Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age
Searches is a complicated and many-sided book ... Searches has many things to recommend it. Vara has a congenial style and, her nose to the zeitgeist, good stories to tell ... 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.
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Vara hasn’t lost her journalist edge, as she shows throughout this book ... Searches is as discomfiting as it is entertaining, with Vara exercising playful technique as a writer while also laying down dire warnings about a tech-dominated future. It’s also a clear reminder that, at least for now, nothing can make language sing like a gifted human mind.
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Vara is an appealing narrator—smart, funny, honest, and a little neurotic ... She is thoughtful but not too heady; principled but not preachy ... Still, the format quickly takes on the feeling of a joke that’s gone on too long ... The material is too often in service of the structure ... [Vara's] incorporation of ChatGPT transcripts is bold but frustrating. Part of the problem might have to do with her conversational approach—tentative, deferential, professional ... It’s a testament to Vara’s own writing that the algorithmic sentences have any emotional valence.
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