Dear Librarians,
Like a lot of authors, I grew up at the library. One of my first memories is of quietly reading at my local library in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan—I guess I was around four—when a pair of ladies saw me and asked if I was really reading the words or just looking at the pictures. I was reading, I told them. They didn’t believe me and challenged me to read out loud to them to prove it. I did, they were impressed, and I felt vindicated. These days I’m still a library superuser—I’m that patron who asks you to order books that you don’t yet have in stock, and who uses interlibrary loans to order dusty hardcovers from the 1980s that it seems no one else has read since the 1980s.
That’s why I’m particularly excited to introduce my upcoming book, SEARCHES, to you all; it’s ultimately about the power of everyday people and the institutions we build together—and, yes, I had libraries in mind as I was writing—to provide a counterforce to the rising power of Big Tech. In 2021, I asked a predecessor of ChatGPT to help me write about my sister’s death, resulting in an essay, called “Ghosts,” that was both more moving and more disturbing than I could have imagined. It quickly went viral and laid the foundation for SEARCHES. But my interest in the subject of this book—a work of narrative nonfiction excavating our past three decades online through my own life as a technology user and journalist—started a lot earlier than that.
As a cub reporter in the Wall Street Journal’s San Francisco bureau, twenty years ago, I met and wrote about tech CEOs including Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and Larry Ellison. I eventually became the paper’s first reporter on the Facebook beat and wrote its first Page One profile of Zuckerberg. Writing about Silicon Valley, I couldn’t help but notice that the trajectories of a new generation of tech moguls, including Zuckerberg and Elon Musk—launched on a potent combination of skill, ambition, privilege, and luck—seemed to be setting them on a path toward incredible amounts of power and wealth. Unlike with the earlier generation, this group’s power and wealth would be founded on the most intimate details of their customers’ private lives. I wondered where we could possibly end up. It didn’t seem good.
In the years after that—as I got older, became an editor and writer for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and others, got married, and had my son—I found myself even more fascinated with the way so much of our written language is produced within the platforms created by the tech companies I started covering all those years ago. What was the difference, I wondered, between the words I write for a magazine, for which I’m paid $2 to $4 apiece, and those I put on X or Amazon—not only without compensation but, worse, for the purpose of financial exploitation by the companies that control those platforms? Without really meaning to, I started playing around with reconstructing my own words on those platforms—Google, Amazon and so on—into literary forms.
“Ghosts” was supposed to just be one of those experiments. But the experience of writing and publishing it, revealing both the power and the danger of corporate-owned technologies, forced me to interrogate more deeply how technologies have influenced my understanding of myself and the world around me, from discovering online chat rooms as a preteen, to using social media as a Facebook reporter, to asking ChatGPT for writing advice—while compelling me to add to the trove of human-created material exploited for corporations’ financial gain. Along the way, it also forced me to interrogate my own complicity in those corporations’ rise. Interspersed throughout the investigation that resulted are my own Google searches, Amazon reviews, and the other raw material of internet life—including the viral AI experiment that started it all. SEARCHES not only captures how these forces are shaping our lives but also asks if we might reclaim a sense of agency, building a future that honors our shared humanity.
Writing SEARCHES helped me to understand my relationship with technology companies in a completely new light; my hope, in publishing it, is that you and your readers will discover new insights about your own relationship with these companies, too. What do your Google searches, Amazon reviews, and ChatGPT conversations tell you about yourself and the world we live in? Thank you for helping me bring this book to as many readers as possible.
Warm regards,
Vauhini Vara
