Headline, May 27 2025/ SEARCHES : ''' SELFHOOD IN THE DIGITAL AGE '''

SEARCHES : 

''' SELFHOOD IN THE

 DIGITAL AGE '''

* THE GRAPES OF WRATH * : '' IF I COULD GET  HUMANITY AND THE GLOBAL Founder Framers of The World Students Society to read one book that could have the greatest impact on their lives and the future, it would be :

' The Grapes of Wrath, ' by John Steinbeck. They will then understand hunger, dignity, migration and the injustices of the systems that create sufferings. It will be a fire in them that will ever burn.''

For that of the above I thank most profoundly author Jose Andres and The New York Times, NYT,  the honoured lifelong member of The World Students Society - the exclusive and eternal ownership of every student in the world. 

'' SEARCHES '' IS A COMPLICATED AND MANY-SIDED BOOK. In part it's a memoir, - one that pays attention to Vara's early years on the internet in the 1990s. 

She recalls trying different identities, and the anxiety inducing - sounds -....... '' a screech long, staticky screech, punctuated by a series of sharp beeps, as if the machine were hyperventilating '' - of a dial-up.

PAUL ALLEN, a co-founder of Microsoft, lived on Mercer Island, and Jeff Bezos has a house in a neighbouring suburb. Vara's coming of age felt inextricably linked with the tech world's own. This sense doubled when she arrived at Stanford in the fall of 2000.

LARRY PAGE and SERGEY BRIN had just dropped out to start Google. Stanford was the third campus to get a sexy new website, Facebook and Vara edited the first article about it for The Stanford Daily.

SAM ALTMAN - the wonder boy of A.I. was a freshman when she was a senior. Many of Vara's friends went on to work for one or more of these prosperous companies.

Threaded through this story are short, sharp sections that for example list her searches on Google and investigate her order history on Amazon.

She lingers for pages over the dark sides of these companies, and of Facebook, and her complicity in their successes. Is it possible that everything the internet gives you it takes back twice over?

Picking up from her experiments in '' Ghosts, '' Vara feeds chapters of this book to a chatbot as she goes along, asking for feedback, and she prints its responses and paraphrases.

Some of the replies are smart and uncanny but there is no way around it. Reading A.I. summaries of and commentaries on what you have just read is, after a while, pulverizing bore.

Perhaps a better phrase is terrifying bore. A.I.'s language is a sort of dead but high-flown managerial bureaucratese - the sound that you begin to feel, that our digital oversouls will make when condemning us to death.

'' SEARCHES '' has many things to recommend it. Vara has a congenital style and, her nose to the zeitgeist, good stories to tell. The book's word-drenched cover is exceptionally beautiful.

All the same, the book is diffuse. It has little forward momentum. Most of its wisdom feels conventional;  she is down the middle about so much.

The gifted novelist Tony Tulathimutte, who is unmentioned in this book but who attended Stanford at roughly the same time Vara did, is also preoccupied with exploring what he called, in his 2016 novel, '' Private Citizens,'' the '' obscene entitlement of a Stanford Degree.''

So hallowed are our elite universities that Paul Fussell, writing in his book '' Class,'' could not help admiring the cheek of the young person who cut apart the letters of a ''Stanford'' rear-window sticker so that they read '' Snodfart''.

'' Searches '' ...... might have profited from more of that sort of mischievous humor.

At its best, though, '' Searches '' projects a lonely intelligence that, facing off against the machines, leaves you with a singular case of the dreads.

The World Students Society honours and recommends : Searches : Selfhood in the Digital Age. By Vauhini Vara. !WOW! thanks Dwight Garner for the Book Review.

With respectful dedication to the Global Founder Framers of !WOW! and then Students, Professors and Teachers of the world. 

See You all prepare for Great Global Elections on The World Students Society - for every subject in the world : wssciw.blogspot.com and Twitter X !E-WOW! - The Ecosystem 2011 :

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - The Voice Of The Voiceless