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.
Provocative, challenging, and concerning, Vara’s clever, eye-opening approach brings home the often-uneasy confluence of individual desire, social benefits, and corporate ambition.
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.
In a growing lineage of books critiquing the power that tech titans wield over our physical world, Searches stands out for emphasizing how they’ve also shaped our private psychological terrain ... This seamless blend of personal narrative and systemic critique parallels Vara’s subject: technology that has made it feel impossible to compose a self and a society without it ... Rather than merely illustrating corporate omnipotence, Vara exposes the fragility of the technology itself: a nonhuman force that still depends on humanity—and is unable to encompass it.
Tragic, funny, and relatable ... this book is by turns absurd and insightful, engaging with the ethics of algorithms, surveillance, and privacy in a meaningful way ... A must-read for anyone interested in technology and artificial intelligence; will also be engaging for memoir lovers.
Singular ... The most poignant selections find pathos in the gap between humanity and AI’s superficial approximation of it ... The inventive formal experiments incorporate scraps of digital media into scathing critiques of the soulless online environment to which they belong. Readers will be profoundly moved by this remarkable meditation.
Vara’s essays are beautifully written and profoundly researched, but what sets them apart is their profound vulnerability. Her use of experimental forms, like listing a brief history of her Google searches and creating an annotated essay about her recent Amazon purchases, pushes the limits of the genre without ever compromising her circumspective, confessional approach ... An original essay collection about loss, technology, morality, and identity.
