The young millenials who become millionaires and billionaires creating tech startups in San Francisco have a lot of overlap with the counterculture revolutionaries of the 1960s. Wiener tries to understand the philosophical implications of this revolution but it’s too complex. Wiener gets to know the revolutionaries, their causes, their ambitions, their faults, their crimes, their successes and anguishes. Wiener was an observer of a social revolution, not a revolutionary herself. Wiener’s role in her story was much like Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, as a commentator on the main characters, or like Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Anna Wiener wasn’t a programmer or computer engineer, and her memoir is not really about computers even though it focuses on people who passionately are. I was hoping Uncanny Valley would be another The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder. I’m a computer guy who loves books about the history of computers and computing. Wiener, graduated from college in 2009 and went to work for publishers in New York, and then at age 25 moved to San Francisco to work at a succession of three internet startups, the most famous of which was GitHub. Bookmarks which tracks links to reviews found mostly rave reviews.ĭescribing what Uncanny Valley is about will be hard. This is probably why The New York Times chose Uncanny Valley as one of the “ Ten Best Books of 2020.” It was also on these best of the year lists from Esquire, NPR, and Parade. Anna Wiener was on the peripheral of several interesting news events of the decade, so even though this is a personal memoir, she had a stadium seat to some significant social upheavals that affected more than just San Francisco. Anna Wiener’s 2020 book Uncanny Valley is about San Francisco of the 2010s, although I’d say mainly about from 2013 to 2016 when Trump is elected president with a bit of updating to 2018. I have never been to San Francisco but over my lifetime I’ve read many books about social movements that city produced. By James Wallace Harris, Friday, December 4, 2020

Uncanny valley a memoir review