Silicon Valley Hustling: An Interview with Anna Wiener
Anna Weiner (Photo: Russell Perkins)
As a contributing writer for The New Yorker, Anna Wiener files dispatches from San Francisco that home in on the Silicon Valley’s human stories with a subtlety elided by consumer data sets and algorithmic models. Contextualized by her own professional experience at a succession of Bay Area internet platforms, she’s plumbed LinkedIn-friendly headlines about earnings reports and funding rounds in order to interrogate the culture: the restrictive gatekeeping of seed accelerators and venture capital, the unlikely marriage of California bohemianism with corporate libertarianism, and the lonely homogeneity of modern, online cities. By analyzing the structures behind the tech industry’s most valuable and ubiquitous products, she conveys these phenomena as natural, if not inevitable, byproducts.
Wiener’s memoir Uncanny Valley maps her own coming-of-age during the Valley’s 2010s rush, as well as the industry’s simultaneous loss of innocence. Frustrated at her dead-end assistant job with a New York literary agency, she jumps at the opportunity to join a short-lived ebook start-up, then sets west to work at a series of big-data SaaS (Software as a Service) companies that promise excitement and equity in exchange for cultish devotion. As a support specialist, she inadvertently finds herself witness to Gamergate, Pizzagate, data breaches, and the ad-tech surveillance boom that
