The company on the receiving end of the digital data then exploits it to offer users products and services based on their characteristics and practices. Wiener and her colleagues call this level of omniscience “God mode.” Individual users have no privacy, no recourse, no knowledge and their online actions are being studied and monetized. Company employees can see individual users’ personal information, too. Her enthusiasm (and salary) clouds her understanding of the corporate mission, and it takes her a while to absorb the truth: that the platform tracks every action users take inside apps of the companies who pay for that information. As a non-engineer in a town that fetishizes technologists, she feels lucky to land her first job at a data analytics company. That “ad tech behind the curtain” is at the core of Wiener’s professional education - her moral education, too. Pay no attention to that ad tech behind the curtain: social would make people kinder, fairer, more empathetic.” “Social would build communities and break down barriers. “Social networks, claimed the social networks’ founders, were tools for connection and the free circulation of information,” Wiener writes.

The social media party, as Wiener recently told an interviewer, was in full swing.

But in her pursuit of meaning and momentum - which, she later admits, she conflated with money - she arrived in Silicon Valley at exactly the time social media companies were convincing people that their platforms could create and unite communities. When Wiener relocated to the West Coast at age 25, American society was already light-years from the birth of the Internet. In “Uncanny Valley,” Wiener’s incisive, compelling memoir of her years as a customer-support specialist at up-and-coming tech companies, readers get to scale it with her. She knew the learning curve would be as steep as the hike up Mount Diablo, one of the Bay Area’s tallest peaks. So in 2013, she fled Manhattan’s opportunity-starved publishing industry for Silicon Valley’s opportunity-studded tech industry. Anna Wiener wanted a foothold in the future.

Uncanny valley anna wiener review