I had to write a performance review for myself at the end of one year I wrote this long performance review and showed it to my mom, who said, “Don’t put all this in writing. These were my resources, and about halfway through the writing, I interviewed former coworkers and colleagues. I had this folder called “Notes To Self” with several thousand emails that were all just snippets. If I hear a piece of dialogue that’s funny to me on the street or if I witness an interaction, I’ll write it up in an email, send it to myself, and put it in a folder.

I have all of these long emails to friends that were actually incredibly helpful in writing this book, although quite cringeworthy. What little down-time I had, I mostly spent emailing with friends in New York. Meet the Vets Who Provide Big Muscle for Big TechĮsquire: What was your approach to collecting information about this period of your life?Īnna Wiener: When I moved to San Francisco, I was twenty-five and very lonely I didn’t have many friends in the city.

Esquire spoke with Wiener, now the tech correspondent at The New Yorker, about mythologization of male founders, selfhood in the workplace, and legal accountability for Big Tech. At the intersection of exploitative labor, entitled men, and ungodly amounts of venture capital, Wiener bears witness to the fearsome future as it unfolds. Yet Uncanny Valley is so much more than a memoir-it’s a vivid, unflinching portrait of a changed San Francisco, a onetime haven for artists and dreamers now dangerously in thrall to the capitalist chokehold of tech monoliths. What has emerged from those experiences is Uncanny Valley, a hyper-detailed, thoroughly engrossing memoir about her coming-of-age in Silicon Valley during the early years of the startup boom.

She joined a data analytics startup, where she gained a front row seat to the amorality and extravagance of the new digital economy. In her mid-twenties, Anna Wiener was working a dead-end job in book publishing when she dropped everything and headed west to Silicon Valley, land of unbridled ambition, surreal excess, and multi-million dollar recklessness.

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