This unsparing look at startup culture is likely meant as an evisceration of Silicon Valley, but Anna Weiner ends up stumbling into a personal coming-of-age tale as well. I suspect she set out to snark an entire vertical, but the book became more intensely personal along the way.
"'Meritocracy': a word that had originated in social satire and was adopted in sincerity by an industry that could be its own best caricature."
"Uncanny Valley" is hilarious and unflinching from the jump, unintentionally positing that twenty-somethings aren't meant to build social awareness through technocratic employment. Weiner intimates that like so many of her generational colleagues, she arrived too late at what was staring at them the entire time.
"A website taking on the kennel market -- a pet-setting and dog-walking app that disrupted neighborhood twelve-year-olds -- raised ten million. An app for coupon-clipping enabled an untold number of bored and curious urbanites to pay for services they never knew they needed, and for a while people were mainlining antiwrinkle toxins, taking trapeze lessons, and bleaching their assholes, just because they could do it at a discount."
Whether you buy her naivete is perhaps dependent on your age and work history. Your stance on whether she finally woke up to the culture she played a role in perpetuating or simply liked the idea of a six-figure salary for a customer support gig will likely inform your consideration of the book.
"It was easier, in any case, to fabricate a romantic narrative than admit that I was ambitious -- that I wanted my life to pick up momentum, go faster."
"The novelty was burning off; the industry's pervasive idealism was increasingly dubious. Tech, for the most part, wasn't progress. It was just business."
Weiner strides up to the edge of generational commentary in a few different places, but never quite takes the plunge. Perhaps she was loathe to indict an entire age group, but I felt she had opportunities to depict the attraction of technology work balanced against some of the economic angst (student debt, recession) and pervasive anxiety ("the plummeting marketing value of culture products in an age of digital distribution") that is inherent to the subset.
"It seemed like half of the new-school old-schoolers spent the bulk of their spare time on overstuffed secondhand couches, drinking tea and processing. Processing was a daily routine, a group activity. People consulted one another on their romantic entanglements, their financial problems, their hemorrhoids. Everyone was always checking in."
"Uncanny Valley" does suffer from over-wrought prose at times, losing momentum while the author demonstrates her love of semicolons and difficult language. Down the stretch, however, she does rediscover her pacing as she details the onset of the current administration.
Weiner is unquestionably a gifted writer who has added an essential record to the annals of Silicon Valley. How she employs what she's learned and where she aims her literary gifts will be interesting to follow as she puts the uncanny valley in her rear-view mirror.
"My interlocutor leaned in conspiratorially. 'There are no adults in the White House,' he said, with a trace of a smile. 'We're the government now.'"
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