A Book(s) Review - Uncanny Valley Book by Anna Wiener and Lurking: How a Person Became a User Book by Joanne McNeil

At first, I didn’t understand why I was asked to review “Uncanny Valley,” Anna Wiener’s memoir about working for Bay Area start-ups in the 2010s. Wiener reports on technology for The New Yorker; I’ve only written about technology to say that I think social media is very bad. I’m much more interested in metafiction than metadata, not least because I’m confident I can explain what metafiction is. But when I started reading, I realized that former liberal arts majors who halfheartedly resist the app-enabled future — mainly through willful ignorance and sweeping complaints — are the intended audience for this book. Wiener was, and maybe still is, one of us; far from seeking to disabuse civic-minded techno-skeptics of our views, she is here to fill out our worst-case scenarios with shrewd insight and literary detail. It isn’t that those of us with skill sets as soft as our hearts don’t need to know what’s going on in “the ecosystem,” as those “high on the fumes of world-historical potential” call Silicon Valley. It’s more that everything over there is as absurdly wrong as we imagine. “Tone = DOOM,” I wrote in the margins, and that was before an up-and-coming C.E.O. introduces Wiener, a new hire, to his favorite dictatorially motivational phrase: “Down for the Cause” (DFTC).