At the end of Uncanny Valley, as the Trump era dawns, mentions of workers' rights and corporate responsibility starts to creep into Silicon Valley conversations. Last year, it was home to a speaker with cup holders and a smart toilet.Īt the panel I attended, the crowd was dwarfed by the number of people who, a day earlier, watched Samsung unveil a robot ball named " Ballie." Serious talks about labor rights are not what I expect from CES. The book was fresh in my mind when I stepped into the Labor Innovation & Technology Summit at CES, held in a modest conference room at Bally’s in Las Vegas. And their workers - however they are defined - can organize. Tech as a movement is above the fray, a miraculous force for change that can only be ruined by politicians and journalists who are jealous or just don't get it.īusinesses, on the other hand, can be regulated. The idea that Facebook and other tech companies are like Goldman Sachs, Coca-Cola, or any other corporation is powerful. "Tech, for the most part, wasn't progress. Tech, for the most part, wasn't progress. The novelty was burning off the industry's pervasive idealism was increasingly dubious. "Most were smart and nice and ambitious, but so were a lot of people.
"In reality, there was nothing superior about those whom I was trying to impress," Wiener wrote. She also encounters some of that famous Silicon Valley utopianism, often from young men on the cusp of becoming very rich. In the Bay Area, she finds everything you might expect, including hubris, misogyny, and offensively priced condos. Wiener moves from a low-paying publishing job to a start-up in New York City, and then takes another job at a data analytics company in San Francisco. Instead, it's a measured, personal, and deeply human look at the tech industry. It’s not a polemic, and, despite the many (thinly veiled) references to well-known tech companies, it’s not a dishy tell-all about Silicon Valley. It was Uncanny Valley, a memoir from New Yorker contributor Anna Wiener, which comes out on Tuesday.
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