A timely and necessary book, Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age asks the reader to examine and interrogate the boundaries between human and machine in the age of techno-capitalism where artificial intelligence is creating seismic change. A Pulitzer finalist for her debut novel The Immortal King Rao (2022), Vara, a tech reporter turned novelist, asked a similar question in that novel through a narrative set in a dystopian future in Seattle where an Indian immigrant had developed a sophisticated computer named Coconut that breached the boundaries of human and machine.
Searches is a book that blurs genre boundaries. There is historical reportage that tells us the story of how the internet has transformed our lives in the last fifty years; there are chapters that explore philosophically how humans have ceded data and privacy to tech corporations; segments where the author uses Chat GPT to workshop her book in progress and seeking its feedback on the significance of each chapter that she is writing in the book we are reading; personal stories about the author’s childhood, the death of her sister, and her evolution as a writer; an exploration of co-writing fiction with the AI in a chapter titled “Ghosts”; and a series of survey questions asked of random readers about what makes them human, their earliest memories, and their vision for the future. The narrative thus engages the reader meta-critically through a feminist lens in the process of reading, narrative creation, publishing, technology, and the place of creativity in making us human.
Vara spent part of her childhood in the Seattle area having come to Mercer Island as a middle schooler. Her coming-of-age maps on to Seattle’s own growth as a tech hub—the birth of Amazon for example—as well as the profound loss of her older sister to cancer. Both in Searches and in The Immortal King Rao we see how being an immigrant child in Seattle during the tech boom shapes her as a thinker and writer.
Vara is both fascinated by the possibilities of technology and how it has transformed our lives while also being very critical of what we have lost as a species by ceding so much to technology. In the latter chapters of the book, she begins to examine how we might resist the dangers of technology. While she invokes thinkers like Audre Lorde and her idea that the Master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house, her solutions to the problem seem somewhat nebulous. For example, an argument that non-profits like Firefox and Wikipedia are preferable to the mega corporations like Meta or Google, is somewhat underdeveloped. The book is most successful in compelling us to think seriously about how tech has taken over our lives—we order things online from Amazon, we post on social media, we use Google ubiquitously to search for information, and AI tools are increasingly embedded in so many of our devices and software products. Without a doubt AI is a controversial topic with many like Sam Altman, the founder of OpenAI , seeing it as transformative even as he raises ethical questions. There are also those like the author herself or thinkers like Safiya Umoja Noble who warn of the algorithmic biases in the cyberworld that replicate the ethnic and cultural biases in our lived experience to writers who have protested the appropriation of intellectual property to train AI. Other elements that Vara raises such as the immense consumption of energy by AI that have significant environmental impacts are not explored in any depth. Ultimately, this book asks us to engage in the big questions and to ask what makes us human and if we are letting machines and capitalism engulf our humanity. The genre experiments in this book make it fascinating, and Vara has the ability to write intelligibly and intelligently about technology for the average reader who may not be an expert. Given the influence of Silicon valley CEOs on the current US administration and the push towards increasing the role of AI without much regulation forthcoming on the technology, this book is a necessary read for all of us.
Vauhini Vara will be at Elliott Bay Books on April 23 at 7 PM in conversation with Emily M. Bender.
Nalini Iyer is a Professor of English at Seattle University where she teaches courses in Asian American, Postcolonial, and South Asian Studies. She is the author/editor of several books in literary criticism. She lives in Kirkland. WA.
