Her experience in tech has unsurprisingly affected how she approaches technology in her own life from not using Facebook to trying to spend less time on the internet. There are aesthetic and cultural differences but at the end of the day these are corporations like any other and should be regulated.” “I don’t believe in the utopian potential in the tech industry, I haven’t been given any evidence to believe that it’s different. There’s a consistent style of corporate culture in Silicon Valley especially among start-ups and so to single any one company out didn’t make sense.”

This also links to her wider argument in the book that this relentless culture is part of a wider issue of the Valley. Companies where there’s the emphasis on speed, rapid growth, acceleration, high returns or monopoly, this is a culture that’s not specific to any one company.” “A lot of them are interchangeable when it comes to the experience women and non-technical employees have. When it came to the companies and start-ups she worked for, the lack of naming also pointed to how similar they are. Despite moving into tech, she still kept a foot in the literary world by doing occasional book reviews for a Brooklyn-based magazine, n+1 which was where the initial idea for Uncanny Valley came about. “I always enjoyed writing but felt maybe my utility was helping other people who were better writers put their books out in the world rather than focus on my own writing as a career path,” she explains when we chat on the phone from a hotel in Washington D.C as part of her book tour. Though she had worked in publishing, a career as a writer wasn’t part of her initial game plan. Whilst reading about an e-reading app promising to disrupt the book industry she decides to apply for a role, which brought her into the tech world and, eventually, saw her working for Github, the open-source code platform which was later acquired by Microsoft for $7.5 billion. New West End Company BRANDPOST | PAID CONTENTĪ New Yorker by birth, Wiener graduated into the peak of the 2009 recession before settling into a job as an assistant in publishing.

Uncanny valley memoir