Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age

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.