Uncanny Valley Book Summary

Book Summary

15 min

Audio available

Brief Summary

Anna Weiner leaves publishing’s poor economic prospects for the gold rush of Silicon Valley but soon finds their dream to be near-sighted. In all the start-ups she works for she experiences sexism, harassment, and sees the surveillance and toxic internet behavior enabled by their practices. As her salary climbs, she feels troubled that she makes so much for doing something that requires little skill and produces no tangible products. Ultimately, she decides that benefits aren’t worth sacrificing her dream of meaningful work dealing with the real world.

About the Author

Anna Weiner writer for the New Yorker and covers things like startup culture, technology, and Silicon Valley . She also writes for publications like the New Republic, n+1, and The Atlantic. She grew up in Brooklyn and worked for Silicon Valley start-ups for several years. She currently lives in San Francisco.

Topics

Biography & Memoir

Uncanny Valley Book Summary Preview

Key Insights

Uncanny Valley follows Anna Weiner in her transition from the New York publishing industry to the Silicon Valley tech world. The literary outsider, drawn in by the allure of economic prospects, works for several start-ups and slowly finds herself growing disillusioned with the tech world, witnessing up-close the questionable morality of things like mass data collection and toxic work culture. Ultimately, the book asks us to all consider the long term implications of tech work and what’s compromised when we uncritically buy into its worldview.

In 2013, 20-something Anna Weiner found her dreams stalling when New York publishing jobs were drying up.

Anna begins the book at a crossroads. She’s been chasing a career in publishing, the dream of a life surrounded by literature in the glamorous New York City. But she starts to wonder if this dream is at all realistic— she’s been stringing together a small income from freelancing and assisting at a boutique literary agency, but barely enough to live on.

The other people she knows with similar dreams, a class of entry-level publishing assistants, are also struggling with the tiny income, taking second night time jobs as bartenders and copywriters. Worse yet, a hoard of well-to-do young people was working for nothing at all, living off of their wealthy parents and trust funds. There was always someone willing to work for less, says Anna, and always someone more enthusiastic.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, a new industry was starting to cause waves. Anna read stories about people her age, students just out of college, starting their first companies (“a social network everyone hated”, for example) and quickly making millions. Jobs sprang up everywhere, and these companies started to make their way into everyone’s lives. Other companies, such as “an online superstore which started off selling books” and then grew into a ruthlessly efficient giant, were stealing sales from older industries like publishing.

In a way, Anna felt inspired by this 21st-century gold rush. One day, hungover and eating a salad at her desk, she comes across an article for a publishing start-up that raised three million dollars in funding, an eye-popping number for Anna. In the photo, two young cofounders posed confidently. The start-up promised to revolutionize book publishing. Quietly, Anna applied.

Anna takes a job with a publishing start-up thrilled by the salary and the mission, but soon finds it wasn’t what it seemed.

Anna was invited for an interview with the company and felt relieved to find that the founders weren’t as nerdy as she expected. They chatted about the mission, and Anna happily accepted a three-month contract to curate book titles for the company, also writing copy for their website.

The small team of five worked out of a New York office, and Anna felt thrilled to be there and certainly feeling more useful than she did at the agency. As the resident book expert, she didn’t mind that she had to fetch snacks for the founders occasionally.

But quickly, cracks started to show in the startup’s façade....