Uncanny Valley: A Memoir

Uncanny Valley tells a broad story of Silicon Valley’s tech industry and the generation of millennial innovators, employees, and consumers that drove its growth. Wiener appears doubly as the book’s naïve protagonist—a participant in that industry—and its knowing narrator, speaking with the benefit of hindsight. Her narration deemphasizes her personal story as she foregrounds anecdotes of others—CEOs, founders, developers. Wiener’s emotional journey progresses subtly from optimistic aspiration through a loyal immersion and then remorseful entanglement with tech’s all-encompassing lifestyle. She displays a keen sociological awareness, situating herself socially and economically with explicit disclosures of salary offers, increases, benefits, and equity. Ironically, she does not disclose the actual names of the many large, recognizable companies that shape the world through which she moves—an allusion to her status as a former employee who may have been made to sign a nondisclosure agreement. These disclosures and wry nondisclosures encourage trust as she names her privilege and the limitations of her perspective.

Wiener paints herself initially as an accessible “everyman,” with a vague desire for stability and a longing for “momentum.” She enters Silicon Valley not as a technically literate insider, but an average individual with unusual access to tech’s inner workings. Her dual status as both insider and outsider invites the reader’s identification with her journey. In the book’s second half, she matures emotionally through a process of quiet realization but struggles to authentically exercise her agency. This struggle manifests feebly, with a quiet sense of tragedy, in a last-minute effort at political action before the 2016 election. In the Epilogue, when she makes an exhausted but decisive exit from the industry, she achieves a partial reclamation of autonomy and integrity.