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Selfhood in the Digital Age
by Vauhini Vara
From the author of The Immortal King Rao, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize,a personal exploration of how technology companies have both fulfilled and exploited the human desire for understanding and connection.
When it was released to the public in November 2022, ChatGPT awakened the world to a secretive project: teaching AI-powered machines to write. Its creators had a sweeping ambition—to build machines that could not only communicate, but could do all kinds of other activities, better than humans ever could. But was this goal actually achievable? And if reached, would it lead to our liberation or our subjugation?
Vauhini Vara, an award-winning tech journalist and editor, had long been grappling with these questions. In 2021, she asked a predecessor of ChatGPT to write about her sister's death, resulting in an essay that was both more moving and more disturbing than she could have imagined. It quickly went viral.
The experience, revealing both the power and the danger of corporate-owned technologies, forced Vara to interrogate how these technologies have influenced her understanding of her self and the world around her, from discovering online chat rooms as a preteen, to using social media as the Wall Street Journal's first Facebook reporter, to asking ChatGPT for writing advice—while compelling her to add to the trove of human-created material exploited for corporations' financial gain. Interspersed throughout this investigation are her own Google searches, Amazon reviews, and the other raw material of internet life—including the viral AI experiment that started it all. Searches illuminates how technological capitalism is both shaping and exploiting human existence, while proposing that by harnessing the collective creativity that makes humans unique, we might imagine a freer, more empowered relationship with our machines and, ultimately, with one another.
Publishers Weekly Top 10/Top 150
Publishers Weekly just released their top 150 for the year (150? Really? Seems like a lot to me.) Their Top 10: https://www.bookbrowse.com/reviews/index.cfm/book_number/4991/audition Audition by Katie Kitamura The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones Capitalism and Its Critics: A History...
-kim.kovacs
"Vara's essays are beautifully written and profoundly researched, but what sets them apart is their profound vulnerability. Her use of experimental forms...pushes the limits of the genre without ever compromising her circumspective, confessional approach. An original essay collection about loss, technology, morality, and identity." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Readers will be profoundly moved by this remarkable meditation." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Tragic, funny, and relatable, [Searches] is by turns absurd and insightful, engaging with the ethics of algorithms, surveillance, and privacy in a meaningful way ... A must read." —Library Journal (starred review)
"Searches is that rare thing: a genuinely thrilling book that breaks open existing forms and structures to offer something entirely new. Vara brings the rigor of a reporter and the exhilarating impulses of an artist into this extraordinary, sui generis book: with wit, insight, tenderness, humility, and clear-eyed candor, she explores the wild frontiers of what our lives have already become. The stakes are high. The ride is terrifying and illuminating at once. This book will leave you changed and stay with you for good." —Leslie Jamison, author of Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story
"I cannot imagine a better guide through the infuriating, labyrinthine underworld of technology than Vauhini Vara. Searches is so many things—heart-stoppingly sad, a formal high-wire act, a wise and funny and thoughtful encyclopedia of our modern age—but most of all it is a book about human relationships: how imperfectly we made this thing that connects us, and how we might use this thing to re-meet ourselves and each other." —Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House
This information about Searches was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Vauhini Vara has been a reporter and editor for The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and the New York Times Magazine, and is the prize-winning author of The Immortal King Rao and This is Salvaged. She lives in Fort Collins, Colorado.
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