Uncanny Valley

Uncanny Valley is memoir of Silicon Valley and all of its odd opulence. In sync with present disillusionment regarding the tech sector, the book seems real, yet also seems to have selectively picked sceneries that paint reality a perverse dystopia. But even though the book is laden with a kind of negative, subversive realism, Wiener is such a great writer and her language is intoxicating, her style as pointed and beautiful as Fitzgerald’s. Regardless, the experiences Wiener had were sweeping, and it feels like she’s seen it all during her years in the Bay Area: a brilliant but overbearing boss, tech’s extravagant office perks, the overdone ski trip to Tahoe, befriending a millennial billionaire and talking Marx with him, getting an IPO windfall, and all the wild things in San Francisco that feel so osmotically familiar to me yet I’ve never experienced before. Despite all of her valid criticisms of the Valley and at times (or maybe, always) its mad absurdity, I think she has underrepresented a large part of the narrative of Silicon Valley, the narrative for innovation and for the ecosystem’s channeling avarice into scaled change – but for the part of the narrative she did represent, the dearth of diversity and an echo chamber of privilege, she represented with flair.

Spending 4 years at Stanford, I recognize that I had grown up in the sweet summer playground of the Valley’s backyard, but was rather isolated from the real tech industry. If the tireless entrepreneurs who had built the ecosystem before had worked in the garages of Palo Alto, the modern one takes place in exclusive parties and expensive restaurants funded by VC money. It’s not something to bemoan – rather, just a change that I now recognize, a fact that I wasn’t exactly aware of within the Stanford bubble. Because I had wished for it, campus life had an immunity to ridiculousness: courses were interesting, books were plentiful, and if one chose, one can simply, and hermetically ignore all the “real life” that was happening, ignore all the drunken parties, booming subwoofers, and general “real life” that passed by. In that sense, the book was highly educational and valuable to me, and now I only wish reality will reveal itself to be a little less sobering than how it was presented in the memoir.