “online superstore that had gotten its start in the nineties by selling books on the World Wide Web”, to name a few.

One of many people drawn to Silicon Valley’s financial opportunities, in a few years Wiener triples the salary she used to make as a publishing assistant, earning $100,000 a year. Simultaneously, she is resentful to be “stuck in an industry that was chipping away at so many things I cared about”.

Wiener touches on the casualties of the technological gold rush: an influx of moneyed tech workers has driven housing prices up in San Francisco to unaffordable levels and worsened California’s homelessness crisis. Her colleagues tell her, only half-jokingly, to “buy a house before the next IPO”, because “the overnight-wealthy were bidding 60 percent over asking on million-dollar starter homes, and paying in cash”.

Wiener has a discerning eye and writes frankly about her complicity in a “globally extractive project”. Eventually, she becomes both desensitised to and ambivalent about tech companies’ cavalier attitudes to data privacy. Knowing it was then common in the industry for employees to have access to customer information, she is reluctant to use dating apps: “It wasn’t the act of data collection itself, to which I was already resigned. What gave me pause was the people who might see it on the other end – people like me.”

She articulates well a familiar love-hate relationship with big tech: we are at once dependent on what tech has done for us and resentful about what it has done to us.

“The platforms, designed to accommodate and harvest infinite data, inspired an infinite scroll,” she writes. “I read whatever the other nodes in my social networks were reading. I listened to whatever music the algorithm told me to.”

Surrounded by high-achieving tech workers, Wiener also details a microcosm in which the prevailing ethos of efficiency encompasses the desire to optimise everything, from entire industries down to individual productivity.

“The word ‘disruption’ proliferated, and everything was ripe for or vulnerable to it: sheet music, tuxedo rentals, home cooking, home buying, wedding planning, banking, shaving, credit lines, dry cleaning, the rhythm method,” Wiener writes. Biohackers administer electric shocks via wearable tech, take smart drugs for cognitive performance and use tech to optimise their sleep cycles.

The start-ups that Wiener worked for were overwhelmingly male, and sexism ubiquitous: “like wallpaper, like air”, she writes. She details exasperating examples: women demoted after maternity leave, fired for reporting sexual assault, or told that diversity initiatives are discriminatory against white men.

These instances are emblematic of a wider problem with the tech world, which the book doesn’t explore: the gender imbalance and racial disparity in tech employees has bled into the products it creates. Facial recognition algorithms have worked well for white men but poorly for women of colour, for example. While the book gives revealing insights into the mentality of the few who have shaped the digital lives of millions, it focuses more on the inner workings of the tech bubble than on the tech industry’s global effects.

Uncanny Valley is both a chronicle of the emerging entrepreneurial class and a counterpoint to the narrative of tech exceptionalism. It is a memoir as compelling as it is disconcerting.

I really enjoyed this book that's very up to date! I loved to learn more about Silicon Valley and the story.
It was a very well researched book, and I thoroughly enjoyed the story and the cahracter development.
thanks a lot to NG and the publisher for this copy.

I'm really not sure how I felt about this one. Although the subject matter is interesting - toxic masculinity and the rise of surveillance culture in Silicon Valley in the 2010s - I'm not sure that it was doing anything really new or innovative. There are already many books and thinkpieces about Silicon Valley culture, and as a non-tech worker in a tech industry, Wiener's perspective was interesting, but not entirely new.
I found it incredibly frustrating, throughout the book, that well-known companies and people were referred to by descriptions, rather than names. I don't quite understand the justification for this. Wiener spends several years of the period covered by the book working for GitHub. I can understand not wanting to identify where you work if you're afraid of a defamation case. But pointing out that your employer is an open-source code repository with an octopus-cat hybrid as its logo, you're really not leaving any alternatives there, so why bother obscure the name? You haven't protected yourself from anything, you've just frustrated your reader. This happened multiple times throughout the book, and every time it infuriated me. I just don't understand what the point of it was. Perhaps it was to make the book more timeless? Perhaps other giant code repositories will arise which could eventually be construed under the same descriptor? But I find that hard to believe...
The book was divided in two, but within those two sections, the chapters weren't numbered. There were only page breaks to indicate new chapters. That made it frustrating, too. I like chapter numbers!
I think really my overall problem with this book is that it falls within a tweet from Patrick Collison quoted towards the end of the book, where he argues that books are too long. This book is too long. It's meandering and doesn't really present anything that strikes me as new or innovative. It could easily have been presented as a long-read on a website, or a podcast interview. There's certainly lots to unpick here, but I'm not sure a memoir was the best way to deal with it. It sits uncomfortably somewhere between a personal memoir and a general overview of Silicon Valley in the 2010s, and failed, for me, to really evoke a reaction.
There were flashes of brilliant insight in here, but they were obscured by strange stylistic choices, and a lack of focus which left me somewhat disappointed.

I really enjoyed this! I was completely sucked into the world of Silicon Valley, and could entirely understand why Wiener is seduced by it to begin with because I was too. I was gripped by the sense of doom that runs through the story, and I really appreciated how much self-analysis Wiener conducts into her relationship with work, money, and ultimately her complicity in surveillance capitalism. It made me think of several other books I want to read, which is always a good thing!

Enjoyable coming of age/autobio of a young woman venturing into the startup/app world of Silicon Valley. It's not hugely surprising, sexism and data surveillance are common topics throughout. Slightly odd how house-hold names are not mentioned by name but are danced around (legal reasons perhaps?), that took me out a couple of times.

Well written and an enjoyable read but not something that lives up to the hpye.