Uncanny Valley

A chronicle by a young woman, who comes from the analog world of publishing, and falls into a career in Silicon Valley, working for a series of technology startups. She observes and participates in the lifestyle, guided by the allure of money, the potential of digitization, of optimization for optimization's sake. Her new world is full of free snacks, self-importance, company sponsored ski-trips, and a echo-chamber of philosphies by thinkers that idolize startup billionaires. No one questions what all their data-harvesting will lead to, or how their industry transforms their neighborhoods. I thought this was quite brilliant. Obviously you need to come to it with a certain knowledge of the scene. Then you can chuckle at Wiener's hilarious digs and truths, cleverly hidden-in-sight references for people and companies, all part of a culture that seems to be a parody of itself. The commentary is wry and witty, the prose quite exquisite, lots of feminism, and there's a self-awareness in it, that only let's you off the hook if you read this for pure entertainment. I'd line this up with the writing of [a:Ellen Ullman 80270 Ellen Ullman https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1375987657p2/80270.jpg]. SF's earlier coding culture had a similar energy, and now probably comes off as the more grounded parent of startup-culture's self-propagating pipe dreams. Glossary “the ebook start-up” ... Oyster“the data-analytics start-up” ... ? “the open-source start-up” ... Github“the search-engine giant” ... Google “the microblogging platform” ... Twitter“the home-sharing platform” ... Airbnb“the social network everybody hated” ... Facebook“the online superstore” ... amazonPatrick ... Patrick Collison, CEO of payment processor Stripemore glossary can be found here