The Anna Wiener story, Anna Wiener warns, is not a hero’s journey. “In a book, you really want your protagonist to have a specific goal: You want to see them try and fail to reach it, and then eventually either triumph or walk away, right?” she says. “But I’ve always just sort of followed what has looked interesting to me.” And yet in Uncanny Valley, Wiener’s 2020 memoir about her experience working customer support roles at Silicon Valley start-ups in her 20s, she makes for a compelling protagonist. Not a hero exactly, but an astute stand-in for the consumer for whom the tech ecosystem is merely, as she writes, “the scaffolding of everyday life”—ubiquitous and useful, if not particularly well understood. This story is from Kinfolk Issue Forty-Two Buy Now Related Stories Arts & Culture Issue 42 Influencers Anonymous Instagram content creators answer a short survey about the influencer industry. Arts & Culture Issue 42 Rage Against the Machine A conversation about the influence of invisible algorithms. Arts & Culture Issue 42 Computed Emotion On the rise of chatbot therapy. Arts & Culture Issue 42 Brewster Kahle The tech idealist archiving the internet. Arts & Culture Issue 42 Captcha This Prove you're not a robot. Arts & Culture Issue 42 Digital Hoarding The ascendancy of virtual memory.
Arts & Culture Issue 42 Influencers Anonymous Instagram content creators answer a short survey about the influencer industry.
Arts & Culture Issue 42 Rage Against the Machine A conversation about the influence of invisible algorithms.
