Every week brings a fresh hell in the tech world. As news of the latest scandals pile up over weeks, months and eventually years, narratives switch. Friendly tech companies become “Big Tech.” The narrative is flattened. The tech giants become monolithic and their employees become caricatures — often of villains.

The truth is always messier, more interesting and more human. It is a central tension animating Anna Wiener’s excellent memoir, “Uncanny Valley.” The book traces Ms. Wiener’s navigating the tech world as a start-up employee in the mid 2010s — what might be thought of as the last years before Silicon Valley’s fall from darling status. Ms. Wiener said she was drawn into the tech world by its propulsive qualities. Graduating into a recession and spending her early 20s in publishing, tech offered opportunities: jobs, the seductive feeling of creating something and, of course, the money was good.

But what makes “Uncanny Valley” so valuable is the way it humanizes the tech industry without letting it off the hook. The book allows us to see the way that flawed technology is made and marketed: not by villains, but by blind spots, uncritical thinking and armies of ambivalent people coming into work each day trying their best — all while, sometimes unwittingly, laying the foundation of the surveillance economy.

From a privacy standpoint, “Uncanny Valley” is helpful in understanding what it’s like being on the other end of the torrent of information that streams from our devices each minute. Early on, Ms. Wiener recounts working for a successful data analytics company and the gold rush toward big data, noting that “not everyone knew what they needed from big data, but everyone knew that they needed it.”