Like/dislike, love/hate, inside/outdoors: Wiener’s formulations attain for rigor, for some deep fact about knowability, however find yourself wimping out. She begins arguments she will be able to’t end, not solely with herself however along with her new colleagues. She’s stunned each time one-on-one interactions admit of nuances disallowed by her standard-issue assumptions. Billionaires are dangerous, besides the one who befriends her. Tech bros assume the identical means, besides her roboticist boyfriend. Maybe these conflicts are supposed to echo the Bay Space itself, a land so riven by self-contradiction it’s on the verge of non secular collapse, however the conclusion remains to be unenlightening. Was Didion ever so flimsy or indulgent? Her moralities had been nonnegotiable. Wiener, perfecting that New York–nourished millennial mode, can’t discover new that means, solely proof, in all places, of meaninglessness.

To remain sane as everybody round her drinks the Kool-Assist (or butter espresso), Wiener by no means relinquishes her outsider standing. As a substitute, she tells herself she’s making good on her faculty diploma and doing sociology—tech as her laboratory. Right here could also be the supply of the battle. Although she lives inside the glass cage, she walks round it as if from the different aspect, mistaking reflections for embodied actuality. She’s dominated by appearances, by wanting and seeing. Observing the ruggedly dressed workforce: “They seemed prepared to assemble kindling and construct a lean-to … They seemed in costume to LARP their weekend selves.” Observing commuters: “They seemed drained, resigned, sheepish. Largely, they checked out their telephones.” Observing businessfolk in the Monetary District: “They seemed a lot older than we did … They seemed straight out of one other period, like the nineties.” No quantity of one thing, alas, makes it come alive. (Except you’re on medication. Which Wiener is, at one level. You’re pleased for her.)

What makes this all the extra irritating is that Wiener can write an immaculate sentence. Like the very first one, an prompt traditional: “Relying on whom you ask, it was both the apex, the inflection level, or the starting of the finish for Silicon Valley’s startup scene—what cynics referred to as a bubble, optimists referred to as the future, and my future coworkers, excessive on the fumes of world-historical potential, breathlessly referred to as the ecosystem.” Rhythmical, urbane, and take a look at that stunning “whom”! (Excessive on her personal fumes, although, she lets the difficult pronoun outline her, utilizing it in the e-book a minimum of 15 instances.) In sections on the ephemerality of software program, the exigencies of telecommuting, and thought-trends in tech—rationalism, city-building, UBI—Wiener’s well-honed phrases pierce by the standard chatter.

She’s additionally a grasp of the descriptive arts. A scorching tub at a spa-themed celebration turns into “a sous vide tub of genitalia.” Fashionable footwear she buys however by no means wears are a “monument to the finish of sensuousness.” Jeff Bezos is a “chelonian ex–hedge funder.” She by no means really names Bezos. The truth is, she makes use of only a few correct nouns. Other than the occasional first identify of a pal, each character or firm, the ones she’s labored for in addition to the ones all people is aware of, is glossed with a pithy phrase. The coy ploy, in subversive deference to NDA tradition, ranges from efficient (“the social community all people hated”—Fb) to distracting (“a computer-animation studio well-known for its high-end kids’s leisure”—Pixar?).

Sentence-level thrives by no means add as much as text-level sophistication, although. Nor do they make this memoir literary, a descriptor Wiener is clearly chasing. Past Didion, Wiener’s different main affect appears to be Ellen Ullman. Ullman, who fell into programming in the late ’70s and stayed at it for 20 years, wrote a masterpiece of a memoir referred to as Near the Machine. Simply because they’re each girls in tech doesn’t validate the comparability, of course, however Wiener actively invitations it. She profiled Ullman for The New Republic in 2016, saying that she learn Near the Machine for the first time at 25, the identical yr she moved to San Francisco. Right here is one of Ullman’s extra startling passages, speaking a few man she dated: