Uncanny Valley
A Memoir
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Uncanny Valley
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Narrated by:
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Suehyla El-Attar
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By:
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Anna Wiener
About this listen
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.
©2020 Anna Wiener (P)2020 HarperCollins Publishers LimitedListeners also enjoyed...
What listeners say about Uncanny Valley
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story3 out of 5 stars
- Anonymous User
- 19-03-20
Engaging narrator, thin content
It rattles along but really it felt like a magazine article stretched into a book.
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2 people found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Little-Fish
- 21-08-22
Love this audio book
Loved the audio book, everything from about it. Cramed with insight into the early day some of today's biggest companies. The booked is crammed with great moments of humour and whit. An excellent ride along with someone who was there and is open about her past on many fronts. A good listen , get it learn something and enjoy.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Olly Buxton
- 26-04-20
great polemic
This is a polemic for our times, cutting, quick-witted, self aware and self-deprecating. Especially in the final straight there are some devastating acknowledgements of the vacuity of youth, absurd expectations for what are really simple ideas, and the casual (again, youthful) insouciance of these tech entrepreneurs of the long range effects and consequences of their cargo cult.
Excellent narrator, too.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- L. V. Smith
- 15-04-20
Hair-raising account
I loved this. It's an account that rings totally true and it's pretty shocking - even if you think you know how toxic the tech world is. I loved the personal details and the ups and downs. Loved the frankness and the humour. As a picture of contemporary Silicon Valley life it's amazingly real and instructive. I've recommended this book to several people and I'm still thinking about it.
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Overall2 out of 5 stars
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Performance3 out of 5 stars
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Story2 out of 5 stars
- A.J.F
- 01-05-20
Neverending dullness
If she hates the tech industry so much why does she stick with it?! I repeatedly asked myself this while forcing myself to reach the end of this extended moan from the author. The book outlines the typical misogynistic environment of the tech industry and is basically a long ramble about the injustices and hardships the author encountered on her life journey. I can't believe I made it to the end- zoning out helped. It's well read at least...
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Overall2 out of 5 stars
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Performance3 out of 5 stars
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Story1 out of 5 stars
- Zebra Karma
- 23-02-20
Underwhelming.
I’m baffled as to why this memoir has received so many rave reviews in the press and been named in Best Reads of 2020 features. Whatever the point of this non-story was, I missed it entirely.
Nothing really happens apart from the author moving from tech job to tech job. Her insistence on not naming certain social media platforms swiftly got on my nerves. “He wrote on the micro blogging site.” “I logged on to the social media site that everyone hated”. Fine once or twice, not repeated over and over. By the end I was yelling at my device: “Just say he tweeted, for the love of all that is good and holy.”
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall2 out of 5 stars
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Performance2 out of 5 stars
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Story2 out of 5 stars
- genevieve cooper
- 18-11-20
S boring book of lists
The author's descriptions consists of lists and lists of things and the way the narrator reads this like a performance piece is really irritating. It's really hard to take in. Even regular sentences are read with a weird valley girl, overly performed, sing-song cadance with too many dramatic pauses. It's like the book version of Paddy McAloon's I Trawl the Megahertz, which is meant to be snippets of stories and fragmented. A book shouldn't be disjointed, arty snippets of description. Everything is described in such a detached way. People are only referred to by their titles. It was a slog to get through. The author just seems like a bored teenager trying to prove she's better than everyone.
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