Credit: AUTHOR PHOTO BY RUSSELL PERKINS

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AUTHOR PHOTO BY RUSSELL PERKINS

People Who Matter In East Coast Media and my social-media feed have made it very clear that we all must set aside a couple days to read Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley, a memoir about a young woman who flees the burning ship of the New York publishing industry for the million lifting boats of San Francisco’s start-up world. In this case, the People Who Matter are not wrong.

Wiener takes an anthropological approach to her three-year stint in tech, cataloging with scientific detail the habits and fashions of the twentysomething gold-rushers and the thirtysomething corporate warriors who descended on the Bay Area to optimize the living fuck out of their lives.

Rich Smith is The Stranger's former News Editor. He writes about politics, books, and performance. You can read his poems at www.richsmithpoetry.com