Uncanny Valley: A Memoir

“What I really like about the Wiener book is that she uses her life story and the various situations that she finds herself in as a way of trying to describe this world that is emerging, but not necessarily to try and pin it down with a simple argument saying ‘this is this’ or ‘this is that.’ She starts as an underpaid publishing person in one of those miserable jobs that we all know about. Then she goes to a minor startup, and moves on through another startup, through to working for a major platform, GitHub. She never names any of the companies, but it’s often quite clear who she’s talking about, and one of the fun parts of the book for people who hang on the outside of this world is figuring out who is who. Wiener uses her own personal experiences and those of people around her to capture how the logic of information and engineering, the Marc Andreessen “Why Software is Eating the World” logic actually intersects with the real world, with real people, with real lives. Also, she wants to get at the messiness of the people who are actually implementing this stuff, the complicated ways in which they try to deny to themselves that they are part of the surveillance industry and to capture the role of women.” Read more...

The Best Books on the Politics of Information

Henry Farrell, Political Scientist

Anna Wiener’s memoir charts her experiences as an employee of a succession of Silicon Valley firms: life among the ‘tech bros’—Wolfe’s masters of the universe, updated for the 2010s. It’s a book about male-dominated tech culture, not an investigation into a particular wrongdoing or crime, but her portrait of an industry full of braggarts and technocrats offers useful background for understanding how the scandal outlined in Bad Blood came to be.

From our article Books like Bad Blood