Book No. 13 of 2020 ⭐️
This book was outstanding. It’s the book I’m glad exists because someone needed to write it, and Wiener did so with astonishing artistry. She depicts the workings of modern-day Silicon Valley with such impossibly perfect precision that it makes reality feel almost surreal.
One absolutely brilliant creative decision that Wiener makes in the book is not identifying a single company, app, or product by name. Instead she uses epithets and descriptions that are exceedingly obvious but serve to strip the luster from these companies; by removing the brand name and only referring to them by what they actually do or are, she effectively shows the reader how absurd, how ridiculous our state of affairs is.
Speaking personally, it was enormously validating for me to read this. I was born and raised in Silicon Valley, I started programming at age 5, I turned down a technical job at a startup shortly after college, and I lived there as a adult up until less than two years ago. I felt, viscerally, that the Bay Area was becoming a hotbed of toxicity and superiority complexes, a place where people were given too much money and power to exacerbate discrimination and inequality—all the while being told that we were living in a wonderful utopia where tech innovation was actively bettering the world. When I told people I was moving away, I was shocked at how many people—both inside and outside the tech industry, longtime residents and recent transplants—said they would move away too, if they could. I love my hometown dearly, but Uncanny Valley reminds me why I left.
Similar Reads
For more books on Silicon Valley’s dirty laundry, I recommend John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood and Mike Isaac’s Super Pumped: the Battle for Uber, both of which I consider standouts.
For similarly absurd, dryly humorous writing in a work of fiction, I recommend Elif Batuman’s The Idiot.