How did Anna Wiener decide exactly which proper nouns to use in her Silicon Valley memoir?
is the author’s elegant elision. Brands, names of apps, titles of movies—Wiener tends to avoid proper nouns. Instead, she describes them: Amazon becomes “an online superstore that had gotten its start in the nineties by selling books on the World Wide Web.” Facebook is “a social network everyone said they hated but no one could stop logging in to.”
It’s a decision that was perhaps birthed in the NDAs Wiener surely had to sign at the three technology companies where she worked. It’s not as if Wiener hides those company’s identities, exactly. I was able to identify two based on their descriptions: Oyster and GitHub ; it took a more tech-savvy co-worker to peg the “analytics startup—just four years old, founded by college dropouts” as Optimizely.
The result is a book that reads as if its audience is not me or you but readers of the distant future; in this respect it reminds me of Choire Sicha’s, a nonfiction book written as if for aliens from outer space. In Wiener’s case, sometimes the tactic is perfectly and pristinely alienating, creating the uncanniness of the book’s title—as when her team watches a movie that is not named asbut in which “two men dressed like school shooters flapped around a dystopian universe.
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