Anna Wiener is an American writer, best known for her 2020 memoir ''
Uncanny Valley
In aesthetics, the uncanny valley ( ja, 不気味の谷 ''bukimi no tani'') is a hypothesized relation between an object's degree of resemblance to a human being and the emotional response to the object. The concept suggests that humanoid object ...
''. Wiener currently writes for ''
The New Yorker
''The New Yorker'' is an American weekly magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. Founded as a weekly in 1925, the magazine is published 47 times annually, with five of these issues ...
'' as a tech correspondent.
Life
Wiener grew up in Brooklyn and attended
Wesleyan University
Wesleyan University ( ) is a Private university, private liberal arts college, liberal arts university in Middletown, Connecticut. Founded in 1831 as a Men's colleges in the United States, men's college under the auspices of the Methodist Epis ...
in
Middletown, CT
Middletown is a city located in Middlesex County, Connecticut, United States, Located along the Connecticut River, in the central part of the state, it is south of Hartford. In 1650, it was incorporated by English settlers as a town under its ...
. 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.
Interested in data, particularly the way in which it could be used to tell stories,
[ she worked for the analytics startup ]Mixpanel
Mixpanel is a business analytics service company. It tracks user interactions with web and mobile applications and provides tools for targeted communication with them.
Data collected is used to build custom reports and measure user engagement ...
and GitHub
GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous ...
,Patrick Collison
Patrick Collison (born 9 September 1988) is an Irish billionaire entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and CEO of Stripe, which he started with his younger brother, John, in 2010. He won the 41st Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition in 2005 a ...
. 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.The New Republic
''The New Republic'' is an American magazine of commentary on politics, contemporary culture, and the arts. Founded in 1914 by several leaders of the progressive movement, it attempted to find a balance between "a liberalism centered in hum ...
'', '' n+1'', ''Atlantic
The Atlantic Ocean is the second-largest of the world's five oceans, with an area of about . It covers approximately 20% of Earth's surface and about 29% of its water surface area. It is known to separate the " Old World" of Africa, Europe an ...
'', and others. She is a contributing writer to ''The New Yorker''.
Bibliography
Books
*
Essays and reporting
* [Online version is titled "Is Substack the media future we want?".]
Critical studies and reviews of Wiener's work
;''Uncanny valley''
*
*
*
*
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;Notes
References
External links
*
*Constance Grady
Uncanny Valley author Anna Wiener on the stories tech companies tell themselves
Vox, Feb 3, 2020
*Pete Tosiello
Silicon Valley Hustling: An Interview with Anna Wiener
Paris Review, January 9, 2020
{{DEFAULTSORT:Wiener, Anna
21st-century American journalists
21st-century American women writers
Living people
The New Yorker people
American women memoirists
21st-century American memoirists
Writers from Brooklyn
Year of birth missing (living people)
American women journalists
American technology writers
Women technology writers
Journalists from New York City
GitHub people
Silicon Valley people