MCD / WIRED
It's been a year for glumly refreshing live blogs and breaking news websites. But we have managed to get some reading done too. Here, our writers and editors have picked out our favourite books released in 2020 across the broad range of areas that WIRED covers.
Uncanny Valley, by Anna Wiener
In this memoir,
New Yorker tech correspondent Anna Wiener recounts her experiences as a millennial diving into San Francisco’s tech startup scene. Disillusioned with her job in publishing, Wiener moves from New York to Silicon Valley, with its promises of building a better future for all – and a more exciting present for those in its club. The book follows her experiences working for multiple startups, with skewering descriptions of a sector that, while ahead technologically, seems in other ways to be wildly out of touch. Covering issues such as sexism, surveillance and San Francisco’s homeless crisis, it reveals a world that hides a pit of moral quandaries beneath its shiny facade.