Uncanny Valley: A Memoir

Wiener relocates to San Francisco feeling adventurous about the move and her new job. She explains the analytics startup’s business model, which makes “a pickax-during-the-Gold-Rush product” (38). The “pickax” product collects and visualizes customized data sets on businesses’ users and consumers; the startup maintains an edge against corporate competitors by offering a streamlined, aesthetically pleasing tool. Wiener happily views her new employer as an underdog: “I liked the idea of working for two kids younger than I was, who […] were upending the script for success” (40). She notes that she is the twentieth employee and the fourth woman, emphasizing the intimacy of the small work environment. She befriends her charismatic onboarding buddy, Noah, and finds herself stimulated by the challenge of understanding the product.

She describes her early excitement about the work: “It did not take long for me to understand the fetish for big data. […] digital streams of human behavior, answers to questions I didn’t know I had” (42). Her company maintains a back-end bird’s-eye view of all companies’ data, known as “God Mode,” which allows her to observe the volatility of many Silicon Valley businesses from behind the scenes. The unprecedented access afforded by