Jennifer Schaffer on Anna Wiener's memoir inside a tech startup, 'Uncanny Valley' "Any honest memoir of the 2010s in San Francisco is, in some sense, a memoir of loss: the get-rich-quick manufacture of millionaires has come at the cost of reckless destruction, the ripple effects of which were felt nationwide during the 2016 election, where Wiener ends her tale. But Uncanny Valley isn’t particularly elegiac: we are shown so little of the world outside of tech, the one being lost. My favorite section of Uncanny Valley is Wiener’s litany of beloved inefficiencies, a moving, paragraph-long tribute to the world of touch and scent and appetite and slowness, ending with “Warm laundry, radio, waiting for the bus,” that is set in contrast to the Valley’s vision of a world where everything “could be optimized, prioritized, monetized, and controlled.” Is it greedy that I wanted more by way of a defense for the sensuous world? Outside of her relationship, we are given so few glances of Wiener’s pre- and sub-Valley life, her non-working personhood. It’s true that while working at startups, your inner self is more or less transplanted by your working self—your value add. But it can be hard, in Uncanny Valley as in our day-to-day lives, to track what is being lost, cut out, sacrificed.