‘Joan Didion at a startup’ Rebecca Solnit‘Impossibly pleasurable’ Jia Tolentino‘This is essential reading’ StylistAt twenty-five years old, Anna Wiener was beginning to tire of her assistant job in New York publishing.
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..
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.
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.
And soon, like everyone else, she was addicted to the internet, refreshing the news, refreshing social media, scrolling and scrolling and scrolling.
Sexual harassment cases were proliferating.
Casual sexism was rife.
Out of sixty employees, only eight of her colleagues were women.
People were speaking of tech startups as surveillance companies.
She felt like part of the future.
But a tide was beginning to turn.
She had a healthy income for the first time in her life.
Leaving her business casual skirts and shirts in the wardrobe, she began working in company-branded T-shirts.
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. ‘Joan Didion at a startup’ Rebecca Solnit‘Impossibly pleasurable’ Jia Tolentino‘This is essential reading’ StylistAt twenty-five years old, Anna Wiener was beginning to tire of her assistant job in New York publishing
