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Perhaps no geographic area in the United States holds as much cultural cache as the northern California region, Silicon Valley. The Valley has become more than just a place, but a signifier of the big tech movement, where college dropouts who can’t legally drink can become billionaires overnight. On the surface, the concept of Silicon Valley conforms to the ideals of the American dream: hard work and genius are rewarded in spades, and those with innovative ideas can acquire the means to quite literally shape the future of society as a whole. But in recent years, that veneer has faded, as the misdeeds of tech giants have been exposed—exploitative labor policies in factories, sexism in the workplace, the illegal sale of private information—and Americans have been forced to come to terms with the danger of life on the Internet.
In her recent memoir, Uncanny Valley, tech reporter Anna Weiner exposes the underbelly of these issues that have been plaguing the industry from her firsthand perspective. Weiner recalls leaving her job at a literary agency to pursue a more progressive career path in Silicon Valley. She describes being attracted to the many advantages that startup culture offered, not only a much higher salary, but also the opportunity to work for companies that use data to shift cultural trends and movements. She describes the allure of a faster paced environment, the need she felt to inject more excitement into her professional life.
So in her mid twenties, Weiner leaves New York for a position at a business-to-business analytics startup in the San Francisco area, upending her life completely. The memoir not only tackles the shifts in her professional environment, but also examines the total culture shift that her move to California represents. She connects the rise of startup culture to the rising rent in the area, the transformation of San Francisco as a liberal city for artists to a prohibitively expensive enclave for the preposterously wealthy. She examines her place in this culture that has totally engulfed the city, and reflects on the civic implications of the movement that de-prioritizes human interaction. She revels in her higher salary that makes comfortable living feasible for her, while also lamenting how her peers participate in perilous consumerism.
From within the two tech firms that Weiner was employed by during her time in the Valley, she reports on the company cultures that animate these startup firms. She describes rampant sexism and a refusal on the behalf of upper level management to hire and promote females and people of color. She describes how femininity is devalued in the workplace, how she has trouble getting her male colleagues and clients to take her seriously. It is clear that her anxieties are shared by her small pool of female colleagues, who adopt male pseudonyms in their online client interactions in order to project authority and command respect. Weiner details the lip service that tech founders pay to workplace diversity, but exposes the lack of actual efforts toward inclusion.
The memoir is offers an incisive look at the larger moral quandaries plaguing the industry, including a ground-level examination of how Internet culture has become a pervasive medium that threatens the privacy of individuals while masquerading as a progressive force for equality and open access. She is not entirely critical of the industry, and doesn’t offer any calls to action in terms of bringing about its demise, but rather lays bare the strengths and weaknesses of startup culture and the products it produces. Weiner is deliberate in her recollection, offering specific insights into her experience rather than a general polemic about tech as a cultural institution. The strength of the memoir is Weiner’s ability to connect her personal experiences to their wider implications, to offer nuanced examinations of our society with linguistic acuity and razor sharp wit.