Anna Wiener
- Words Allyssia Alleyne
- Photography Kourtney Kyung Smith
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.
Over the course of the book, Wiener recounts swapping the New ...
