A Love-Hate Letter to Technology

A few years ago, I reached the tabs limit on my iPhone’s web browser; apparently, you can keep only up to 500 windows open in Safari. Rather than close them all, I scrolled back—and stumbled upon an abridged atlas of my life, dating from high school. There was the first recipe I cooked for my parents, a gift for a crush, tickets for my younger sister’s first live concert. I was initially enchanted by this record of buried memories; then I was alarmed by the dossiers the tabs represented: sellable data about my digital preferences and habits that have likely been collected by Apple, Amazon, Google, and the like.

For many people born in recent decades, the internet feels inseparable from its corporate operators—as well as from our lives. Catalogs of data like mine abound in Netflix viewing histories, prehistoric Facebook posts, and, now, dialogues with ChatGPT—imprints of the way the web informs and commoditizes work and friendship, sorrow and joy. These digital archives, and the strange intimacy that produces them, are the subject of Searches, a new essay collection by the novelist and journalist Vauhini Vara. “The material that Google valued for its financial potential was, for me, valuable on its own terms,” Vara writes in her opening essay, after downloading a decade of her search history. “It taught me about the person I’d been during each day of my existence, about how I’d changed from one day to the next.” What follows is a striking record of past searches, organized as a list of prompts: “What should I do with my life. What is a deductible. What happens to syrian refugees who return.”

In a growing lineage of books critiquing the power that tech titans wield over our physical world, Searches stands out for emphasizing how they’ve also shaped our private psychological terrain. Vara treats her own life as a vehicle to recount the disquieting history of the internet—or perhaps the other way around. For instance, an essay on social media is interwoven with Vara’s coming of age in AOL chat rooms, attending Stanford when TheFacebook hits campus, and becoming The Wall Street Journal’s first Facebook reporter. Her decision to turn down the Apple beat at the Journal in 2007, the year the iPhone was released, in order to pursue an M.F.A. in fiction propels an exploration of how much human creativity depends on the ideas and labor of others. Drawing on her own reporting, as well as that of established tech critics including Shoshana Zuboff and Safiya Noble, Vara details Silicon Valley’s grip on the global economy, elections, and information ecosystems. This seamless blend of personal narrative and systemic critique parallels Vara’s subject: technology that has made it feel impossible to compose a self and a society without it.

Vara, like many of her readers, is both enchanted by the web and disgusted with the companies that control it. Firms that have allegedly spread misinformation, flouted intellectual-property rights, and exploited workers—to name only a few of Vara’s grievances—also provide software that frequently benefits people’s lives. Navigating streets, making everyday purchases, and staying in touch with friends without the tech giants is “hard for a lot of us to imagine,” Vara writes. “Let me not speak for you,” she adds. “I continue to use these products. I continue to use these products because I feel I benefit from them.” These companies feel like necessary building blocks of modern existence. That doesn’t mean we have to like them.

[Amazon has transformed the geography of wealth and power]

Vara’s essays pulse with anger but also disappointment, as she laments the digital worlds that could have been. “Before the content existed,” she writes, “there were people like me who, through the act of searching, communicated a desire for answers.” From her searching emerges a book that might be called biography, historiography, cultural criticism, manifesto, or all of the above—a memoir, in a sense, of the internet.

What sets Searches apart from other techno-skeptical works is not its argument so much as its method. Each prose essay is part of a diptych, paired with a sort of found poem spun from the threads of Vara’s own digital web. These addenda include a history of Google searches, a diary of Amazon purchases and reviews, and an alphabetized list of Vara’s Twitter “interests” used for targeted advertising. As the book progresses, such pairings evolve into seeming collaborations: a satire about Silicon Valley accompanied by AI-generated illustrations, an essay about losing her sister to cancer that was co-written with GPT-3 (a precursor to ChatGPT). These formal experiments reveal the depths and limitations of these corporations’ knowledge, reworking text generated by major tech firms toward new ends—or, as it may be, beginnings.

Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, and other tech barons like to prophesy a future in which AI cures cancer and makes everyone prosperous. Although such statements present this glorious end point as inevitable, the evidence that generative AI can bring about such grand benefits, or that they would be fairly distributed, is scant; better established are the tremendous costs—financial, labor, environmental—on top of clear technological limitations. The messianic claims of AI’s biggest stakeholders are tautologies: Generative AI will transform civilization; therefore, we must be empowered to steer it in the right direction. The proof that generative AI will be revolutionary? That so many people have empowered us to steer the revolution.

Vara presents the AI boom as the apotheosis of Silicon Valley’s greed, the beginning of “a dramatic leap in the corporate capture of human existence.” As if to justify her distrust, executives who once championed democracy and public good—Pinchai, Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk—have ingratiated themselves to a president who seems to be tearing American democracy apart for corporate benefit. In 2017, Vara notes, Altman wanted “to figure out how Big Tech might be part of the anti-Trump resistance”; in January, the OpenAI CEO wrote that Donald Trump “will be incredible for the country in many ways!”

[Was Sam Altman right about the job market?]

If an AI-saturated future is a self-fulfilling prophecy, then everyday people can also “make reality-bending declarations about the future,” Vara writes; recent boycotts against Google, Amazon, and Meta suggest the immediacy of her project. She runs through a number of writers, scholars, and projects attempting to reorganize the internet: Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan’s antitrust investigations; regulatory proposals from Senator Elizabeth Warren; the nonprofit foundations running Wikipedia, Firefox, and Signal.

But Searches is not intended to devise new policy. Rather, Vara’s found poems work on a personal and emotional level, attempting to reorder readers’ individual and collective relationships to digital technology. Consider, for instance, her recomposed Google search history. “When to switch from car seat to booster seat. When to switch to twin bed. When do children learn to read percentages,” reads one stretch, tracking Vara’s motherhood in a way that leaves her pride or anxiety implicit. “Why did google buy nest. Why is property crime so high in san francisco. Why don’t my friends have kids,” reads another, associating Google’s purchase of the smart-home start-up with surveillance and the domestic sphere. Still another composition features a Google Translate interpretation of an essay Vara wrote in Spanish, which contains both mistranslations and stretches where the software turned flawed Spanish into grammatical English. Each of these ready-made verses reveals the product’s bugs and gaps—Google and Amazon histories can’t capture an infant’s laugh, and a translation app fails to evoke a tongue tripping over new sounds. Rather than merely illustrating corporate omnipotence, Vara exposes the fragility of the technology itself: a nonhuman force that still depends on humanity—and is unable to encompass it.

The centerpiece of Vara’s experiments is “Ghosts,” the essay about her sister, which was widely acclaimed when it was first published in The Believer in 2021. Across nine iterations, Vara writes more and more of the essay, with GPT-3 completing each version. Vara worried, as she notes in Searches, that the essay’s success aggrandized a technology “that had been found to reinscribe harmful rhetoric, while exploiting human labor and natural resources.” But at the same time, uniformly rejecting the chatbot would be too simple, she adds, because “in my opinion, GPT-3 had produced the best lines in ‘Ghosts.’” Still, those lines referenced events that never occurred—which is precisely what prompted her to write, in each version, more and more of the essay; the AI “compelled me to assert my own consciousness by writing against the falsehoods.” GPT-3’s weaknesses brought out her strengths. For republication in Searches, Vara reclaims the final words from the bot: Her sister taught her “to lie believably. But, then, to tell the truth, too.”

The diptychs in Searches echo the work of a number of contemporary poets, such as Solmaz Sharif, Robin Coste Lewis, and Nicole Sealey, who have taken the language of authorities—a Pentagon dictionary of terms, the museum titles of artworks, a government investigation into police violence—and reordered, redacted, and recontextualized the text to instantiate new meanings and realities. Vara’s essays, taken together, do something similar, feeling around for a future that cleaves digital technology from capitalism. “Is it even possible to subvert the tools of technological capitalism to create art from the raw material of my life?” she asks. “Is it possible to use them to cast light on the exploitation they facilitate and our complicity in it? Or are these exercises inherently corrupted by their reliance on the tools?” Yes, yes, and yes.