POSTPONED-Uncanny Valley: A Memoir

Date
Wed May 13th 2020, 7:00 - 8:30pm
Event Sponsor
McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society
Location
TBD
POSTPONED-Uncanny Valley: A Memoir

Anna Wiener is a contributing writer to The New Yorker, where she writes about Silicon Valley, startup culture, and technology. Her writing has appeared in n+1The AtlanticWiredThe New RepublicNew YorkHarper’s, and the Times Magazine. Her first book, “Uncanny Valley,” is a memoir of her time in the tech industry. 

From The New York Times review: In her extraordinary new book, “Uncanny Valley,” Anna Wiener recounts what made her, a 25-year-old woman with an “affectedly analog” life in New York City, abandon her job at a literary agency in 2013 to work for tech start-ups, and what eventually — five years later — made her leave the industry. Money was certainly part of her original decision, but not all. At the literary agency, she was subject to the low pay and genteel exploitation of a shrinking industry; even more alluring than the offer of a better salary was tech’s “optimism and sense of possibility,” how it “promised what so few industries or institutions could, at the time: a future.”