OUR DIGITISING SELFHOOD

In Searches, Vauhini Vara examines decades of digital progress and subjects tech capitalism to a social, moral and personal scrutiny

- Bishakha Datta

This is a big book. Big in its ideas, its ambition, its formal daring. For starts, it's not a straight-up non-fic history of tech through a critical lens. It's a memoir of sorts, built like a double helix, with two intertwined strands: one strand is personal, pivoting around the early death of Deepa, Vara's sister. And grazing on her marriage, seeded in a series of missed texts. Another strand is technological, recording the problematic rise of surveillance capitalism through Meta's Zuckerberg, Amazon's Bezos, and OpenAI's Altman.