Metadata#
- Author(s): Anna Wiener
- Number of pages: 281
- Year published: 2020
- Year read: 2025
Review#
Hm, an interesting memoir that I consumed like gossip or candy - but am unsure if I’d recommend?
This is a memoir of a very specific experience: being a relatively privileged, liberal arts/literary fiction-type white lady going to work in Silicon Valley in the 2010s. I am a white lady who went to work for tech in the 2010s (though, twist!, I hate literary fiction); I can confirm a lot of the cultural/anthropological reportage. The socio-economic and political points are specific to her perspective. And I totally get it.
But! A couple criticisms:
First, Wiener makes this interesting choice to anonymize EVERYTHING. It’s not Meta, it’s “the social network everybody hates”. It’s not Amazon, it’s “the former e-book seller megacorp” (or whatever, I can’t remember that one). In some cases, this is illuminating. Okay, in ONE case, it was illuminating: when she described Apple’s marketing of itself for its liberal/tolerant values, while its supply chain is an extractive, exploitative human rights nightmare (conflict minerals in the Congo; Foxconn, etc). THAT moment gave me pause.
But the rest of the time, the anonymization is just annoying. And weirdly gatekeeping? I kept asking myself: who is the audience for this?
For tech “insiders”, aka people who work in the industry or pay close attention to it, the anonymization is weird because it’s usually VERY clear who she’s talking about: GitHub, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, etc. For folks NOT in the industry, it’s just… not helpful? Like, I’m all for educating people who are not in tech about tech’s wicked, perverted ways (too numerous to mention). But we can only really do that if we name names! Being oblique just isn’t helpful. (And here is one person’s helpful public good: a “reverse engineered” dictionary of all the references.)
Another BIG missing piece that bothered me quite a lot is the total absence of the joy of, well, tech. Wiener is coming from a liberal arts perspective (and the points she makes about the different work cultures in the NYC publishing industry vs. SF startups were very on-point and authentic to my experiences coming from the non-profit world). She’s not particularly interested in learning how to code. She gives it a try one weekend, working through tutorials, and finds it pleasant but only gratifying to her “obsessive compulsive tendencies, [her] perfectionism”. She seems to imply that even the joy of coding is, in some way, corrupt or corrupting.
As a perfectionist with diagnosed OCD (!), this, well, hurt my feelings! And missed the mark COMPLETELY. (Correlation is not causation…)
Because coding is, for me, a creative craft, akin to making music! YES. And I know several musicians-turned-coders. Music and coding both create something out of nothing. They are tools for expression. They abide by some rules - often mathematical - but you can arrive at a “solution” in many different, creative, delightful ways. Reading code/music is harder, more onerous and less fun than writing it - than playing with it.
So imagine a history of the music industry that had zero appreciation for music? But only criticized the ways rapacious capitalism has poisoned and perverted it? That - in a way - endorsed the “tech exceptionalist” narrative that tech is somehow “beyond [the] good and evil” of capitalism. No! Tech is not exceptional. And a history of music without any understanding of why some people enjoy making (or listening to) music is a very woeful perspective indeed. And its narrowness would be immediately apparent! But for whatever reason, coding’s bullshit public relations has ruined it in the cultural imagination to such a point that seeing accurate portrayals of the Joy of Coding, of the hacker spirit, are few and far between. (I have GREAT hopes for Ellen Ullman’s memoirs.) Seriously, the only ones I can think of are Merlin in Disney’s The Sword in the Stone (he is a true tinkerer, people), Jaron Lanier’s memoir, and, of course, almost anything by my beloved Cory Doctorow.