![]() For anyone reading the book since the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, which began but a few weeks after the memoir’s release, the experience of Wiener’s book-with its depictions of the tech industry’s growing consciousness of its political power, as well as its aspirations for a frictionless, remote-working world for an emerging techno-utopian class-will seem, well, nothing short of uncanny. Only Wiener doesn’t place her dystopia in a hypothetical future, but rather describes a real-world region gone utterly strange: the San Francisco Bay Area of the past decade or so. Like Orwell, Wiener warns of the potential dangers of a world where surveillance and techno-futurist ideologies have run rampantly amok, dramatically threatening human freedom. If you had happened to read Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley in January 2020, when this insider’s account of working in Silicon Valley’s “surveillance economy” was first published, the experience must have felt a little like reading George Orwell’s 1984. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |