Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age

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

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Esquire, Slate, Scientific American, Vox, Electric Literature, Book Riot, Culture Study, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, Library Journal

"I cannot imagine a better guide through the infuriating, labyrinthine underworld of technology than Vauhini Vara."—Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House

“Smart, funny, honest.”—The New Yorker • "Seamless blend of personal narrative and systemic critique."—The Atlantic • "Beautifully written and profoundly researched." —Kirkus • "At once genre-defying and gripping.”—The Washington Post

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 not only could communicate but also could do all kinds of other activities, and 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 herself 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 corporate 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.