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So this didn’t turn out quite how I imagined it to be when I first picked it up. I was expecting something more journalistic than anything else, but what I got was certainly a lot more memoiristic. Not that that’s a bad thing, but when I first heard about this book I really thought it was going to be a lot less personal.
Having finished it, though, it actually reminds me of Careless People, which is Sarah Wynn-Williams’ memoir of her time working at Facebook (now Meta). In many ways, Searches is what I expected - and hoped - Careless People would be: a close look at the effects of our current uses of technology, as reported by an industry insider (or as close to an insider as one can get, in Vara’s case). However, while Wynn-Williams DID expose a lot of the sketchy things Zuckerberg and the rest of Facebook/Meta’s upper management were doing in the time she was there, it also felt like she was trying to escape any kind of accountability for what happened during her tenure. There is a sense of Wynn-Williams holding her hands up in (what feels like feigned) helplessness and asking “What could I do?” every time she reveals some new, terrible thing about what Zuckerberg and his crew did.
There is also an element of that in Vara’s book. When talking about how she uses Amazon, and a little bit when she talks about using ChatGPT, there is a little bit of that sense that she has surrendered to the “inevitable.”. However, UNLIKE Wynn-Williams, Vara is not necessarily in a position to exert any kind of great change in companies like Amazon, OpenAI, or indeed, Meta; her hand-wringing at her own inability to stop using Amazon and ChatGPT is therefore somewhat less annoying than Wynn-Williams’. Also unlike Wynn-Williams, Vara does argue that there ways humanity can fight against the seemingly overwhelming tide of technology that’s trying to eat at our lives; the only problem is that her “solutions” feel a bit wishy-washy, as opposed to genuinely concrete.
Another thing that I didn’t appreciate about this book were the chapters where Vara showcases her conversation with ChatGPT while writing the book, or the chapters where she showcases things like her Amazon purchase history or Google search history, or an entire essay she wrote in Spanish then translated to English using Google Translate. Those interstitials did awful things to the pacing of the narrative, and in many cases just weren’t entirely interesting. The ChatGPT chapters were especially annoying, and in my opinion, utterly pointless.
Overall, this was an interesting memoir on the technology we use - or are forced to use - in these days of surveillance capitalism, from the perspective of a person who has a deeper familiarity with the technology than most, while not being a complete insider. Vara’s hand-wringing on her technology use is somewhat more bearable compared to that of Sarah Wynn-Williams’s strident denial in her own memoir, but it can still grate on the reader, especially in the chapters where Vara showcases how she used ChatGPT as a writing partner, of sorts, while making this book. Readers who are willing to embrace the more memoiristic tone may find this an acceptable read; however, readers who were expecting something more journalistic may find themselves disappointed.
Originally posted at kamreadsandrecs.tumblr.com.
So this didn’t turn out quite how I imagined it to be when I first picked it up. I was expecting something more journalistic than anything else, but what I got was certainly a lot more memoiristic. Not that that’s a bad thing, but when I first heard about this book I really thought it was going to be a lot less personal.
Having finished it, though, it actually reminds me of Careless People, which is Sarah Wynn-Williams’ memoir of her time working at Facebook (now Meta). In many ways, Searches is what I expected - and hoped - Careless People would be: a close look at the effects of our current uses of technology, as reported by an industry insider (or as close to an insider as one can get, in Vara’s case). However, while Wynn-Williams DID expose a lot of the sketchy things Zuckerberg and the rest of Facebook/Meta’s upper management were doing in the time she was there, it also felt like she was trying to escape any kind of accountability for what happened during her tenure. There is a sense of Wynn-Williams holding her hands up in (what feels like feigned) helplessness and asking “What could I do?” every time she reveals some new, terrible thing about what Zuckerberg and his crew did.
There is also an element of that in Vara’s book. When talking about how she uses Amazon, and a little bit when she talks about using ChatGPT, there is a little bit of that sense that she has surrendered to the “inevitable.”. However, UNLIKE Wynn-Williams, Vara is not necessarily in a position to exert any kind of great change in companies like Amazon, OpenAI, or indeed, Meta; her hand-wringing at her own inability to stop using Amazon and ChatGPT is therefore somewhat less annoying than Wynn-Williams’. Also unlike Wynn-Williams, Vara does argue that there ways humanity can fight against the seemingly overwhelming tide of technology that’s trying to eat at our lives; the only problem is that her “solutions” feel a bit wishy-washy, as opposed to genuinely concrete.
Another thing that I didn’t appreciate about this book were the chapters where Vara showcases her conversation with ChatGPT while writing the book, or the chapters where she showcases things like her Amazon purchase history or Google search history, or an entire essay she wrote in Spanish then translated to English using Google Translate. Those interstitials did awful things to the pacing of the narrative, and in many cases just weren’t entirely interesting. The ChatGPT chapters were especially annoying, and in my opinion, utterly pointless.
Overall, this was an interesting memoir on the technology we use - or are forced to use - in these days of surveillance capitalism, from the perspective of a person who has a deeper familiarity with the technology than most, while not being a complete insider. Vara’s hand-wringing on her technology use is somewhat more bearable compared to that of Sarah Wynn-Williams’s strident denial in her own memoir, but it can still grate on the reader, especially in the chapters where Vara showcases how she used ChatGPT as a writing partner, of sorts, while making this book. Readers who are willing to embrace the more memoiristic tone may find this an acceptable read; however, readers who were expecting something more journalistic may find themselves disappointed.
Originally posted at kamreadsandrecs.tumblr.com.