Washington Monthly - How the Digital Age Changed Us
Editorial director Anita Jain explores how two contrasting books—Searches by Vauhini Vara and Like by Bob Goodman and Martin Reeves—reveal different but revealing ways of understanding Big Tech's impact on society.
Not a week goes by that book publishers don’t disgorge a tome on Big Tech, whether it’s a tell-all about C-suite leaders keeping us hooked to their algorithms, a boosterish guide to Artificial Intelligence (AI) by a tech insider, or a dire warning on how the tech platforms are hollowing out our attention spans.
Add two more volumes to the pile. One is a meditation on technology and AI by Vauhini Vara, a Wall Street Journal alumnus and the first of the paper’s reporters to cover Facebook, Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age. The second chronicles a key piece of computer code that helped launch the social media age, Like: The Button That Changed the World. The latter’s success and the former’s sprawl suggest that a narrower aperture is a more enlightening way to view our tech world.
Searches is a chimera of a book: part AI, pastiches of journalism, an exhortation against what she calls technological capitalism, and hints of a postmodern novel couched within a memoir. For example, Vara shares a decade’s worth of queries she has typed into Google—something we all do multiple times a day and can easily relate to: “What is wastewater charge on water bill. What is a cardigan without buttons called. What to spray in ovens to clean. What is turbot fish.” She finds the excavation “unexpectedly moving,” as many of us might. “The material that Google valued for its financial potential was, for me, valuable on its own terms,” she writes.
Similarly, Vara, who landed her first post-undergraduate covering tech for the Journal in the mid-2000s after attending Stanford, looks back at product reviews she wrote on Amazon and lists the topics X has determined she is interested in based on its algorithm. This record of her, and by extension, our behavior, shows the creepy and long-lived surveillance we subject ourselves to when we engage with any of these platforms. The book’s experimental approach works best in these passages. By showing us evidence of, rather than declaring, how our data is the very product driving the hundreds of billions of dollars generated by the tech giants, we feel the violation.
When she does resort to telling rather than showing, Vara is prone to familiar assessments that online life resembles but doesn’t replicate or enhance lived experience. “To live like this—endlessly comparing our imperfect fleshy selves with sanitized digital simulacra of selfhood that [sic] appears online and finding ourselves wanting, endlessly finding ourselves trapped in an infinite scroll of algorithmically advantaged outrage and scorn—exerts such a subtle psychic violence that we might not even be aware of it as it’s happening,” she surmises.
The book’s deconstructive way of critiquing Big Tech falls flat when it becomes something of a gimmick: One in every few chapters is “written” by the latest Chat-GPT model (in this case, Chat-GPT4), which summarizes the previous two chapters in a bloodless facsimile of human writing: “Your portrayal of tech companies, particularly Amazon, captures a complex and multifaceted view that many share about the impact of these corporations on society.” If nothing else, these chapters confirm that AI will never replace the writing and art of actual humans, though it’s unclear whether Vara intends to make us feel this way.
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