Acclaimed novelist and journalist Vauhini Vara joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V Ganeshananthan to discuss her new essay collection, Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age. Vara talks about the rise of the loser tech bro, internet privacy, Google search logs, the power and limits of turning one’s collected personal data into art, and whether a recently publicized AI-authored short story is actually good.
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This podcast is produced by V.V. Ganeshananthan, Whitney Terrell, Hunter Murray and Vanessa Watkins.
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From the episode:
Whitney Terrell: One chapter of the book, which I thought was really cool, lists what I suppose are actual searches from your Google Search archive in a kind of a prose poem situation. As we’ve discussed, Google and other companies store and sell all this information about us, and yet, do you find some value in being able to look back at all those searches into what you call a “portal into the depths of human desire?”
Vauhini Vara: I do! Yeah! When I realized that I had this archive, or rather that Google had this archive where I was allowed to have access to of all my Google searches starting in 2005, I downloaded a spreadsheet full of all these searches, and I read through it, and what struck me was that it was probably the most comprehensive record of my life since the year 2005 that exists. I have sometimes kept diaries, I text my friends and my family members, I send emails, but that doesn’t capture the sort of day-to-day concerns,both superficial and deep, that I had over the course of every day since the year 2005 the way Google does. And I find that complicated.
I find it moving and intellectually interesting to look back at that archive. I found it artistically interesting to take what belongs to Google and reconstitute it as a piece of literature that I own. It felt like a reappropriation of my written language that somehow I hadn’t previously owned, because it’s actually Google that owns it and monetizes it. And at the same time, I have to contend with the fact that it’s not as if doing that is such a subversion of Google’s intent that Google can’t benefit anymore. Google doesn’t care if I make a cute lyric essay out of my Google searches. They still benefit financially from my information the way they always have. So it would feel really neat to be able to say, “I found a way to reappropriate this. Now, it’s all mine. It’s not theirs anymore.” And yet, that’s not the case.
WT: I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for about a decade, so I’m out of luck on the searches. I don’t think that I can get those back from them.
V.V. Ganeshananthan: So in 2003 Mark Zuckerberg was at Harvard. Jared Kushner was at Harvard. Matt Yglesias was there. Ruben Gallego is somewhere around there. Elise Stefanik was somewhere around there. So all of these people who are involved in related conversations are part of the collegiate soup of this time.
I also want to mention that the book I was obliquely referring to before was Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams, for people who might be interested in looking that book up.
So we’re talking a lot about the addictive quality of all of this, right? I think people describe this person—
WT: She was testifying before Congress yesterday.
VVG: Yeah, she was. Also Facebook went to considerable lengths—
WT: …or maybe Wednesday.
VVG: Yeah—we’re recording on Friday, April 11, so she was just testifying in Congress—and Facebook went to considerable lengths to try to prevent any of this information that she was talking about from coming out. We’re talking a lot about the addictiveness of the internet, and one of the addictive things about the internet, of course, is shopping.
I love shopping on the internet; it’s the worst. And I have particular habits about it and ways to be strategic to make it feel like I’m being productive. Your way of disciplining yourself around that form of addictiveness was to—every time you bought a product from Amazon, you made yourself review it in an attempt to make it difficult for yourself to buy products from Amazon. Can you talk a little bit about how that experiment worked for you, whether you think individuals have a chance of making a difference against these kinds of tech monopolies, and what kinds of tools we have other than boycotting to fight the privacy encroachment that we’re talking about regarding Amazon, Facebook, and so many other companies at this point?
VV: Yeah, there’s so much there. What started this experiment for me was this conversation with a close friend of mine who does not use Amazon, or shop at Whole Foods, or use any other Amazon products. I got into this tense conversation with her, in which, when she described her reasoning. I heard it as, “I’m doing all this so that I can take Amazon down.” I later realized that was not what she was saying at all, and what she was saying was, “Nothing I can do is going to take Amazon down. I’ve decided not to shop on Amazon in order to feel right with myself; in order to feel that I’m living according to ethical principles that are important to me.” And that was a really helpful reframing for me; this idea that we can make these personal choices, even if we don’t expect that they are going to change anything, right? It feels very relevant, actually, to all kinds of things, not just our commercial decisions as consumers, but our decisions as political players in a democratic system with agency.
So I went through this period where anytime I bought something, I was trying to put pressure on the decision to buy on Amazon by reviewing it, which took work, and also explaining in my review why I had to buy on Amazon rather than somewhere else. What I found in the process was that as time went on, my bar got lower and lower; it became easier and easier to justify a way for making a purchase on Amazon, because it’s a habit. Once this was available to me, I found it difficult to make the choice to take other approaches that might have been slightly more difficult, slightly less convenient. And I’m definitely not the hero of that essay. We get to the end and not only am I not successfully getting off Amazon, I’m probably accelerating my Amazon purchasing as we get closer to the holidays of the year in which I’m writing.
The reason I was willing to put myself as a narrator character in that position was because I know I’m not the only person who finds herself in that position. And it feels useful narratively to cast myself as a villain of this essay—as a manifestation of the problem that the book is about, in general, having to do with our agency and how we exercise it.
To answer your other question, though, about what we can do if it’s not the case that not buying on Amazon is gonna take down the company, I think recognizing our own agency is step one, which is why in that essay and throughout the book, I’m very concerned with my own agency and honestly my own failures to take responsibility for my actions. If we position the situation as there are these big technology companies; they’re exploiting us; we’re using their products because they’re so good at coercing us into using their products, or even forcing us so that we have no other choice, it would then follow that this is just the world we live in, and there’s no possibility for change. If it’s literally the case that we are being forced to use these products, and we have no agency in the matter, it’s just going to be this way forever. If we want to consider the possibility that there are other potential paths forward, like, for example, technologies that serve some useful purposes for us and maybe do make our lives more convenient or more interesting, but aren’t tied up in big technology companies’ accrual and consolidation of wealth and power, we can consider that.
Maybe there are nonprofit models, maybe there are worker-owned models, maybe there are public utility models that we can use to think about other ways to sort of organize the capital and labor required to build these technologies. And I think once we agree that we do have agency in the matter, I think then we can take the next step and say, “Okay, so what are some of the things we can do with that agency, other than what we’re doing right now.”
Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Keillan Doyle. Photograph of Vauhini Vara by Brigid McAuliffe.
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Searches • This Is Salvaged • The Immortal King Rao • “Ghosts,” The Believer
Others:
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace • Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams • “OpenAI’s metafictional short story about grief is beautiful and moving,” by Jeanette Winterson, The Guardian • “‘A computer’s joke, on us’: writers respond to the short story written by AI,” The Guardian • Vauhini Vara on the Perils and Possibilities of Artificial Intelligence Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 6, Episode 17 • Alex Reisner on Covering Books3 and Fighting Piracy Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 7, Episode 1