57 pages • 1 hour read
Anna WienerUncanny Valley: A Memoir
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1, Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “Incentives”
Chapter 1 Summary
In Silicon Valley circa 2012, the tech industry enjoys a boom period. With sweeping narration and an ironically grandiose tone, Wiener details the expansive optimism of start-up founders and venture capitalists, aiming to insinuate their products into every corner of daily life. In contrast, Wiener leads a “fragile but agreeable life” (5) as an assistant at a literary agency in New York, oblivious to the churning startup scene. She feels Silicon Valley’s influence most acutely in her work, as “an online superstore that had gotten its start in the nineties by selling books on the World Wide Web” (6)—a thinly veiled description of Amazon.com—exerts pressure on a shrinking publishing industry. Wiener sees few opportunities for professional growth; she is newly single, having ended a relationship with a cheating older man; she moves through the city “staving off a thrumming sense of dread” (8). She longs to free herself from her precarious, stagnant situation.
Chapter 2 Summary
Wiener reads an article about an e-reading startup that piques her curiosity, promising a “revolution” in publishing. Advancement in her industry depends on paying one’s dues while supplementing an inadequate salary with auxiliary income; the industry is built upon its underpaid and “expendable” assistants. Wiener admits that her work in publishing is made possible through significant parental support and privilege, but the situation begins to feel unsustainable. A gnawing discontent and vague desire “to feel affirmed, confident, and valued” drive her to leave publishing for something new (12). She lands a position at the e-reading startup.
The startup’s cofounders—all younger than her—radiate confidence. Wiener admires their energetic, goal-oriented approach to their lives. The position pays better than her publishing job, but her role is nebulous, a shifting, improvised combination of editing and administration. She plays the caretaker to her male coworkers, ordering snacks and organizing team outings. She begins to feel inessential, which is confirmed when the CEO accidentally types a private criticism into a group chat: “She’s too interested in learning, not doing” (22). Shortly after this incident, she agrees to leave. Reluctant to return to publishing, she heeds the advice of one of the cofounders to seek work in San Francisco.
Chapter 3 Summary
Wiener arrives in a swiftly gentrifying San Francisco, which “had begun to bend to the on-demand desires of recent college graduates with plump bank accounts” (25). She books a room using Airbnb to interview for a customer support position at a mobile analytics startup. The interview consists of a series of “self-conscious and infuriating” questions, functioning “more like a hazing ritual than an airtight vetting system” (31). The exercise culminates with the startup’s cofounder asking her to complete a section of the LSAT. She achieves a perfect score and later receives a generous job offer.
As she accepts and prepares to move, a friend expresses concern that the work might be “soul-ruining.” Wiener feels embarrassed about how her decision might be perceived by others; she publicly claims that she’s made this choice for the novelty of it, and that this day job might enable the pursuit of other passions. She confesses a more self-serving motivation to the reader: “It was easier, in any case, to fabricate a romantic narrative than admit that I was ambitious—that I wanted my life to pick up momentum, go faster” (35). These final lines propel the story ahead as Wiener enters an environment defined by relentless forward motion and breakneck speed.
Part 1, Chapters 1-3 Analysis
Opening the book, Wiener assumes the tone of an omniscient narrator to provide a broad view of the social and cultural moment in which her story begins. Her first chapter surveys the overriding ethos of Silicon Valley in 2012 and articulates an unbridled, entitled optimism inherent in tech that she explores throughout the book. In more personal, confessional prose, she contrasts her “affectedly analog” life with this ethos, describing the habits by which she avoided new technology that was nonetheless encroaching upon her social and professional life. Chapter 2 presents an inciting incident as Wiener begins and quickly ends a job at the e-reading startup, and the narrative gains speed as she secures a new position in San Francisco and leaves Brooklyn behind in the hopes that life will “go faster.”
Wiener’s prose reveals much about herself and the culture of the tech industry. She balances visual and scenic description with introspection about her motivations and the beginnings of her emotional journey. This descriptive style casts Wiener as a voyeur and a guide for the reader, as she enters the industry but in an auxiliary role, maintaining an “outsider” status. Her choice to refer to well-known global businesses, such as Amazon and Facebook, not by their names but by their functions makes the familiar strange for the reader, exposing brand names as euphemisms that conceal a business’s more ominous realities and roles in society. In contrast, Wiener discloses her salary and benefits packages at each job she works—a choice which defies norms of etiquette and raises questions about how the relative value of things, services, and people is determined. Wiener paints a world that is slightly precarious and unstable, both recognizable and odd, creating both tension and excitement that engross the reader in Wiener’s journey.
While Wiener focuses on her individual experience of a few years in the tech industry, this short period has had momentous political, social, and material consequences across the globe. In the first chapter, she nods towards the momentous, hard-to-grasp nature of this moment for the tech industry, opening with a line that shows a warped or warping sense of time and significance: “Depending on whom you ask, it was either the apex, the inflection point, or the beginning of the end for Silicon Valley’s startup scene” (3). Her subsequent description of Mark Zuckerberg—described only as the “grinning founder” of “the social network everyone hated”—ringing the opening bell on Wall Street over video chat as Facebook went public—is both a humorous and ominous image. Wiener describes it as a ”death knell for affordable rent in San Francisco” (3), but with the benefit of hindsight following the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the 2016 American presidential election, the reader may interpret the image as foreboding and significant well beyond San Francisco’s city limits, as our society continues to grapple with the political repercussions of this moment.
