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Uncanny Valley

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What to expect

‘Joan Didion at a startup’ Rebecca Solnit

‘Impossibly pleasurable’ Jia Tolentino

‘This is essential reading’ Stylist

At twenty-five years old, Anna Wiener was beginning to tire of her assistant job in New York publishing. There was no room to grow, and the voyeuristic thrill of answering someone else’s phone had worn thin.

Within a year she had moved to Silicon Valley to take up a job at a data analytics startup in San Francisco. Leaving her business casual skirts and shirts in the wardrobe, she began working in company-branded T-shirts. She had a healthy income for the first time in her life. She felt like part of the future.

But a tide was beginning to turn. People were speaking of tech startups as surveillance companies. Out of sixty employees, only eight of her colleagues were women. Casual sexism was rife. Sexual harassment cases were proliferating. And soon, like everyone else, she was addicted to the internet, refreshing the news, refreshing social media, scrolling and scrolling and scrolling. Slowly, she began to realise that her blind faith in ambitious, arrogant young men from America’s soft suburbs wasn’t just her own personal pathology. It had become a global affliction.

Uncanny Valley is a coming of age story set against the backdrop of our generation’s very own gold rush. It’s a story about the tension between old and new, between art and tech, between the quest for money and the quest for meaning – about how our world is changing forever.

Critics Review

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u2018I've never read anything like Uncanny Valley, which is both a searching bird's-eye study of an industry and a generation as well as an intimate, microscopic portrait of ambition and hope and dread. Anna Wiener writes about the promise and the decay of Silicon Valley with the impossibly pleasurable combination of a precise, razored intellect and a soft, incandescent heart. Her memoir is diagnostic and exhilarating, a definitive document of a world in transitionu2019u00a0Jia Tolentino,u00a0New York Times-bestselling author ofu00a0Trick Mirroru00a0

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u2018Joan Didion at a start-upu2019u00a0Rebecca Solnit, bestselling author ofu00a0Men Explain Things To Me

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u2018This was the memoir I'd been waiting for. A witty, unique perspective and fresh insight showing us the behind the scenes of the tech industry in a new thrilling wayu2019 Emma Gannon

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u2018Uncanny Valley is a generation-defining account of the amoral late-capitalist tech landscape we are fatally enmeshed in. u2026Insightful, compelling and urgentu2019 Stephanie Danler, author of Sweetbitter

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u2018Uncanny Valley is an addictive combination of coming-of-age story, journalistic memoir, and brilliant social critique. This is a stunningly good book. I loved itu2019 Dani Shapiro, author of Inheritance

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u2018This much-anticipated memoir of Anna Wiener's time spent working in San Francisco's booming, seductive tech industry is guaranteed to make you think differently about the role apps command in our everyday livesu2019 Vogue

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u2018Wieneru2019s compulsive debut memoir chronicles her journey from proud late-adopter to true believer, forging on into burnout territory and beyond. Itu2019s a wry, crisply written tale of optimism and hubris, idealism and misogyny. While it often reads like sci-fi, itu2019s also a kind of horror story, one in which we are all u2013 through inattention, if nothing else u2013 complicitu2019 Daily Mail

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