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Uncanny Valley : a memoir / Anna Wiener.

by Wiener, Anna, 1987-

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MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, c2020.

338.4760979 W647u

Wiener, Anna, 1987-

High technology industries -- California -- Santa Clara Valley (Santa Clara County).

Santa Clara Valley (Santa Clara County, Calif.)

9780374278014 (hc.)

279 p. ; 22 cm.

"Anna Wiener is a contributing writer to The New Yorker, where she writes about Silicon Valley, startup culture, and technology. She lives in San Francisco. Uncanny Valley is her first book"--Jacket.

"In her mid-twenties, at the height of tech industry idealism, Anna Wiener — restless 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, Uncanny Valley is rare first-person glimpse into the 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. Unsparing and incisive, Uncanny Valley is a cautionary tale, and a revelatory interrogation of a world reckoning with consequences its unwitting designers are only beginning to understand."--Jacket.

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