A few years ago, I reached the tabs limit on my iPhone’s web browser; apparently, you can keep only up to 500 windows open in Safari. Rather than close them all, I scrolled back—and stumbled upon an abridged atlas of my life, dating from high school. There was the first recipe I cooked for my parents, a gift for a crush, tickets for my younger sister’s first live concert. I was initially enchanted by this record of buried memories; then I was alarmed by the dossiers the tabs represented: sellable data about my digital preferences and habits that have likely been collected by Apple, Amazon, Google, and the like.
For many people born in recent decades, the internet feels inseparable from its corporate operators—as well as from our lives. Catalogs of data like mine abound in Netflix viewing histories, prehistoric Facebook posts, and, now, dialogues with ChatGPT—imprints of the way the web informs and commoditizes work and friendship, sorrow and joy. These digital archives, and the strange intimacy that produces them, are the subject of Searches, a new essay collection by the novelist and journalist Vauhini Vara. “The material that Google valued for its financial potential was, for me, valuable on its own terms,” Vara writes in her opening essay, after downloading a decade of her search history. “It taught me about the person I’d been during each day of my existence, about how I’d changed from one day to the next.” What follows is a striking record of past searches, organized ...
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