SEARCHES: Selfhood in the Digital Age, by Vauhini Vara
Vauhini Vara was in high school when she learned that her charismatic older sister, Deepa, had a type of cancer called Ewing sarcoma. The cancer went into remission and Deepa left to study at Duke, where she took an interest in public policy.
Her cancer came back in her junior year. Deepa returned to the family’s house on Mercer Island, a suburb of Seattle, close to where her father worked as a physician for Boeing. Vara took a leave of absence from her freshman year at Stanford to be with her sister. Within a few months, Deepa was dead.
You have a memory to look back on today, Facebook likes to (creepily) tell us. For Vara, Deepa’s death is the memory that needs no reminder; it is one she cannot shake. It marked the beginning of her expulsion from Eden. Her parents soon divorced, and her family as she’d known it ceased to exist.
After graduating from Stanford, Vara turned to word work. She was on the staff of The Wall Street Journal, covering Oracle and Facebook, and then she joined The New Yorker to write and edit for the business section of its website. She wrote two books of fiction, the novel “The Immortal King Rao,” which was a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in fiction, and a story collection, “This Is Salvaged.”
For many readers, she is best known for a piece of experimental writing titled “Ghosts,” in which she uses an A.I. chatbot, a precursor to ChatGPT called GPT-3, to push her sister’s story past the usual boundaries. “Ghosts” ran in The Believer in 2021; it was anthologized in the Best American Essays series and was adapted for audio by “This American Life.”
“Ghosts” moves in mesmerizing fits and starts, as Vara feeds GPT-3 her own sentences and asks the borg to pick up from there. At moments it is as if she is moving a heart-shaped planchette across a Ouija board. What spooks Vara is that A.I. writes what are possibly her essay’s most piercing lines. “Here, then, is something else,” one paragraph begins. “We were driving home from Clarke Beach, and we were stopped at a red light, and she took my hand and held it. This is the hand she held: the hand I write with, the hand I am writing this with.”
The awkward fact about these intolerably beautiful sentences is that this event never happened. GPT-3 served it up, à la carte. Vara writes, in sentences that drive her new book, “Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age”:
I’d often heard the argument that A.I. could never write quite like a human precisely because it was a disembodied machine. And yet, here was as nuanced and profound a reference to embodiment as I’d ever read. Artificial intelligence had succeeded in moving me with a sentence about the most devastating experience of my life. If it could write that sentence, what else could it write?
“Searches” is a complicated and many-sided book. In part it’s a memoir, one that pays special attention to Vara’s early years on the internet in the 1990s. (She was born in 1982.) She recalls trying on different identities, and the anxiety-inducing sounds — “a long, staticky screech, punctuated by a series of sharp beeps, as if the machine were hyperventilating” — of dial-up.
Paul Allen, a co-founder of Microsoft, lived on Mercer Island, and Jeff Bezos had a house in a neighboring suburb. Vara’s coming-of-age felt inextricably linked with the tech world’s own. This sense doubled when she arrived at Stanford in the fall of 2000.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin had just dropped out to start Google. Stanford was the third campus to get a sexy new website, Facebook, and Vara edited the first article about it for The Stanford Daily. Sam Altman, the wonder boy of A.I., was a freshman when she was a senior. Many of Vara’s friends went on to work for one or more of these prosperous companies.
Threaded through this story are short, sharp sections that, for example, list her searches on Google and investigate her order history on Amazon. (She is as sickly addicted to the latter as I am. Will the company send flowers to our funeral services?) She lingers for pages over the dark sides of these companies, and of Facebook, and her complicity in their successes. Is it possible that everything the internet gives you it takes back twice over?
Picking up from her experiments in “Ghosts,” Vara feeds chapters of this book to a chatbot as she goes along, asking for feedback, and she prints its responses and paraphrases. Some of the replies are smart and uncanny but there is no way around it: Reading A.I. summaries of and commentaries on what you have just read is, after a while, a pulverizing bore.
Perhaps a better phrase is terrifying bore. A.I.’s language is a sort of dead but high-flown managerial bureaucratese — the sound, you begin to feel, that our digital oversouls will make when condemning us to death.
“Searches” has many things to recommend it. Vara has a congenial style and, her nose to the zeitgeist, good stories to tell. The book’s word-drenched cover is exceptionally beautiful. All the same, the book is diffuse. It has little forward momentum. Most of its wisdom feels conventional; she is down the middle about so much.
The gifted novelist Tony Tulathimutte, who is unmentioned in this book but who attended Stanford at roughly the same time Vara did, is also preoccupied with exploring what he called, in his 2016 novel “Private Citizens,” the “obscene entitlement of a Stanford degree.” So hallowed are our elite universities that Paul Fussell, writing in his book “Class,” could not help admiring the cheek of the young person who cut apart the letters of a STANFORD rear-window sticker so that they read SNODFART. “Searches” might have profited from more of that sort of mischievous humor.
At its best, though, “Searches” projects a lonely intelligence that, facing off against the machines, leaves you with a singular case of the dreads.
SEARCHES: Selfhood in the Digital Age | By Vauhini Vara | Pantheon | 332 pp. | $30
Dwight Garner has been a book critic for The Times since 2008, and before that was an editor at the Book Review for a decade.
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