“Can’t get sexually harassed when you work remotely,” she and other women joke. Following #MeToo, her experiences (one of her older colleagues tells her he fancies Jewish women) sound depressingly familiar, even mundane. The background radiation of misogyny in its various forms is sadly no surprise at all. Wiener is always rolling her eyes, wishing the people she met were kinder, wiser and more cultured “Built by humans, used by unicorns,” says an advert. And bizarre technology products marketed in a way that might leave a visitor from the past wondering what the hell everyone in San Francisco is smoking. There’s the data analytics firm happily ignoring the fact that they’re actually just spying on people. We meet the prodigious CEO who treats his staff like dirt but remains worshipped by them. That aside, though, this remains a beautifully relatable and tender account of a young woman trying her best to swallow Silicon Valley’s Kool-Aid, but never quite managing to keep it down. If there was one part of this memoir I didn’t enjoy, it was her interminable lists of observations and objects so numerous you start to wonder whether they’re only there to beef up the word count. We know exactly what she had for lunch, what the stores on every street were selling, what colleagues in her office were wearing, their hobbies and foibles. She must have been taking notes the whole time. From this vantage, not quite at the heart of the action but adjacent to it, she carefully, wryly observes everyday life in the Valley. It’s the kind of people-facing job that tech companies need, but engineers and coders sneer at. A New Yorker with a liberal arts background who started her career in publishing, she worked briefly in her 20s in Silicon Valley in customer support. It is instead intimate, the rolling thoughts of a young hipster sucked into this world against her better judgment. Wiener’s account is not designed to shock in the way others have.
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