science

Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener review – bullies, greed and sexism in Silicon Valley – The Guardian


I sometimes wonder, having studied engineering at university, whether I should have headed for California to pan for digital gold, working as a coder for one of Silicon Valley’s tech giants or trying my luck at an overvalued startup with employee share options. Anna Wiener’s book is a reassuring reminder that, had I gone, I probably would have hated it.

Uncanny Valley is a memoir with few revelations for those who have had contact with the technology industry. Even people familiar with it only through media coverage will already recognise Silicon Valley as a world of young men (and it has to be said, a few women) who have had their egos massaged perhaps a little too hard and a little too long. Their stories of failure and greed, sexual harassment and bullying, toxic cultures fomented by bloated valuations of firms that turn out to be built on thin air, have become our generation’s cautionary tales. And that’s to say nothing of Facebook and Cambridge Analytica.

Wiener’s account is not designed to shock in the way others have. It is instead intimate, the rolling thoughts of a young hipster sucked into this world against her better judgment. A New Yorker with a liberal arts background who started her career in publishing, she worked briefly in her 20s in Silicon Valley in customer support. It’s the kind of people-facing job that tech companies need, but engineers and coders sneer at. From this vantage, not quite at the heart of the action but adjacent to it, she carefully, wryly observes everyday life in the Valley.

She must have been taking notes the whole time. We know exactly what she had for lunch, what the stores on every street were selling, what colleagues in her office were wearing, their hobbies and foibles. If there was one part of this memoir I didn’t enjoy, it was her interminable lists of observations and objects so numerous you start to wonder whether they’re only there to beef up the word count.

That aside, though, this remains a beautifully relatable and tender account of a young woman trying her best to swallow Silicon Valley’s Kool-Aid, but never quite managing to keep it down. We meet the prodigious CEO who treats his staff like dirt but remains worshipped by them. There’s the data analytics firm happily ignoring the fact that they’re actually just spying on people. And bizarre technology products marketed in a way that might leave a visitor from the past wondering what the hell everyone in San Francisco is smoking. “Built by humans, used by unicorns,” says an advert.

The background radiation of misogyny in its various forms is sadly no surprise at all. Following #MeToo, her experiences (one of her older colleagues tells her he fancies Jewish women) sound depressingly familiar, even mundane. Many of us have been through the same. “Can’t get sexually harassed when you work remotely,” she and other women joke.

When raising lack of diversity, women and minorities are countered with the obtuse and now tired refrain: “What about diversity of opinion? What about diversity of thought?” Because, of course, who needs black women in tech when you can have a few more right-leaning white men?

It is draining. They find themselves constantly gaslit, blasted with the erroneous claim that Silicon Valley is a meritocracy, that it only looks the way it does because some people happen to be better at their jobs, and if others don’t like that, it’s because they’re not trying hard enough. Or they’re jealous.

Unless you’re making big money in Silicon Valley, you are seeing the emperor without his clothes. It feels as though Wiener is always rolling her eyes, wishing the people she met were kinder, wiser and more cultured than they are. She desperately tries to expose them to quality literature. They respond with a lack of interest and with condescension.

She stays as long as she does, it seems, because this place still feels like the centre of the universe. It is an industry birthing billionaires, influencing not just how we behave but also the health of our democracies and the direction of our politics. It’s difficult not to be seduced. Wiener may be ashamed and guilty to be there, but she is also in thrall to it, negged into submission.

Her experience tells us to be wary. From a distance, the engineers may look like geniuses, but in the pages of Uncanny Valley they are reduced to naive young men – boys, almost – who can’t believe their luck. Hiring in their own image in the apparent belief that they have some magic money-making ingredient not shared by the rest of us, they have fostered a narrow culture so incapable of self-reflection, empathy or humility that only disaster can follow.

Angela Saini’s most recent book is Superior: The Return of Race Science (Fourth Estate)

Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener is published by Fourth Estate (£16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15



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