2020 has not been a kind year, but it gave us stories. They got away.”īetween a global pandemic, social unrest, and a contentious presidential election-not to mention the tragedies and suffering experienced on a personal scale-none of us will begrudge the new year. Gaiman once asked her, “Why? Why would you risk death-for a story?” She replied, “Because for an hour every day, those girls weren’t in the ghetto-they were in the American South they were having adventures.

During that time, books were illegal, but she hid a translated copy of Gone with the Wind in her room, read a chapter each night, and told the story to the girls the following day, a routine she repeated until the book was finished. Risking her life, she gathered a group of young girls daily under the pretense of a sewing class to teach them math, Polish, writing, and other illegal skills. With wit, candor, and heart, Anna deftly charts the tech industry’s shift from self-appointed world savior to democracy-endangering liability, alongside a personal narrative of aspiration, ambivalence, and disillusionment.Unsparing and incisive,Uncanny Valleyis a cautionary tale, and a revelatory interrogation of a world reckoning with consequences its unwitting designers are only beginning to understand.Years ago, Neil Gaiman delivered a lecture in which he shared a story about one of his cousins who survived the Holocaust while living in a Polish ghetto. But amid the company ski vacations and in-office speakeasies, boyish camaraderie and ride-or-die corporate fealty, a new Silicon Valley began to emerge: one in far over its head, one that enriched itself at the expense of the idyllic future it claimed to be building.Part coming-age-story, part portrait of an already-bygone era, Anna Wiener’s memoir is a rare first-person glimpse into high-flying, reckless startup culture at a time of unchecked ambition, unregulated surveillance, wild fortune, and accelerating political power. 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.Anna arrived amidst a massive cultural shift, as the tech industry rapidly transformed into a locus of wealth and power rivaling Wall Street.

The prescient, page-turning account of a journey in Silicon Valley: a defining memoir of our digital ageIn her mid-twenties, at the height of tech industry idealism, Anna Wiener-stuck, broke, and looking for meaning in her work, like any good millennial-left a job in book publishing for the promise of the new digital economy.

Uncanny valley by rachel anna wiener