The most backwards process imaginable. Walk us through it starting with college. Going with college, itwas just my 10 year reunion. I did not attend. I graduated in 2009 from wesley and university with a degree in sociology. And i just read in the wall street journal 2009 was the worst job market for generations so i had the good fortune to walk straight into that. And after a bunch of internships and living with my parents, working in music, i work in publishing at a Literary Agency for a few years in new york and after that joined a startup was doing a sort of netflix or ebooks type of app. I was there sort of it was supposed to bethe person you know about books and publishing. It was a fourperson company when i joined. Three of you were founders. And from there i went to San Francisco and iworked at a Data Analytics startup. Which i thought would be a great application of my sociology degree. Little did i know not exactly ebooks but i did that for 18 months and it was probably the longest 15 months of my life and from there went to work at a Company Building software for open Source Software development. So a software Company Building software or Software Developers, kind of the belly of the beast. You come back to new york or are you still bass . I live in San Francisco. I only left the industry in 2018. And i had sort of been writing about it for a little while. And then it reached a point where it seemed i could no longer do both. So i left last february. One of the things you do in uncanny value as you describe your young adulthood here in new york city. Quote, i had a fragile but agreeable life, a job as an assistant of a small Literary Agency in manhattan. A smattering of beloved friends. On i exercise my social anxiety, primarily by avoiding them. In the matter of so many twentysomethings living in north brooklyn. At the time when and art seasonal chocolatefactory was considered a local landmark, when people spoke earnestly about urban homesteading , my life was affected, effectively analog. In fact, was typical for people your age living in new york city . Thats a good question. I dont know, i dont think i can make a generalization about people my age certainly my cohorts coming out of the liberal arts college, people who really. Wanting to be in publishing. People who were into art, music, literature. I live in greenpoint where there was a pretty vibrant culture and the arts scene and music scene. And the technology was not, it was sort of in conventional, it wasnt the focus and i think that our world was way more, was just a tangible physical world. It wasnt one characterized by speed or visibility, if that makes sense. You describe publishing as rather quaint, antiquated. Relatively, yes. Publishing, they are really different. Publishing, books take a really long time to make. Often they require a lot of time to write and for them to get together slowly is in the investment of the book so in Silicon Valley people are pushing software before its finished to see how it goes. There is a rating on quickly, there are different approaches to Product Development, im horrified that im making a best Product Development but insofar as it is, the sort of values that motivate both are reallydifferent. Host is it addictive . Guest technology . Some of it i think. Host is the mindset addictive . Guest thats interesting. Yes, i found it really intoxicating. Host intoxicating, better word. Guest it feels good to see the proper products of your labor realized quickly and you get in this feedback loop of working on something and you see it go. You can see that quickly. Within you know, a month of having something, a viable product. Host what about publishing and technology . Is there a synergy there . Guest thats a good question. A synergy in terms of how can technology providenew infrastructure . Its hard to say. I think a lot of the Technology Products available that tried to innovate in publishing havent really taken off the way theyre expected to. I think obviously the reading is a Big Development but i dont really know the answer to that question. I think its kind of hard to get a rate on a prettyperfect technology. I think the book is a pretty perfect technology. What was her first job in San Francisco . It was this Data Analytics and i was going to do Customer Support. What did you know about Data Analytics bythe time you join . Close to nothing, i would say. Why would you hire . Guest well, i was later told i was hired and the interview process i was given , a section of the lsat and i thought there was one of the founders of the lsat and apparently. Host be said it was for his girlfriend. Guest he been helping his girlfriend study so he was familiar with the test and i guess we figured that would be a method of quantifying qualitative skills. And in Silicon Valley i think thats a date, people are trying to figure out how do you quantify everything. This seems like a useful for them. But yes, i think they found that i was someone who like to write, could write a grammatically correct email. And i was willing to Learn New Technology side. And they also really needed someone to jump in. So its a good question. To quote on kelly valley, being the only woman on a nontechnical team providing Customer Support to Software Developers was like immersion therapy for internalized misogyny. Break that down for us. I think that was sort of trying to do just an every day Emotional Experience was being not just the only person latino men but one of four women at a company of 24 six women at a company of 40. And for me, i was sort of surrounded by mail confidence. And all of these young menwho really felt like it been given the green light by society to do what theywanted to do. And it was working. And things aremoving really fast. And i think for me, it was sort of an everyday struggle to just like make sure that people were treating me fairly and as an equal. And try not to let myself get gas lift can quickly. Gas lift, or to feel that i was, its if something seemed off to me to make sure there was good reason for it rather than assuming that it was based on some other rubric that was gender specific. Its a little hard to break that down. But i know how it feels, its just hard to articulate in a certain way very few women know. Correct . Famously so. In the industry. Host are technologists treated differently than the support staff . Guest evidently. I think its a culture that really values not just the engineering skill set has been in short supply so the market values it obviously but its a way of looking at the world that i think people appreciated, looking at infrastructure and systemsand sort of highlevel overview of how things work. And before it is a nontechnical, its a little technical but is largely a nontechnical role and you are dealing with peoples feelings and it can take a long time and you know, often dealing with the user its tedious. And i think thats a sort of cross skill, soft skills role where you dont have the same Cultural Capital as the technical one. Did you find what you are learning in Silicon Valley will at some point be the new norm . For business . I think a lot of companies are interested in having some of that Silicon Valley startup, however you might call it. I think that people like the future of work insofar as thats something is an elusive category. I think people are looking at Silicon Valley organize their workplaces, i dont mean that in a union way all that would also be fantastic. And how to you know, how to keep up withthis culture. Pay, that technology and clearly people have, the culture has reallyresponded. To these Tech Companies. So how do you, Silicon Valley has become a model for a lot of other industries for better and worse, i dont think its all valid. I think its specific to the use case but its also, theres a lot to learn and theres a lot also that i think could be readily dismissed. Host where does the term uncanny come from . Guest the phrase uncanny valley is the term from robotics and it describes the experience of seeing say humanoid robot thats so realistic that somethings a little bit off so you fall into this valley of, its sort of an eerie sensation of things like being close to human but not quite right or close to real but some things all little strange. Host is that how you felt when you are out there . I think it describes the Emotional Experience in certain ways for sure. Host you were paid 69,000 your first job in Silicon Valley, 65, was that enough to survive . Guest in 2013 it was and i had a rentcontrolled apartment that filled a third of my paycheck but i was lucky. I didnt have anyone relying on me. For financial support, so i definitely was surviving, more than surviving. Anyone going into the city now making 65,000 a year, you have to find an apartment is probably in for a more difficult time. Host from your book, it did not take long for me to understand the fetish for big data. Guest would you like me to expand on that . I think that this still exists. I think around the time i was writing people were excited about big data. I think that technology had made it so people could collect data on any facet of theirproduct, running queries on it. And i think some people like to know whats going on so you look at the cohort Level Analysis and it shows you how people are using your products or how people are engagingwith the technology your building. I think also , my third month on the job at the Analytics Company was the story broke and i hadnt realized how high up that fetish goes for collecting data and the sort of surveillance applications obviously. And i think its just people like to have information and its preferable to be in the position of having information on people and being someone whose information is being collected by an unknown entity. Host what can be done with all that information . Guest what cant be done with all that information after mark. Host is it all about marketing . Guest i think on the internet. The internet economy is largely about targeted ads. Its also about in any individual app theres a way the company can make money unless their business is selling data to somewhere else. So a, an ecommerce site might try to tweak a certain checkout pages are away or make it easier to check out in the way that maybe passive amazon makes it easy to pay. They might make it as frictionless as possible to get peoples money. So that would be a sort of i think pretty kosher application of user data or engagement data. I think it gets more frightening. You have the Cell Phone Companies selling location data to i guess to advertisers but also its not difficult to process this information. I think you have government surveillance that can be, that can target people who might be suspicious for whatever reason that is culturally based or you have people who are targeting minorities or not just minorities, so i dont know. Its sort of limitless. Its these are Mysterious Forces that kind of undergird everything. Host where were you raised . Guest i grew up in brooklyn. Host so youre from new york city. Was it a Culture Shock to go to the other coast . Guest definitely, in many ways. I think the 60s counterculture as a significant presence in San Francisco still even if its largely based in nostalgia. People are more laidback, more casual. I would say the intellectual culture of tech specifically, i dont feel i can speak about San Francisco because when imoved there in the context of this book , my life was very claustrophobic. I was in the office, hanging out withcoworkers. I would say iwas a great cultural citizen. Host you were down for the cause as they say. What did that mean . Guest that was a phrase we used it in the analytics startup to refer to being committed to the company. So if you stayed up till midnight working on a side project that wasnt within your job responsibility, that being down for the cost. Theres sort of putting the company first, making sure that the success of the team was a priority. Host the book is called uncanny valley and were starting to talk to anna wiener about it. The book is coming out in january 2020, thats a long leadtime, isnt it . Guest i guess so. I didnt make that decision but i think january is a good time. Host to go back to your life in San Francisco, one of the things youre right, i had never seen such a shameful juxtaposition of blatant suffering and affluent idealism. Guest anybody was been to San Francisco in the last decade has probably seen this. There is a growing homeless population. I think itssomething like 17 percent in the last few years. I found it very jarring and i still do. I hope i never stopped finding it jarring but you walk downtown to market which is the neighborhood where a lot of the startups are in San Francisco and people will be sleeping on the street outside of a company like uber or youll see people doing drugs or struggling with Mental Illness outside city hall. You have people building the future in a city where people are really being failed at the most basic level so i think for me, that just felt and still does feels like whiplash and tech is committed to solving problems and a lot of companies are solving important problems but these very basic fundamental problems are all over thecity. I specifically found it interesting that people havent turned their attention to whats literally on their doorstep. Host covering tech today , a lot different, do you get access to the Tech Companies . Guest ive been writing more about the culture of the industry and access is tricky. A little bit, im not really doing Investigative Journalism so its less of an issue for me. I really think people in Silicon Valley are excited to talk about what theyre working on. And its a pretty secretive industry. I think google,apple, facebook are a black box even. So much of the people who report on them as a dedicated beat , but i dont know, its funny. I do feel having gone from being a tech worker to writing about the Tech Industry that its sort of like the doorsof power in the city have closed on me. And im no longer on the inside but im still very much paying attention to the system and the industry. Host after 18 months in the Tech Industry, the longest in your life as you say. Guest maybe a little dramatic. Definitely the most intense as far as my work life. Host do you still use all the different websites that we still know after mark use more tech, less tech . Guest im a little bit more paranoid, specifically more paranoid about what data im sharing apps and websites and whogets to see that inside these companies. I think if i download a app and see that they dont have arevenue model im suspicious of it and i tend not to use it. Anything that asks for access to my photos or my address book i tend not to use and i turn off those settings. I used add blockers on everything except media websites. So yes, im not a luddite. I Love Technology as a consumer in many ways but i feel more aware of the various abuses of information that can happen. And i feel very protective of my content on the internet. I assume this book will change it but im proud of the fact that if you google me, i have no pictures of my face ongoogle. I managed to get away with that for 20 years. I may be a little bit paranoid about this, i guess. Host the book is called uncanny valley, and memoir. The author is new york contributor anna wiener. s book tv continues on cspan2, television forserious readers. Good evening everybody. Im bradley graham, coowner of politics and prose along with my wife and on behalf of everybody, welcome. Thank you very much for coming out this evening. So its not very often that we get to hold an author