Do you think it is reasonable at this point for these enormously wealthy corporations to call themselves underdogs? Anna Wiener That positioning then allows them to get away with enormous abuses of power, generally organized in ways that reinforce our existing hegemonies of power. You paint a really vivid picture in the book of how tech companies position themselves as underdogs who are disrupting the modern workforce. Our conversation, which has been lightly edited for length and clarity, is below. I spoke with Wiener over the phone about Uncanny Valley, covering everything from the false narrative of the scrappy tech upstart to why narratives are important, Silicon Valley, and whether Mark Zuckerberg should revisit his college major (psychology, who knew). The book covers the myopic solipsism of the tech world - but it also captures its best and most utopian impulses.

Those years provide the raw material for her critically acclaimed new memoir Uncanny Valley, which paints a portrait of Silicon Valley in the boom period of 2013 through 2016. Wiener, who is now a contributing writer for the New Yorker, spent her years in tech working on the soft skills side, helping companies interact with human beings. She packed up and moved to San Francisco.

She came to the conclusion that the best place for ambitious and bright young people not in publishing. A few years after graduation, Wiener found herself stuck in a job as an assistant at a literary agency with no clear path for advancement.

When Anna Wiener graduated from college in 2009, she did what so many ambitious young women who cared about books and intellectual culture did before her: She moved to New York to try to make it in publishing.īut publishing, then in the middle of a profound contraction, was not a welcoming industry.

Uncanny valley book