Unveiling the Valley of hypocrisy

UNCANNY VALLEY by Anna Wiener (Fourth Estate, $33) Reviewed by Laurence Dodds

About one year into her time in Silicon Valley and halfway through her new book, Anna Wiener goes to hear a symphony with a privacy activist friend. She is taking a break from her gruelling work at a business-to-business start-up whose provision of data analysis to innumerable other apps and services gives its employees a backdoor view into some of the most personal information imaginable.

As her friend rails against the tech industry’s slow centralisation, she grows uncomfortable. Finally, she asks the question: “Do you think I work at a surveillance company?” He answers: “I thought you’d never ask.”

There are already a large number of Silicon Valley memoirs. But unlike most of its peers, Uncanny Valley is not interested in name-dropping and corporate buccaneering. It contains little business advice and will not be of much use to the next generation of hustling would-be gurus. Instead, it is a cool, witty, incisive dissection of an industry and culture that has asked “forgiveness, not permission” while imposing its beliefs across the whole world.

It is also an affecting story of a young woman’s personal change and disenchantment: The Devil Wears Prada with LSD and sleeveless fleece jackets. “Tech promised what so few other industries or institutions could, at the time,” writes Wiener: “A future.” Her account begins in 2012, the year Facebook went public but back then, she wasn’t paying attention.

At 25, she is a downtrodden member of New York City’s “assistant class”, well-educated but paid a pittance, working in publishing and slowly overtaken by peers with generational wealth. She lives an “affectedly analogue” life, taking photographs on film and dating woodworkers, acoustic guitarists and an “experimental baker”.

A chance job at an e-book start-up offers a sudden portal to San Francisco, on the other side of the country, a former outsiders’ haven now being blown apart by massive financial infusions. Her old friends, who disdain capitalism and sometimes carry flip phones with no internet connection, feel she has sold out. But secretly, she is glad to be doing something “ambitious” — fast-moving, that