It is, as she says, “a world freed of decision-making, the unnecessary friction of human behavior, where everything - whittled down to the fastest, simplest, sleekest version of itself - could be optimized, prioritized, monetized, and controlled.” Yes, there’s the money, but there’s also an insatiable desire to make everything efficient: apps, meals, experiences, and even people themselves. Once in San Francisco, Wiener struggles to understand the motivations of those around her. It soon becomes clear to her, and to the reader, that those in Silicon Valley do not value those things. Wiener is continuously struck by the self-assuredness of the men she works with and for, and by the contrast between their innate feeling that everything they contribute to society is valuable, and her own feelings of having something to offer without being able to do so. She then decides to leave for a job at a data analytics startup in San Francisco, despite having qualms about the implications of working there. She first works for an ebook startup that is essentially constructing a digital library without the feeling of being in one. Wiener begins the memoir in New York City, working in a publishing job that does not pay well but which enables her to say that she’s doing a job with some meaning attached to it. These observations do double duty: They demonstrate her incredible ability to write nonfiction, and they further highlight why she felt so out of place in Silicon Valley in the first place. She notes, as if in passing, the smallest of minutiae of the food she sees at a party she comes to define life in Silicon Valley as everyone optimizing their bodies for longer lives, which could then be spent productively.
Two aspects of Anna Wiener’s memoir, “Uncanny Valley” immediately make themselves apparent: its understated observations and attention to detail.
0 kommentar(er)
