Searches Selfhood in the digital age

Review by Booklist Review

In the twenty-first century, few activities seem, on their face, more benign than a simple online search for a quick answer to a basic question. Yet even a query for "best local Thai restaurant," for example, generates caches of specific information that platforms can use for hyper targeted if not always hyper accurate results. As a millennial coming-of-age in Seattle, the ground zero of the tech boom of the late 1990s, Vara was on the cusp of how technology and information access were utilized. A journalist and novelist, Vara humanizes the influence of technology in highly personal terms--a collection of her Google search queries, a fiction collaboration with an early version of ChatGPT, and a very meta construct in which intermittent chapters of this manuscript were submitted to AI for summary, analysis, and suggestions. Vara projects what the future holds as tech oligarchs gain political influence and, while not being overly alarmist, advises consumers and users to pay attention to the overt and covert ways AI and other tech advances infiltrate daily life. Provocative, challenging, and concerning, Vara's clever, eye-opening approach brings home the often-uneasy confluence of individual desire, social benefits, and corporate ambition.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In this singular inquiry, journalist and novelist Vara (The Immortal King Rao) reflects on humanity's relationship with technology. One entry transcribes an exchange between Vara and ChatGPT in which she prompts the chatbot to explain that it provides answers in first-person plural because doing so encourages users to "let down their guard" while fostering "a sense of identification and loyalty" with its parent company. In "A Great Deal," Vara compiles Amazon reviews she wrote detailing her reasons for buying from the site despite otherwise boycotting the company over its exploitative labor practices, illustrating how monopolistic corporations make it difficult to live without their services. The most poignant selections find pathos in the gap between humanity and AI's superficial approximation of it. For instance, Vara laments that her sister, who died from cancer as a college junior in 2001, left behind relatively few photos of herself compared to the abundance that characterizes the smart phone age. Slick AI-generated images that accompany the text purport to fill the vacuum by depicting her sister, their childhood toys, and scenes from their lives, but the images' uncanniness instead drives home the technology's sterility and lifelessness. The inventive formal experiments incorporate scraps of digital media into scathing critiques of the soulless online environment to which they belong. Readers will be profoundly moved by this remarkable meditation. Agent: Susan Golomb, Writers House. (Apr.)Correction: A previous version of this review stated that Vara's sister died in 2000. She died in 2001.

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Review by Library Journal Review

The pace of technological change throughout the lives of people who are now in middle age has created a set of artifacts and patterns that challenge people to sustainably integrate new possibilities into their lives. Novelist Vara (a Pulitzer Prize finalist for The Immortal King Rao) has been engaging with these concepts in her writing for some time, and this book collects and expands on standalone pieces for which she received past attention. Her story is tragic, funny, and relatable. Moving from Google and social media to Amazon and artificial intelligence, Vara depicts her experience as a technology journalist and user of all these services, in the context of her sister's early death from cancer and the trauma it created for the author and her family. Depicting a conversation with an AI chatbot as she works, this book is by turns absurd and insightful, engaging with the ethics of algorithms, surveillance, and privacy in a meaningful way. While the answers at the end of the book feel a bit nebulous, the experience of searching for those answers feels real. VERDICT A must-read for anyone interested in technology and artificial intelligence; will also be engaging for memoir lovers.--Margaret Heller

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A South Asian American journalist uses the history of technology to tell the story of her life. When technology reporter Vauhini Vara was a freshman in high school, her sister was diagnosed with cancer. In response to the news, she conducted a series of searches on Yahoo!, the most popular search engine at the time, because it was easier than talking to a human about it. Vara writes, "I never did get up the nerve to take the question to a human being who might be able to answer." The reason, she says, is that "I harbored a vague terror that naming my fears out loud would make them come true." Eventually, the then-limited internet would expand to "more than one billion websites," including morally dubious ones like Facebook and Amazon, which, against her better judgment--and despite her years of covering the best and worst practices of technology companies--Vara continues to use. Vara would see these changes, but her sister, Deepa, would not: Deepa eventually succumbed to cancer while she and Vara were in college. As the internet continues to grow and change, so does Vara's grief, so much so that, as an adult, she uses AI to try to find the words to describe a loss that defies language. Vara's essays are beautifully written and profoundly researched, but what sets them apart is their profound vulnerability. Her use of experimental forms, like listing a brief history of her Google searches and creating an annotated essay about her recent Amazon purchases, pushes the limits of the genre without ever compromising her circumspective, confessional approach. An original essay collection about loss, technology, morality, and identity. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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