Lauren D'Souza's Reviews > Uncanny Valley

Hype can be a good and bad thing for a book. For me, the hype ruined Uncanny Valley. Since maybe July of last year, this book has been heralded as a send-up of Silicon Valley, a scathing and witty critique of everything wrong with tech culture, by Goodreads and The New York Times alike. I was expecting such when I picked it up, only to discover that it is a completely mediocre, not very well written piece of nonfiction that recycles many opinions about tech that I've heard before.

The author, Anna Wiener, is a tech outsider. She's an assistant at a publishing company in New York, working hard for minimum wage, before deciding to leave the industry and work for an ebook startup - still literature-adjacent, but with more of a tech bent. When that job doesn't work out, she moves to San Francisco and joins a data analytics startup in a customer support role. After a few years there, she moves to work for Github. She realizes that she does not like the self-importance of tech, how everyone in the industry thinks they're changing the world when they're really ruining it. She critiques the subcultures and hobbies that abound here: spiritualism (think: yoga, astrology, reiki, sound baths, silent meditation retreats), crafts and working with your hands for fun, obsessive and mandatory team bonding in city-wide scavenger hunts and happy hours and ski trips, etc. She hates the sexism and lack of diversity that is so commonplace here. (Another reviewer pointed out that maybe she wasn’t taken seriously because she has zero technical skills, not because she’s a woman, and there may be some truth to that.) She hates talking to other people in tech, particularly brogrammers (despite kinda dating one, oops). She hates it all! But she doesn't leave the industry. Oh, in fact she is exactly part of the culture she is criticizing, making way too much money and enjoying all the perks of working for a tech company.

I felt that Wiener's book may have been more topical and relevant a few years ago. In fact, it ends right after the 2016 election, where the author is truly awakened out of her coastal elite bubble. Since then, we've seen countless send-ups of the industry, repeating the same ideas that everyone has of how overrated and self-obsessed tech is. I don't think that this book adds anything new to the growing zeitgeist of how terrible Silicon Valley is.

The writing style was also off-putting to me. Instead of referring to companies and people by their names, she dubs them with obvious epithets, repeats them a million times, and makes the reader do the work of putting two and two together. Facebook is "the social network everyone hates." Amazon is "the online superstore." Google is "the search engine giant." Microsoft is "the litigious Seattle-based software conglomerate" (or something like that). Her own employer, Github, is "the open-source startup." Even The Matrix is "a movie about a group of hackers who discover that life is a simulation." THE MATRIX. JUST SAY THE NAME OF THE DAMN MOVIE. I didn't form a connection with any of her coworker-characters because she didn't even give most of them names. Instead, she referred to them by job title: "the solutions manager," "the data analytics company CEO," "the technical co-founder," etc. All of this felt lazy and impersonal to me.

Wiener also does a lot of telling, not showing. Instead of giving us a compelling narrative about one of her work retreats, she presents a list of compound activities of general actions that happened on the trip: e.g. there was drinking, people played games, we ate at a diner. Not only is she generalizing these activities and implying that the apply to every company in this industry, but she's not making me feel engaged with the subject matter and story at hand. This technique might be effective for an article or essay (which I understand is how this book was originally presented), but it's not effective for a long-form work of nonfiction.

Overall, the hype killed this for me. If I hadn't expected something great, I might have liked this a little more (still not that much, I'll admit). I don't think this is anything new, and frankly I didn't enjoy the experience of reading it.