‘Searches’ by Vauhini Vara: A wonderfully experimental book about how the internet shapes selfhood

“People like me, through the act of searching, communicated a desire for answers. That is, for content.”

I do not consider myself conservative, not by a long stretch. But if there’s one thing I’ve been a real prude about, it is Chat-GPT. I’ve not only never used it – never felt the desire to – but also abhor the idea of using it for non-essential purposes such as distilling online searches, writing email, or substituting it for speaking to a friend. Just the idea of speaking to a machine or having it create anything on my behalf is perplexing to me.

Among my strongest beliefs is that language is humankind’s final frontier – not just its effectiveness for communication, but its versatility to give structure to our dreams and memories, spell out our fears, conjure jokes and puns, and mould it in a way that creates communities. Think of the many, many languages we speak, the hieroglyphics that made complete sense to our ancestors, the shorthand that we use to make notes and is comprehensible to perhaps just us, or the secret language that we use with a lover, or a child, or a pet.

Through millions of years of evolution, humans have perfected language – we...

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