Anna Wiener

Anna Wiener is an American writer, best known for her 2020 memoir Uncanny Valley. Wiener currently writes for The New Yorker as a tech correspondent.^[1]

Anna Wiener
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Wesleyan University
Genre	Non-fiction, memoir
Notable works	Uncanny Valley: A Memoir
Employer	The New Yorker
Website
www.annawiener.com

Life

Wiener grew up in Brooklyn^[2] and attended Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT.^[3] She worked in the tech sector in San Francisco in an attempt to find a career path with more "momentum" than the book publishing industry, where she was previously employed.^[4][5] Interested in data, particularly the way in which it could be used to tell stories,^[5] she worked for the analytics startup Mixpanel and GitHub,^[6] and befriended Stripe CEO Patrick Collison.^[7] Her book, Uncanny Valley, never mentions the names of the companies she worked at or interacted with, though she often describes their products and corporate cultures in sufficient detail for the reader to deduce what they are.^[6] After several years in San Francisco, she left the tech industry for several reasons, including its lack of response to the classified information released by Edward Snowden and a wider disillusionment with the corporate culture and sexism present therein.^[8]

Since leaving tech, Wiener has been writing about Silicon Valley for The New Republic, n+1, Atlantic, and others.^{[citation needed]} She is a contributing writer to The New Yorker.^[9]

Bibliography

Books

• Wiener, Anna (2020). Uncanny Valley: A Memoir. New York: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Essays and reporting

• Wiener, Anna (January 4–11, 2021). "You've got mail : the newsletter service Substack claims to be the future of media. Is it a future we want?". The Critics. A Critic at Large. The New Yorker. 96 (43): 70–76.^[a]

Critical studies and reviews of Wiener's work

Uncanny valley

• Muhammad, Ismail (December 22, 2019). "Inside Tech's Fever Dream". The Atlantic. Retrieved February 18, 2020.
• Westenfeld, Adrienne (January 14, 2020). "Anna Wiener Dissects the Brain Rot of Big Tech in Her Searing New Memoir". Esquire. Retrieved February 5, 2020.
• Saini, Angela (January 26, 2020). "Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener review – bullies, greed and sexism in Silicon Valley". The Observer. ISSN 0029-7712. Retrieved February 18, 2020.
• Ghaffary, Shirin (January 17, 2020). "Things can get "really bad, really quickly" when a 24-year-old runs a company". Vox. Retrieved February 18, 2020.

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Notes

1. Online version is titled "Is Substack the media future we want?".

References

1. "Anna Wiener". newyorker.com.
2. "About". Anna Wiener. Retrieved March 15, 2020.
3. "Aural Wes on Fader: Wesleyan's Breakout Bands". December 23, 2008. Archived from the original on January 6, 2011.
4. Wiener, Anna (September 19, 2019). "Four Years in Startups". The New Yorker. Condé Nast. Retrieved September 24, 2022.
5. Simon, Scott (January 11, 2020). "Living An Everyday Life Amid The Disrupters In 'Uncanny Valley'". NPR. Retrieved February 5, 2020.
6. Kois, Dan (January 7, 2020). "A Complete Guide to the Handful of Proper Nouns Anna Wiener Uses in Uncanny Valley". Slate. Archived from the original on March 21, 2020.
7. Tiffany, Kaitlyn (January 14, 2020). "Why Normal People Want to Work in Silicon Valley". The Atlantic. Retrieved March 15, 2020.
8. Todd, Sarah (January 11, 2020). ""There's a deep sadness to it": A new book takes on masculinity in Silicon Valley". NPR. Retrieved February 5, 2020.
9. "Contributors". The New Yorker. Retrieved December 18, 2023.

External links

• Official website
• Constance Grady, Uncanny Valley author Anna Wiener on the stories tech companies tell themselves Vox, February 3, 2020
• Pete Tosiello, Silicon Valley Hustling: An Interview with Anna Wiener, Paris Review, January 9, 2020