Jun 28

Jun 28 Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age

About the book

Author: Vauhini Vara
Publisher: Pantheon

More info:
The StoryGraph | Goodreads
Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the review.

Buy and support indie bookstores (+ I earn a small commission):
Bookshop.org (print or ebook) | Libro.fm (audio)

My Review

I am the head of content marketing at a tech startup, so I am no stranger to generative AI. (Using it skillfully is literally in my performance review.) At the same time, I don’t think there is any community out there who is more outspoken against AI than the book community. So it often feels like I live in two entirely different worlds.

I think, against all odds, this book actually manages to bridge them, and it does it in the best way: where essay writing meets performance art. Searches is a timely, personal, and incredibly smart look at our techological present and immediate past, probing what AI is doing and will do to our lives with a healthy dose of skepticism while holding the giants like Meta, Amazon, etc to task.

Between more traditional essays about how she grew up and became a journalist alongside Facebook and the rest of them, Vara publishes everything from her Amazon reviews to a giant list of her Twitter “interests” to attempts at getting AI to try to finish a narrative about grief her sister (who died of chilchood cancer) to full chats with ChatGPT, asking it to critique and interpret the very book we’re reading. The result, when considered as a whole, is deeply resonant.

I really hope this gets some prize attention later this year — it deserves it.