An Excerpt from Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age
An excerpt from Searches by Vauhini Vara, published by Pantheon and longlisted for the 2025 Porchlight Business Book Awards in the Personal Development & Human Behavior category.
When it was released to the public in November 2022, ChatGPT awakened the world to a secretive project: teaching AI-powered machines to write. Its creators had a sweeping ambition—to build machines that could not only communicate, but could do all kinds of other activities, better than humans ever could. But was this goal actually achievable? And if reached, would it lead to our liberation or our subjugation?
Vauhini Vara, an award-winning tech journalist and editor, had long been grappling with these questions. In 2021, she asked a predecessor of ChatGPT to write about her sister’s death, resulting in an essay that was both more moving and more disturbing than she could have imagined. It quickly went viral.
The experience, revealing both the power and the danger of corporate-owned technologies, forced Vara to interrogate how these technologies have influenced her understanding of her self and the world around her, from discovering online chat rooms as a preteen, to using social media as the Wall Street Journal’s first Facebook reporter, to asking ChatGPT for writing advice—while compelling her to add to the trove of human-created material exploited for corporations’ financial gain. Interspersed throughout this investigation are her own Google searches, Amazon reviews, and the other raw material of internet life—including the viral AI experiment that started it all. Searches illuminates how technological capitalism is both shaping and exploiting human existence, while proposing that by harnessing the collective creativity that makes humans unique, we might imagine a freer, more empowered relationship with our machines and, ultimately, with one another.
Searches has been longlisted in the Personal Development & Human Behavior category of Porchlight Book Company's 2025 Business Books Awards. The excerpt below is from the book's opening chapter, "You Whole Life Will Be Searchable."
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Today, more than one billion websites exist. We often complain about the abundance of digital content as if it had been thrust at us without our consent, leaving us with little choice but to consume it, like guests at a dinner table who, presented with a too-heaping plateful of rice and curry, have no option but total ingestion to avoid offending the host. The truth is that before the content existed, there were people like me who, through the act of searching, communicated a desire for answers. That is, for content. Back when I conducted my searches about my sister’s illness, in 1997, the problem wasn’t only that not much information existed online; it was also that the existing search engines weren’t particularly effective. The earliest ones worked a bit like the search function in a word processor. You’d type a search term, and they’d give you a list of websites in which that term appeared a lot. But in 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, both graduate students at Stanford, published a paper explaining a different way to present search results. It had to do with ranking the relevance and authority of a given website based in part on how many other websites, especially ones judged to be high-quality, linked to it. The idea was so electrifying that, soon after, Page and Brin dropped out of Stanford to turn it into a business.
I wasn’t aware of Page and Brin when I arrived at Stanford in the fall of 2000. Deepa had gone into remission by then and returned to Duke. I’d chosen Stanford for college because, of all the selective universities I’d gotten into, it was the closest to home, and I wanted to be nearby if my sister got sick again. At my dorm orientation, I met an engineering major from New Jersey named Dana who lived across the hall from me and quickly became my closest friend on campus. She was the one who told me that a startup called Google, imagined into being not far from our dorm, was reinventing internet search. She told me, too, about Google’s informal motto, which she, an aspiring entrepreneur, found inspiring: “Don’t be evil.” I began using Google because Dana said it was better and more ethical than the other search engines, and then kept using it because it seemed she’d been right. At the time, Microsoft was embroiled in a major antitrust case brought by the U.S. Department of Justice and a coalition of state attorneys general, alleging that Microsoft had unfairly secured privileges for its own browser, Internet Explorer, on computers. We’d heard that Google’s founders opposed advertising or any other form of selling out their customers; they’d created their search engine only to make the world a better place for us. There was a feeling around campus that the internet was birthing a new generation of companies more transparent, socially responsible, and trustworthy than the last.
In February of my freshman year in college, Deepa traveled home again from Duke, where she was halfway through her junior year. She was getting headaches, and her doctors wanted to check her out. It turned out her cancer had recurred, for the second time. There was no longer any effective treatment for it. At Duke, Deepa had grown interested in public policy; she’d been talking about a career coming up with laws in Washington, D.C. The previous time her cancer had recurred and forced her to fly home, during her freshman year, she had signed up for Spanish classes at the local community college, so as not to feel as if she were wasting time. She loved to be out doing things in the world. She also loved gossip, boys, dancing, laughter. She loved living. Now I took a leave of absence from Stanford and flew home to Mercer Island to be with her as she died. She said goodbye to all of us, and then, with the same strength of character as ever, she lay in bed, closed her eyes, and stopped existing. I held her arm that morning and felt her skin harden and cool.
Deepa’s death marked the end of my family as I knew it; my parents, who had never gotten along, would soon divorce. I stayed home through the summer and got a job selling magazine subscriptions over the phone, from an office in Seattle’s University District. In grief, I couldn’t absorb much about the broader state of the world. I barely cared when, in September of that year, terrorists crashed four planes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Western Pennsylvania, killing 2,996 people.
In her landmark book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, the scholar and Harvard Business School professor emerita Shoshana Zuboff describes what was happening in Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C., while I was too immersed in my own private disaster to notice. Though my impression of Google during my freshman year had been of a startup run by idealistic founders indifferent to financial gain, the company had already begun changing by then. The recent dot-com collapse had unsettled Google’s investors, who, during the summer that I was selling magazines, had persuaded Larry Page and Sergey Brin to bring on an outside CEO—Eric Schmidt, previously of Novell—to make it more financially successful. A month after Schmidt joined Google, the attacks of September 11, 2001, terrified the U.S. public and our government. Within forty-five days, President George W. Bush had signed the USA PATRIOT Act, expanding the government’s ability to collect data about citizens, including online, in the name of national security; other related laws followed. Before the attacks, Zuboff writes, the U.S. government had been seriously considering how to regulate online privacy, given the explosion in internet use. But afterward, the government realized companies like Google could be valuable sources of information for its own purposes, which, Zuboff argues, made privacy protection less of a priority.
This was happening at a time when Google executives were also starting to understand how much material they could get ahold of. Late that year, an early Google marketer named Douglas Edwards pressed Larry Page to define just what Google was supposed to be. “If we did have a category, it would be personal information—handling information that is important to you,” Edwards later recalled Page telling him, in a memoir about his years at Google. “The places you’ve seen. Communications. We’ll add personalization features to make Google more useful. People need to trust us with their personal information, because we have a huge amount of data now and will have much more soon.” Page spoke faster as he went on. “Everything you’ve ever heard or seen or experienced will become searchable. Your whole life will be searchable.”
At the time, in Edwards’s recollection, the question of money didn’t come up; he wrote admiringly of the exchange. But Google’s executives must have realized at some point that since searching on Google was free, they couldn’t quite characterize Google’s day-to-day searchers as their customers. Someone else would have to provide the revenue, specifically, advertisers. Page and Brin had at some point dropped their resistance to advertising; after all, they had a big stake in Google’s financial success. Google had hired a young Harvard Business School graduate named Sheryl Sandberg, a former chief of staff to the Treasury secretary Larry Summers, and, that November, tasked her with developing and running an advertising program. That program would soon involve publishing ads not only on Google but also on other websites. Under it, as Zuboff puts it, the personal information Google collected about us—starting with, but going well beyond, search queries—would function as Google’s raw material. Google would then use ever-more-sophisticated software to render this material into a product—the product being a chance at influencing us through advertising.
This product, of course, would depend on providing something to users that we genuinely wanted. As college went on, I increasingly relied on Google, as did most everyone around me. The summer after I graduated, in 2004, Google went public. It had benefited from an antitrust settlement between the U.S. government and Microsoft, in the case having to do with Internet Explorer, restricting Microsoft’s business practices. That settlement had in turn made room for startups like Google to compete. Now Google was working on establishing its own advantage, in its case, through our growing reliance on its search engine. In their first letter to shareholders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin explained that its advertising was in our best interest, after all. Echoing Tim O’Reilly’s earlier comments about online marketing, they wrote, “Advertising is our principal source of revenue, and the ads we provide are relevant and useful rather than intrusive and annoying. We strive to provide users with great commercial information.”
Of course our search histories are monetizable. It was true then, and it remains true, that there is no better porthole into the depths of human desire.
Excerpted from Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age by Vauhini Vara, in agreement with Pantheon Books. Copyright © 2025 by Vauhini Vara. All rights reserved.
About the Author
Vauhini Vara has been a reporter and editor for The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and the New York Times Magazine, and is the prize-winning author of The Immortal King Rao and This is Salvaged. She lives in Fort Collins, Colorado.
