Since the advent of the Internet, the question of ethical consumption—and what it means to balance personal values with societal norms—has loomed over us. ‘Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age’ takes us on a journey through the crevices and cracks in the old order brought about by media consumption.
Authored by Vauhini Vara—a Pulitzer Prize finalist for ‘The Immortal King Rao‘ and an acclaimed contributor to The New York Times Magazine—Searches is a profound examination of how technology both serves and manipulates our deepest human needs: connection and understanding.
Published by HarperCollins, ‘Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age’ by Vauhini Vara will be released on 28 June on SoftCover, ThePrint’s online platform for launching non-fiction books.
When ChatGPT exploded into public consciousness in 2022, it revealed Silicon Valley’s grand ambition: to create machines that don’t just mimic human communication but surpass human capability altogether. But at what cost? Vara’s incisive exploration weaves together personal narrative, Google searches, and digital ephemera to dissect how technological capitalism reshapes identity and agency. What happens when the machines we built to connect us end up redefining what it means to be human? Searches—part memoir, part cultural autopsy—grapples with this unsettling question in the age of AI.
This is more than a book about technology—it’s about power. Who controls the systems that now mediate our relationships, our creativity, even our self-perception? Can we harness AI’s potential without surrendering to its logic? And most urgently: in a world where corporations monetize our every digital breath, how do we reclaim what makes us human?
With the precision of a journalist and the lyricism of a novelist, Vara maps the invisible war between human agency and technological determinism. Searches is a rallying cry—a demand that we confront the systems shaping us before we lose the ability to imagine ourselves outside of them. The machines are learning. The question is: are we?
Vauhini Vara is an acclaimed author and journalist whose work sits at the intersection of technology and human identity. Her latest book, Searches, was named a Best Book of the Year by Esquire and hailed as “a remarkable meditation” by Publisher’s Weekly. Vara has contributed to Businessweek and served as an editor at The New York Times Magazine. Her writing has earned numerous accolades, including the Colorado Book Award and the High Plains Book Award for her fiction. Currently, she shares her expertise through the Lighthouse Writers Workshop’s Book Project, mentoring the next generation of writers.
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