Uncanny Valley
"In 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. 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. 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. 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.
Stats for nerds
5recommend
9mentions
9people
2016–2025years
56% recommend44% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- No Place to Hide By Glenn Greenwald and Uncanny Valley By Anna Wiener
- Hatching Twitter - Nick Bilton
Bad Blood - John Carreyrou
How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story - Billy Gallagher
Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork - Reeves Wiedeman
Whistleblower: My Unlikely Journey to Silicon Valley and Speaking Out Against Injustice - Susan Fowler
Uncanny Valley - Anna Wiener
What Tech Calls Thinking: An Inquiry Into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley - Adrian Daub
The Scapegoat - René Girard
- Anna Wiener makes commentary in her book Uncanny Valley that's pretty on the nose, and I know I wouldn't be able to do it justice. Worth a read.
- I honestly think you didn't understand the article. Let me summarize what I got out of it - we can agree to disagree about the quality of the prose.
In the late 60s, as the early political struggles of the the baby boomers were coming into full flower, Stewart Brand published a series of books about how to build back-to-the-land communes. While they were high quality productions and somewhat influential, they were written based on some mushy political ideologies that have since been discredited. In the present day Brand, now an old man, has realized some of his mistakes and half-heartedly distanced himself from the premises of the "Whole Earth Catalogue". Instead of a sort of pseudo-intellectual hippy libertarianism, he now identifies with the thinking of people like Steven Pinker, another baby boomer, who has written extensively about how despite the obvious growing problems of the early 21st century, everything is actually fine. The author closes by musing on the damage the boomer generation has caused.
The paragraph at the end is not a random addition - it's the point of the article. The point is: Brand had it wrong in the 60s and he has it wrong today. His calls to retreat from politics and build utopian communes in the 60s reflect his panglossian attitude now; in both cases, he washes his hands of the hard work of actually building and surviving the real world.
Also - if you're not familiar with Anna Wiener, I think her best work is the essay "Uncanny Valley": https://nplusonemag.com/issue-25/on-the-fringe/uncanny-valle...
- This article is far too on-the-nose for my taste. As an exaggerated critique of Silicon Valley, I much rather enjoyed Anna Wiener's "Uncanny Valley".
Article: https://nplusonemag.com/issue-25/on-the-fringe/uncanny-valle...
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11565691
- https://archive.is/om6IC
'Reference Shelf:
Seeing Like a State, by James Scott
The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson
Zero to One, by Peter Thiel
The Power Broker , by Robert A. Caro
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, by Edmund Morris
Elon Musk, by Ashlee Vance
The Sovereign Individual, by James Davidson and William Rees-Mogg’s
A Half-Built Garden, by Ruthanna Emrys
Uncanny Valley, by Anna Wiener'
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