Hi, it’s Vanessa, your ENLIGHTENMENT host.

Tech is always changing. As are our uses of it, our hopes for it, and our concerns about it. But one thing about the tech industry seems to remain constant, and that is San Francisco/Silicon Valley remains its global hub. People who want to make their mark — and their fortune — in tech still come from all over the world to that part of California. Some succeed and can afford the median price for a San Francisco home ($1.7 million), but most leave, feeling better or worse about their time there.

That’s why the latest pick for my bimonthly book club of fiction/non-fiction focused on the Golden State is Uncanny Valley, a memoir by Anna Wiener. She spent four years in Silicon Valley and while the e-publishing and Big Data startups she worked at may now be obsolete, the social, economic and moral issues she faced then are probably still the ones faced by the latest batch of young tech workers today.

I usually invite a special guest to each club meeting, and this time I’m hoping that it’s you “Silicon Valley refugees” who now live here. If you’ve spent time working in Silicon Valley (or still do), come and share your stories and opinions about that experience. Even if you haven’t finished/read the book, you can still follow along as we use Wiener’s memoir to discuss the pros, cons, highs and lows of working and living in California’s digital hub.

Below is a summary of Uncanny Valley.

Tickets are $5 (not including Eventbrite's fee) to cover refreshments; you are welcome to BYO.

Claim your seat - Register here on our Eventbrite page.

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In her mid-twenties, at the height of tech industry idealism, Anna Wiener—stuck, broke, and looking for meaning in her work, like any good millennial—left a job in book publishing for the promise of the new digital economy. She moved from New York to San Francisco, where she landed at a big-data startup in the heart of the Silicon Valley bubble: a world of surreal extravagance, dubious success, and fresh-faced entrepreneurs hell-bent on domination, glory, and, of course, progress.

Anna arrived amidst a massive cultural shift, as the tech industry rapidly transformed into a locus of wealth and power rivaling Wall Street. But amid the company ski vacations and in-office speakeasies, boyish camaraderie and ride-or-die corporate fealty, a new Silicon Valley began to emerge: one in far over its head, one that enriched itself at the expense of the idyllic future it claimed to be building.

Part coming-of-age-story, part portrait of an already-bygone era, Anna Wiener’s memoir is a rare first-person glimpse into high-flying, reckless startup culture at a time of unchecked ambition, unregulated surveillance, wild fortune, and accelerating political power. With wit, candor, and heart, Anna deftly charts the tech industry’s shift from self-appointed world savior to democracy-endangering liability, alongside a personal narrative of aspiration, ambivalence and disillusionment.

Unsparing and incisive, Uncanny Valley is a cautionary tale, and a revelatory interrogation of a world reckoning with consequences its unwitting designers are only beginning to understand.