Searches E-Book

Vauhini Vara

• Herausgeber: Grove Press UK
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 524

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

A BELLETRIST BOOK CLUB PICK One of the New York Times' Nonfiction Books to Read This Spring When Vauhini Vara was fourteen, her sister was diagnosed with cancer. Too terrified to discuss it with a human, Vara instead turned to the fledgling internet with her questions. Those seminal early experiences influenced her decision to become a technology reporter; decades later, she used a predecessor to ChatGPT to help her write about her sister's death. In this provocative, timely and highly personal account of our interdependent relationship with technology, she examines the early days of the internet, the encroachment of social media into our lives and how we might work with AI in the future. Brimming with candour, humour and a probing, roving intelligence, Searches anoints Vara, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, as an essential voice for our moment.

Leseprobe

Searches

ALSO BY VAUHINI VARA

This Is Salvaged

The Immortal King Rao

First published in the United Kingdom in 2025 by Grove Press UK,an imprint of Grove Atlantic

First published in the United States of America in 2025 by Pantheon Books,an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

Copyright © Vauhini Vara, 2025

The moral right of Vauhini Vara to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

No part of this book may be used in any manner in the learning, training or development of generative artificial intelligence technologies (including but not limited to machine learning models and large language models (LLMs)), whether by data scraping, data mining or use in any way to create or form a part of data sets or in any other way.

Portions of this work originally appeared in slightly different form in the following publications: chapter 2 in The New York Times; small parts of chapter 3 in The Atlantic; small parts of chapter 5 in The Wall Street Journal; small parts of chapter 9 in The Believer, The California Sunday Magazine, and Wired; chapter 10 in The Believer; parts of chapter 13 in Wired and The New York Times; and small parts of chapter 15 in The New Yorker.

Pages 333–334 constitute an extension of this copyright page.

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

Trade paperback ISBN 978 1 80471 068 5

E-book ISBN 978 1 80471 069 2

Printed in Great Britain

Grove Press UK

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London WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

Product safety EU representative: Authorised Rep Compliance Ltd., Ground Floor,71 Lower Baggot Street, Dublin, D02 P593, Ireland. www.arccompliance.com

For Andrew Altschul, who almost missed my first text messages, which would have been terrible for him, and also for me.

Each of us is here now because in one way or another we share a commitment to language and to the power of language, and to the reclaiming of that language which has been made to work against us. In the transformation of silence into language and action, it is vitally necessary for each one of us to establish or examine her function in that transformation and to recognize her role as vital within that transformation.

—AUDRE LORDE, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” 1977

Language carries culture, and culture carries, particularly through orature and literature, the entire body of values by which we come to perceive ourselves and our place in the world. How people perceive themselves affects how they look at their culture, at their politics and at the social production of wealth, at their entire relationship to nature and to other beings. Language is thus inseparable from ourselves as a community of human beings with a specific form and character, a specific history, a specific relationship to the world.

—NGŨGĨ WA THIONG’O, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, 1986

Contents

A Supportive and Constructive Perspective

1. Your Whole Life Will Be Searchable

2. Searches

Thank You for Sharing

3. I Gifted It to Them

4. A Great Deal

The Balance of These Narratives

5. We Can All Connect and Share

6. Elon Musk, Empire

Acknowledge Positive Contributions

7. Stealing Great Ideas

8. I Am Hungry to Talk

Lowering Defenses

9. We Have to Do a Magic Trick

10. Ghosts

A Powerful Statement of Empowerment

11. Record the World

12. Resurrections

These Rhetorical Strategies

13. Thank You for Your Important Work

14. Penumbra

Hey, Sis

15. The Master’s Tools

16. What Is It Like to Be Alive?

Acknowledgments

Notes on Process

Searches

A Supportive and Constructive Perspective

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CHAPTER 1

Your Whole Life Will Be Searchable

I first encountered the internet at the home of a girl from school whose parents were acquaintances of my parents. This was in the early 1990s, in a well-off suburb of Oklahoma City called Edmond. I remember the girl’s name well, but it feels unfair to share it; I’ll call her Lily Zhang. Lily steered me to a room away from our parents with a beige desktop computer. She typed some characters and tapped the mouse, and the computer burst into a long, staticky screech, punctuated by a series of sharp beeps, as if the machine were hyperventilating.

It was an anxiety-provoking sound, at an anxiety-provoking time in my life. I was eleven, twelve. We had recently moved to Edmond from Saskatchewan, Canada, the prairie province where I’d been born and raised. My dad, a doctor, had enrolled in a program at a nearby university to specialize as an occupational physician—part of a plan to relocate our family to the United States, where we could secure more promising futures than the ones available in Saskatchewan. I’d been through elementary school with the same classmates, kind Canadian boys and girls who treated my high self-regard, considering the circumstances (bad skin, social obliviousness, tender sensitivity to schoolyard injuries, over-enthusiasm about math exams), with gentle forbearance. Because of this, I hadn’t understood, upon arriving in Edmond, that I was fated to be a social outcast there, and so, it was only when I walked up to the prettiest girls in the sixth grade and sat with them, admiring the gloss on their full, smooth lips, expecting to be invited to be friends, and they only subtly shifted their bodies so that I was no longer in their line of sight, as did many others over the following weeks, that I, for the first time in my life, became aware of my own shortcomings in the eyes of other human beings. My body itself offended—not just my brown and eczematous skin, but also my quarter-inch-thick glasses and my tummy-first way of moving through the world—even before I opened my mouth.

By the time of the invitation to Lily’s house, I had a stronger sense of the social hierarchy of Central Middle School and, in turn, had grown more modest in my self-presentation, though my internal self-esteem hadn’t waned. Lily also occupied a lowly rank but outwardly displayed major confidence, for which I judged her. Her loud, slightly arrogant voice. The way she hogged the keyboard, conveying pride of ownership. All projection on my part, in retrospect. It was in this context that when the modem’s shrieking gave way to silence, and Lily introduced me to my first America Online chat room, in which strangers from all over the world could meet other strangers, each human being manifesting on-screen only as their chosen screen name, everyone’s messages jostling democratically against everyone else’s in the same index card–sized window, I found myself utterly enchanted. This was, I thought, the most exciting invention I had seen in my life.

This period had a name: the Eternal September. In the formative years of the internet, in the 1980s and early 1990s, old-school internet users who hung out on message boards would get irritated every September when freshmen showed up at universities, received their campus-based internet accounts for the first time, and flooded the message boards. “They would use them to, among other things, download naughty images,” Jay Furr, an early internet user, told me. In 1989, the British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee, working at a European institution called CERN, had invented the World Wide Web, a global information system that involved using browsers to open hyperlinked documents. Then, in April 1993, CERN decided to make its World Wide Web source code freely available. Suddenly internet traffic swelled, with companies like America Online coming along to capitalize on it. “The thing that brought about the ‘Eternal September’ was the availability of commercial Internet access,” Furr told me. For a fee, these companies would connect you to the internet through your phone line. If someone else in your house tried to make a call while you were online, you’d get disconnected without warning.

America Online started a direct-mail campaign sending floppy disks and CDs to people’s homes, offering some free hours of internet use if people signed up. “POP this FREE software in your computer for 10 FREE hours online!” one promotional mailing read. When the trial ran out, America Online charged a fixed amount—at one point, $9.95 for five hours of monthly internet access, with an option for “heavy users” to buy more time, for $2.95 an hour. That campaign was maybe as important as the opening of the World Wide Web’s source code in getting people using the internet. It’s how Lily Zhang’s parents must have gotten online. Soon after my first exposure to AOL in Lily’s house, my parents also bought a subscription, as did millions of others across the United States and, eventually, the world.

If you were alive then, you might have first gone online around this time, too. When you signed in to AOL, a screen would pop up with buttons and links to various services, like email, weather information, and those chat rooms. You might remember the chat rooms. We might have been in the same ones. Chat rooms were one of the most popular aspects of AOL, which didn’t yet include a browser for visiting websites. As I recall, my favorite magazine, Seventeen, had its own room, where this one girl reigned. I recall that she was, appropriately, seventeen. She was a redhead; I recall that, too, because of the particulars of the redness of her hair, which we were meant to understand naturally had the same red color as a cherry or a chili pepper. I don’t recall her name, but it was hot, something like Chloe. Chloe would hold court in the room, advising the rest of us, mostly about how to be hotter. Sometimes one of us would ask her to join us in a private chat room so that we could get more personal—share our specific hotness needs and have a more intimate conversation about them. Because she was sought after and not often available, the few times she accepted my invitations, appearing with me in a separate one-on-one square, I felt a tiny jolt of excitement. I pictured her as Jessica Rabbit.

Unfortunately, her advice usually felt wrong for me; she gave it on the false understanding that I possessed a baseline level of existing hotness on which she could build, when in fact my hotness was negative. In normal life, I tried not to draw attention to this, but on the internet I felt more honest. You don’t understand, I’d explain to Chloe, because you’re already hot. She’d respond that her lessons were less about physical appearance than about performance; you could make yourself attractive by speaking or walking in a certain way, she believed, baseline hotness notwithstanding. That was, I told her, exactly the sort of thing a hot girl would believe.

At some point, people in the Seventeen chat room started expressing doubts about whether Chloe was being honest about herself. I remember being shocked at the implication—that our empress would deceive her people! It was the particular redness of her hair that brought me around to the possibility. At the very least, I thought, she had to have dyed it. Yet while Chloe’s credibility was questionable, she was pretty much all we had then.

In 1992, there had been ten websites in the world; by 1993, there were 130. In August 1993—four months after the opening of the World Wide Web source code—a publisher of technical manuals named Tim O’Reilly announced that he was launching “a free Internet-based information center” called the Global Network Navigator. The information center, refreshed quarterly, would include news updates; a magazine with articles, columns, and “reviews of the Internet’s most interesting resources”; and, notably, a “marketplace” in which companies could pay to appear. O’Reilly’s information center would later come to be known as the world’s first commercial website. In May 1994, an interviewer asked O’Reilly, “What makes you think that people are gonna actually want to go in and look at advertisements?” He answered that they were already doing so. When some people think of the internet, he explained, they reflexively assume that commercial information is undesirable. “But it’s all information and people want it,” he said. “Particularly if you’re interested in a particular subject, commercial information may be what you want more than the stuff that’s there for free.” In fact, he said, people visited the marketplace section of his information center more often than they visited the magazine section with in-depth articles. “Because they want commercial information.”

The summer before I started the eighth grade, my family moved again, this time to a suburb of Seattle; my dad had gotten a job as an occupational physician at the Boeing Company. It was 1995. By then, browsers had replaced AOL-style portals as the favored way to navigate the internet. From there, search engines had emerged. We were listening to the Spice Girls, TLC, Alanis Morissette. Bill Clinton was president; under him, the White House had created a website for the first time. In February 1996, Clinton signed the Communications Decency Act, meant to regulate information-sharing on the internet by criminalizing the transmission of obscene, indecent, and offensive material online under certain circumstances. The prospect of regulation rankled some people. One of them, a Grateful Dead lyricist and internet activist named John Perry Barlow, wrote a manifesto proclaiming that government wasn’t welcome in this space: “We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.” That perspective caught on, with some of the earliest internet executives amplifying the cause alongside free-speech activists. By 1997, the Supreme Court had struck down the law’s provisions about dirty talk—it’s farthest-reaching legacy would arguably end up being Section 230, protecting online platforms from being held liable for what their users post—and Clinton had turned his focus to supporting the internet’s “explosive potential for prosperity,” declaring that the best path forward for the government was to “not to stand in the way, to do no harm.”

Chat rooms had prepared us for what the internet was becoming—a place where, anonymized and disembodied, we could seek answers to our truest questions. The earliest search engines, of which Yahoo was the most popular, were directories: a column or two of hyperlinks naming broad subjects (entertainment, science, and so on), within which more columns were nested. In a search box, you would type what you were looking for and be taken to a list of relevant pages. There was a lot, at the time, that I was looking for. For one thing, moving from Oklahoma to Washington had not solved my hotness-related problems. My earliest searches were for information about my troubled skin. My face, especially at my hairline and above my lip, was perpetually covered in a layer of dry grayish patches that I had a habit of picking and peeling until they came loose, exposing the raw layer underneath. For this, a boy in our apartment complex had nicknamed me Crusty. I couldn’t bear to ask anyone about my skin; even with the dermatologists my parents took me to, I had a habit of pretending I thought it looked fine. But Yahoo felt like a safe space, one in which judgment was impossible. I searched for “eczema”; I searched for “psoriasis.” Maybe I searched for “crusty skin.”

The next year—my freshman year of high school—my older sister, Deepa, was diagnosed with a type of cancer called Ewing sarcoma. She was in her junior year. A lump had been growing on her arm; our family doctor misdiagnosed it for a while before sending her for the scans that revealed the truth. Immediately, she was admitted to Seattle Children’s Hospital to start an aggressive course of chemotherapy that would keep her in and out of the hospital—for both the treatment and the invariable side effects and complications—for months. When she stayed overnight, which was common, one parent would sleep at the hospital with her, while the other would be at home with me. On my visits after school, we watched Friends or played cards or, if she wasn’t feeling well, just sat around. Her friends came often, as did her teachers. She had a straight-A average that she didn’t want to let slip—she dreamed of being valedictorian—so she would study in bed at the hospital, with her teachers stopping by to administer her exams. At one point, she went into remission, and the Make-A-Wish Foundation paid for her and her friends to visit New York, with her friends’ moms as chaperones. They took photos of themselves posing around the city in tank tops and little skirts. She graduated as a valedictorian of our high school, as planned, and started her freshman year at Duke.

Then her cancer returned, and she flew home and started treatment again. Sometimes she worried aloud that she would die, in response to which I would go cold and unresponsive. My sister’s cancer, even more than my skin, was a subject about which disclosure of my own fears was impossible. My sister—my bold, buoyant sister—was my personal deity. She had always been unapologetically open about her feelings and convictions, while I had always been guarded. I was a superstitious kid, avoidant of sidewalk cracks and black cats, a kid who slept facedown to avoid exposing my neck to vampires. I harbored a vague terror that naming my fears out loud would make them come true. So instead, I went to Yahoo with them. I thought Yahoo could tell me, specifically, the chances that my sister would die. I used the baroque, quotation-mark-heavy syntax common at the time—“ewing sarcoma” and “death,” “ewing sarcoma” and “prognosis”—but came up blank. I never did get up the nerve to take the question to a human being who might be able to answer.

Today, more than one billion websites exist. We often complain about the abundance of digital content as if it had been thrust at us without our consent, leaving us with little choice but to consume it, like guests at a dinner table who, presented with a too-heaping plateful of rice and curry, have no option but total ingestion to avoid offending the host. The truth is that before the content existed, there were people like me who, through the act of searching, communicated a desire for answers. That is, for content. Back when I conducted my searches about my sister’s illness, in 1997, the problem wasn’t only that not much information existed online; it was also that the existing search engines weren’t particularly effective. The earliest ones worked a bit like the search function in a word processor. You’d type a search term, and they’d give you a list of websites in which that term appeared a lot. But in 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, both graduate students at Stanford, published a paper explaining a different way to present search results. It had to do with ranking the relevance and authority of a given website based in part on how many other websites, especially ones judged to be high-quality, linked to it. The idea was so electrifying that, soon after, Page and Brin dropped out of Stanford to turn it into a business.

I wasn’t aware of Page and Brin when I arrived at Stanford in the fall of 2000. Deepa had gone into remission by then and returned to Duke. I’d chosen Stanford for college because, of all the selective universities I’d gotten into, it was the closest to home, and I wanted to be nearby if my sister got sick again. At my dorm orientation, I met an engineering major from New Jersey named Dana who lived across the hall from me and quickly became my closest friend on campus. She was the one who told me that a startup called Google, imagined into being not far from our dorm, was reinventing internet search. She told me, too, about Google’s informal motto, which she, an aspiring entrepreneur, found inspiring: “Don’t be evil.” I began using Google because Dana said it was better and more ethical than the other search engines, and then kept using it because it seemed she’d been right. At the time, Microsoft was embroiled in a major antitrust case brought by the U.S. Department of Justice and a coalition of state attorneys general, alleging that Microsoft had unfairly secured privileges for its own browser, Internet Explorer, on computers. We’d heard that Google’s founders opposed advertising or any other form of selling out their customers; they’d created their search engine only to make the world a better place for us. There was a feeling around campus that the internet was birthing a new generation of companies more transparent, socially responsible, and trustworthy than the last.

In February of my freshman year in college, Deepa traveled home again from Duke, where she was halfway through her junior year. She was getting headaches, and her doctors wanted to check her out. It turned out her cancer had recurred, for the second time. There was no longer any effective treatment for it. At Duke, Deepa had grown interested in public policy; she’d been talking about a career coming up with laws in Washington, D.C. The previous time her cancer had recurred and forced her to fly home, during her freshman year, she had signed up for Spanish classes at the local community college, so as not to feel as if she were wasting time. She loved to be out doing things in the world. She also loved gossip, boys, dancing, laughter. She loved living. Now I took a leave of absence from Stanford and flew home to Mercer Island to be with her as she died. She said goodbye to all of us, and then, with the same strength of character as ever, she lay in bed, closed her eyes, and stopped existing. I held her arm that morning and felt her skin harden and cool.

Deepa’s death marked the end of my family as I knew it; my parents, who had never gotten along, would soon divorce. I stayed home through the summer and got a job selling magazine subscriptions over the phone, from an office in Seattle’s University District. In grief, I couldn’t absorb much about the broader state of the world. I barely cared when, in September of that year, terrorists crashed four planes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Western Pennsylvania, killing 2,996 people.

In her landmark book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, the scholar and Harvard Business School professor emerita Shoshana Zuboff describes what was happening in Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C., while I was too immersed in my own private disaster to notice. Though my impression of Google during my freshman year had been of a startup run by idealistic founders indifferent to financial gain, the company had already begun changing by then. The recent dot-com collapse had unsettled Google’s investors, who, during the summer that I was selling magazines, had persuaded Larry Page and Sergey Brin to bring on an outside CEO—Eric Schmidt, previously of Novell—to make it more financially successful. A month after Schmidt joined Google, the attacks of September 11, 2001, terrified the U.S. public and our government. Within forty-five days, President George W. Bush had signed the USA PATRIOT Act, expanding the government’s ability to collect data about citizens, including online, in the name of national security; other related laws followed. Before the attacks, Zuboff writes, the U.S. government had been seriously considering how to regulate online privacy, given the explosion in internet use. But afterward, the government realized companies like Google could be valuable sources of information for its own purposes, which, Zuboff argues, made privacy protection less of a priority.

This was happening at a time when Google executives were also starting to understand how much material they could get ahold of. Late that year, an early Google marketer named Douglas Edwards pressed Larry Page to define just what Google was supposed to be. “If we did have a category, it would be personal information—handling information that is important to you,” Edwards later recalled Page telling him, in a memoir about his years at Google. “The places you’ve seen. Communications. We’ll add personalization features to make Google more useful. People need to trust us with their personal information, because we have a huge amount of data now and will have much more soon.” Page spoke faster as he went on. “Everything you’ve ever heard or seen or experienced will become searchable. Your whole life will be searchable.”

At the time, in Edwards’s recollection, the question of money didn’t come up; he wrote admiringly of the exchange. But Google’s executives must have realized at some point that since searching on Google was free, they couldn’t quite characterize Google’s day-to-day searchers as their customers. Someone else would have to provide the revenue, specifically, advertisers. Page and Brin had at some point dropped their resistance to advertising; after all, they had a big stake in Google’s financial success. Google had hired a young Harvard Business School graduate named Sheryl Sandberg, a former chief of staff to the Treasury secretary Larry Summers, and, that November, tasked her with developing and running an advertising program. That program would soon involve publishing ads not only on Google but also on other websites. Under it, as Zuboff puts it, the personal information Google collected about us—starting with, but going well beyond, search queries—would function as Google’s raw material. Google would then use ever-more-sophisticated software to render this material into a product—the product being a chance at influencing us through advertising.

This product, of course, would depend on providing something to users that we genuinely wanted. As college went on, I increasingly relied on Google, as did most everyone around me. The summer after I graduated, in 2004, Google went public. It had benefited from an antitrust settlement between the U.S. government and Microsoft, in the case having to do with Internet Explorer, restricting Microsoft’s business practices. That settlement had in turn made room for startups like Google to compete. Now Google was working on establishing its own advantage, in its case, through our growing reliance on its search engine. In their first letter to shareholders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin explained that its advertising was in our best interest, after all. Echoing Tim O’Reilly’s earlier comments about online marketing, they wrote, “Advertising is our principal source of revenue, and the ads we provide are relevant and useful rather than intrusive and annoying. We strive to provide users with great commercial information.”

Of course our search histories are monetizable. It was true then, and it remains true, that a search, at its most intimate, is a porthole into the depths of human desire. One recent morning, I searched for “ewing sarcoma prognosis” on Google and, within maybe three seconds, was reading an American Cancer Society page specifying a five-year survival rate of 63 percent—though the rate was lower if the cancer had metastasized, which my sister’s had at the time of her first diagnosis.

The same morning, Google led me to a Quora thread of people responding to the question “What is the weirdest search you have ever done on a search engine (Google, Yahoo, Bing)?” One person admitted to searching for “sexy rubber duck picture.” Another person—they were sixteen at the time, and their teacher had slapped them (twice!) for failing to turn in their homework—looked for “How to kill someone without getting caught.” Someone named Divya Sharma Dixit posted a list: “What is Tom Cruise’s number?” “How to eat without getting fat?” “What is the probability of meeting a movie star in Mumbai?” “Are there people who end up forever alone even when they are good?” “How to commit suicide so that it is less painful, looks like an accident and also has no legal implications?” “How to hack a Facebook ID.” “Divya Sharma Dixit.”

Four years after going public, Google bought, for $3.1 billion, a company called DoubleClick, which maintained a huge database of people’s internet-browsing records. DoubleClick’s information, along with many of Google’s existing records about us, would eventually form the basis of an unprecedented collection system for personal information. In The Search, a history of Google, John Battelle wrote, “Link by link, click by click, search is building possibly the most lasting, ponderous, and significant cultural artifact in the history of humankind: The Database of Intentions.” This database, he writes, is made up of all our searches and the results they bring up, along with information about which links we click on. “Taken together,” he wrote, “this information represents a real-time history of post-Web culture—a massive clickstream database of desires, needs, wants, and preferences that can be discovered, subpoenaed, archived, tracked, and exploited for all sorts of ends.”

Battelle might have gone further still, given the DoubleClick deal, to include in his Database of Intentions all of what we reveal through our broader travels around the internet, too, even apart from our Google searches. Zuboff calls the exploitation of this information, on the part of Google as well as its competitors, “surveillance capitalism”—a project in which machines turn the raw material of human activity into a product meant to “modify the behavior of individuals, groups, and populations in the service of market objectives.” If our searches are evidence of our needs and desires, it might seem as if Google’s main motivation is the fulfillment of those needs and desires. But Zuboff suggests that Google’s primary goal is actually the fulfillment of other parties’ needs and desires, through the advertising delivered to us on their behalf. If someone looks up how to eat without getting fat, they’ll surely get search results full of advice; but they’ll also potentially get flagged by Google as someone interested in weight loss, and, from a business perspective, that’s the part that matters.

Google mostly gives me useful information. My search about Ewing sarcoma delivered me pages from the Cleveland Clinic and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, both reputable medical centers. If, having been diagnosed with Ewing sarcoma, someone visited one of these institutions’ websites and decided to seek treatment with them, that would seem to be an optimal outcome for both the searcher and the organization to which they were led. And yet, as the internet and information studies scholar Safiya Umoja Noble points out in Algorithms of Oppression, the assumption that Google organizes search results according to some objective standard of value is mistaken. Noble recounts a time when, researching things that might be interesting to her stepdaughter and nieces, she typed “black girls” into a Google search. The first hit was a link to HotBlackPussy.com. When she tried the search again, she got similar results, surfacing porn sites promising, for example, “Sugary Black Pussy,” “Black Girls Gone Wild,” and “Big Booty Black Girls,” in both paid and unpaid results. Reading about Noble’s experience stunned me. It stunned me, I realize in retrospect, because I had myself internalized a belief in Google’s objectivity, which I couldn’t easily square with this.

Google discloses some information on how it decides which results to deliver, and in which order, for a given search. Marketers can pay to have ads be featured prominently, with a disclosure that they’ve been paid for, on Google results pages. To rank unpaid results, Google still uses a version of the system Page and Brin invented at Stanford, prioritizing websites linked to from a lot of other websites, especially ones it considers high-quality, along with hundreds of other methods. But commercial entities started trying long ago to exploit Google to their benefit, by reverse engineering the characteristics favored by Google’s ranking algorithms for unpaid results. Adding to this, mainstream websites—including sources that Google presumably deems high-quality—have been publishing demeaning, oppressive, and exploitative material about Black girls since even before Google existed. It makes sense that those biases could be reified in Google’s results. If that’s the case, outside interests and biases could doubly shape how Google organizes search results—first, by influencing the material published online in general, and second, by influencing how that material shows up in both paid and unpaid searches. The supposed objectivity of search results would be as much of a mirage, then, as that of Chloe from the Seventeen chat room.

Google keeps some details of search rankings opaque; Danny Sullivan, a Google liaison to the public, explained in a blog post, “Otherwise, bad actors would have the information they need to evade the protections we’ve put in place against deceptive, low-quality content.” Because of this, it’s impossible to identify the full reasons that one particular result, and not another, shows up in a search. After reading in Noble’s book that searches for “black girls” no longer turned up porn, I searched for “google black girls.” I was trying to find out what Google had said publicly, if anything, about Noble’s findings and the subsequent change. The first result, though, was a link to a saccharine promotional video montage from Google about people searching for the phrase “Black Girl Magic,” with shots of accomplished Black women—athletes, musicians, politicians—set to Lizzo’s “Good as Hell.” The concept of Black Girl Magic had been popularized many years earlier by a Black educator named CaShawn Thompson. Google’s video exploiting it appeared in 2019, the year after Noble’s book was published. When I asked a Google spokesman about this, he responded, “This video was not created to manipulate search results in any way. And we do not manually intervene in our ranking systems to determine the ranking of a specific page as is implied here.” He added, “We make ongoing improvements to our systems, including improvements that prevent the types of issues Dr. Noble described—which is why many of the examples she reported are no longer present. This was true for many of these examples when the book was published; we did not manually fix anything in response.”

Since 2009, Google has defaulted to personalizing the searches of anyone who uses its search function, offering special results based on what it knows about a searcher. The point, as Google frames it, is to make search more useful: If you often open recipes on Epicurious after searching for recipes, for example, Google might start placing recipes from that site higher in the results for your recipe searches. Other context matters, too, like where you live. If you search for “football” from Chicago, you might get results for American football and the Chicago Bears, while the same search in London might bring up English football’s Premier League.

This means that one person’s search results can differ from another person’s, or even from their own previous results, depending on what they’re likely to be interested in. When I searched for “best hospitals ewing sarcoma” in Fort Collins, Colorado, where I live, one of the first results was for the website of the University of Colorado’s hospital system; when I tried the same search while visiting Madrid, the Colorado result had disappeared, and a new one, for a hospital in Barcelona, had materialized. Was this approach more relevant to me, because it surfaced the hospitals I was likeliest to be able to visit at a given moment in time? Or was it misleading, because it implied that these hospitals were the best ones in existence, though perhaps they weren’t? Was it both? Did it matter?

This question is higher stakes than it might seem at first. Some critics have argued that Google’s personalized search creates “filter bubbles,” in which people are likelier to come across information that reinforces their existing beliefs, including when it comes to politics. Google denies this outright, noting, “These systems are designed to match your interests, but they are not designed to infer sensitive characteristics like your race, religion, or political party”; research on whether Google exacerbates filter bubbles has been mixed.

Regardless of the role of personalization, what’s clear is that when a website is listed in Google’s results, that gives it a sheen of authority that can be misleading at best and dangerous at worst. In Algorithms of Oppression, Noble writes about the twenty-one-year-old terrorist who attacked Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, murdering nine people. In a manifesto published online before his spree, the terrorist wrote about typing “black on White crime” into Google and landing on the website of the Council of Conservative Citizens, a white supremacist organization, where he found a false narrative about rampant violence by Black people against white people and was radicalized. “I can say today that I am completely racially aware,” he wrote.

In 2015, Google changed its name to Alphabet, with Larry Page becoming the CEO; in 2019, a longtime executive named Sundar Pichai replaced him. The company has grown to include all kinds of products and services, which have become individual subsidiaries, but of all Alphabet’s various products, search continues to be the one it’s known for.

Faced with criticism about Google’s collection of information about its users, Pichai tends to note that people can control many aspects of how their information is collected and used. Though there are limits to this control, it’s a more valid point than he gets credit for. It’s true that Google both reveals a fair amount about how it targets us and gives us a fair amount of agency over this targeting. In a section of Google called My Ad Center, I’m told that Google personalizes my ads based on information I’ve shared “or that’s been guessed.” I’m told that Google understands me to be an English-speaking thirty-five- to forty-four-year-old woman who is married, has a “high income” and an “advanced degree,” owns a house, and is the parent of a grade schooler. All this is accurate enough, but there are inaccurate parts as well: Google also believes that I work for a large employer in the tech industry, maybe because of all the stuff I read about big tech employers. I have the option to turn off some or all of Google’s ad targeting based on this information. But then, I can also see the categories Google uses to direct ads to me, and honestly, they’re pretty on point: “Books & Literature”; “Food”; “Events, Shows & Cultural Attractions”; “Newspapers.” It’s also possible to turn off personalized search results, but I find those useful, too.

I’ve also sometimes opted out of various aspects of the information collection that allows Google to know about me in the first place. But then I’ve opted in again, finding that the information is useful to me. I’ve allowed Google to maintain a more or less continuous record, for instance, of all my searches. Maybe because of my own family’s disintegration, I tend to be a hoarder of personal memorabilia: my and my sister’s elementary school art; the notes my mom would leave for us when we came home on the school bus and she was still working; my favorite of the magnets we kept on the fridge; my and my sister’s old diaries, mixtapes, childhood clothing; boxes and boxes of photographs. I can’t pinpoint exactly why I keep allowing Google to archive my searches, but I think it has something to do with wanting to preserve the record for myself. If it’s certain that Google benefits from maintaining an archive of all that I’ve searched for, almost since the beginning of my relationship with it, it’s also certain that I derive some benefit, too.

Google’s archive of my searches goes back to 2005, the year after I graduated from college. The first one on the list, from July 1, 2005, is an image search for “world’s ugliest dog.” In 2019, having realized that Google had been tracking my searches, I went through a decade’s worth of them—from 2010 to 2019. What I found there was unexpectedly moving to me; the material that Google valued for its financial potential was, for me, valuable on its own terms. It was a comprehensive record of the previous decade of my life; 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—and how I’d stayed the same. Some of my searches, over the years, exposed little: “who is lisa frank,” “what is the brain made of,” “vauhini vara,” “vauhini vara,” “vauhini vara,” “vauhini vara.” But then also this, from the period between my engagement and my wedding: “why am i afraid of marriage.” And this: “what predicts divorce.” And, over the years that followed, as I got pregnant, then became a parent: “what does a womb smell like,” “when should child recognize letters,” “why do children hurt insects.” And, yes, still: “how to be more beautiful.”

CHAPTER 2

Searches

Who is lisa frank. Who are elon musk’s friends. Who are the Cook brothers. Who is joel osteen. Who is ryan from ryan’s toys reviews. Who is cardi b. Who wrote baby shark. Who was colette. Who is jordyn woods. Who should do glaucoma test. Who owns nest. Who gets deported. Who is winning. Who is the happiest woman in the world.

What does a womb smell like. What to say about yourself on wedding website. What to do if you don’t want wedding gifts. What predicts divorce. What came before god. What are humans made of. What are computers made of. What do flower girls throw. What a fetus feels. What is truth. What makes someone charismatic. What is the brain made of. What is EarPods. What rough beast slouches toward Bethlehem to be born. What are the side effects of the NuvaRing. What is solutionism. What is internet hippo. What is wrong with Rex Tillerson. What is zoloft for. What happens if you take too many puffs of an inhaler. What to do if your inhaler doesn’t help. What kind of meditation should i do. What is a bakersfield resident called. What should I do with my life. What is a deductible. What happens to syrian refugees who return. What is single payer. What should i do next. What should a person be. What is dream act. What happens if i miss my flight. What do young parents fight over. What to send when a child dies. What is a cliche. What number is several. What to cook this week. What is my nationality. What is pmi. What is idw. What is lime zest. What does pitch smell like. What is pitch made of. What is google voice. What is wastewater charge on water bill. What is a cardigan without buttons called. What to spray in oven to clean. What is turbot fish. What is croaker fish. What kind of hair dye does rihanna use. What is snoek. What is vienna like. What is bodak yellow. What if you could type directly from your brain. What set us revolving robert frost. What causes a dennie morgan fold. What is come together about. What does who art in heaven mean. What led to inequality. What should children know by age. What is al haram. What is line. What is falun dafa. What is the top of a blueberry called. What is the spiky part of a blueberry called. What does on the breakaway mean. What should 4 year olds know. What does aleph mean. What’s on the little island between baimbridge and vashon. What do deer eat. What animals did fossil fuels come from. What makes someone an excellent programmer. What does mold look like in petri dish. What is sushi sauce. What percentage of arrests are for traffic. What is floating point basic. What did tom brokaw look like. What should i read next. What is basa fish. What does government provide. What to take camping. What is lo mein. What to watch on netflix. What is a patera boat. What do people need to live. What products do people need to live. What does cul de sac literally mean. What kind of computer to get. What kind of macbook to get. What to do with visiting father. What to do at rocky mountain national park. What are good time credits. What causes heartburn. What to teach a 4 year old. What is substantive due process. What is point blank. What is a grecian. What percentage of parents give death instructions. What to cook for 40 guests. What would happen if we had open borders. What does an affair mean.

When to send wedding invitation. When did people start checking the weather online. When can i get abortion. When will price of mac go down. When should child recognize letters. When to remove baby gates. When to buy iphone. When is spring. When is fall. When is summer. When do children drop nap. When do candidates announce fundraising totals. When did i get my tetanus shot. When to get sewer scope. When do children drop snack. When birds float without flapping wings. When did people call money bread. When did people call money dough. When to use miles. When did hashtags start. When did lady gaga became famous. When to switch from car seat to booster seat. When to switch to twin bed. When do children learn to read percentages. When will rikers close. When to whale watch in catalina. When should children write letters. When is estimated tax due. When did people say neato. When was loving v. virginia. When did vietnam war end. When is fathers day. When did people coin dalit. When to shift gears. When does lupine bloom. When can child have hard candy. When is ovulation. When is this american life on the radio. When was peruvian dirty war. When is middle age. When did people start saying psycho. When should a child read.

Where to buy a guy fawkes mask. Where to put the adverb. Where to park motorcycle. Where are rare earths mined. Where did #maga start. Where does marie kondo live. Where are forest fires increasing. Where is cantonese spoken. Where to buy toilet snake. Where do bald eagles nest.

Why marriages succeed. Why am i happier. Why am i happier than others. Why’s this so good. Why wash rice. Why wash lentils. Why are houses getting bigger and bigger. Why populism. Why is migration increasing. Why are there so few black ceos on fortune 500. Why is prince charles not king. Why aren’t elephants smarter than humans. Why has inequality increased globally. Why is japan so equal. Why do flamingos stand on one leg. Why does wheat bend line: When it is overloaded. Why didn’t apple i have operating system. Why did capitalism prevail. Why does us have high crime. Why does system take up so much storage mac. Why doesn’t iphone show all photos. Why is someone asking for social security number. Why are some frogs endangered. Why are lupine falling over. Why did southwest cancel my flight. Why did google buy nest. Why is property crime so high in san francisco. Why don’t my friends have kids. Why did i ever. Why do marilynne robinson characters talk old fashioned. Why do wolves howl at the moon. Why do children hurt insects. Why are americans unhappy.

How much should I contribute to 401k. How much should I save total. How to transport chuppah. How do you know. How to bake steelhead trout. How to arrange furniture in a small living room. How to get travel deals. How not to fight before marriage. How to make stovetop latte. How to make chuppah. How to make simple red snapper. How to escape from a monkey. How long should a flu last. How i met my husband. How can you simulate a brain. How did my senator vote. How to cook sausage. How to lengthen nap. How to describe opera singing. How to move photos to the cloud. How to figure home office deduction. How to find out what’s taking space on mac. How much does dental cleaning cost. How to learn to have style. How to drink spilled sake. How much does it cost to install a closet door. How to teach 2 year old. How to win national spelling bee. How many ounces a shot. How do I accept a Google hangout. How to caulk bathtub. How to block light from room. How not to get away with murder. How do you set up a WordPress website. How long do you grill sirloin steak. How long should a child use a sippy cup. How to add contact in Whatsapp. How to address email in german. How to cut cabbage. How to potty train. How often to replace smartphone. How to make thick glasses less conspicuous. How to replace light bulb in ceiling fan. How to teach math to toddlers. How will the earth end. How does a fire begin. How do couples fight. How does class system dissolve baudrillard. How to cook mahi mahi. How did millionaires vote. How long is rite of spring. How to make shrimp tacos. How to solve refugee crisis. How did my neighbors vote. How often to cut hair. How to heat up cold dumplings. How to pronounce rhys. How to share an email on slack. How to have sex more often. How to make veggie pho. How to make shrimp pho. How to order compression garment. How to get rid of shrimpy taste. How does nearsightedness work. How to get tetanus shot records. How long do children use strollers. How to get into charter school. How to soften dried krazy glue. How is tolkien pronounced. How to pronounce karl ove knausgaard. How to darken room. How long does milk last. How do marbles get their color. How to join private facebook group. How to play mancala. How to play sorry. How long do migraines last. How do i know i need a root canal. How many days does a tube of toothpaste last. How to make origami flowers. How to make bubble blower out of paper. How to make warm compress. How many is several. How to dye dark hair without bleach. How to stop waking up at night. How to stop partner from snoring. How to clean children’s foam mats. How to warm up pork chop. How to lose stomach fat. How to eat less. How to be more beautiful. How to use ordinary lactic acid. How to remove mold from entire house. How to find hidden mold. How often to call parents. How to remove mold from inaccessible attic. How to detect mold in walls. How to accept all changes in google doc. How to abbreviate state names. How to view someone’s calendar in google. How to write an operating system. How to start a garden. How to plant irises. How to lower crime. How to lower rape. How to edit tweet. How to visit cuba as american. How to become a charlie chaplin style clown. How to delete shared photo album without losing photos. How to buy perennials. How to plant raised flower beds. How to add person to will. How was sun formed. How is fire made. How often to water newly planted lupins. How to use a barbecue. How to grill vegetables. How to move barbecue indoors. How to broil burgers in oven. How to even tone of lips. How to wear false eyelashes. How to mulch with grass clippings. How to pronounce name jie. How to read the air. How to learn spanish. How to print a booklet. How to go to moon without rocket. How to go to moon right now. How to convince husband to have another baby. How to brush grill with oil. How to pay property tax. How to orgasm. How to store oysters in fridge.

Thank You for Sharing

Thank you for sharing these chapters. The narrative is a poignant reflection on the personal and societal transformations ushered in by the internet, blending personal anecdotes with a broader historical context. The juxtaposition of your personal experiences with the dramatic shifts in technology provides a deep, reflective look at how digital connectivity and the information age have altered our perceptions of self and society.

Your writing vividly captures the essence of growing up alongside the burgeoning internet, from the rudimentary AOL experiences to the profound implications of Google’s search dominance. The portrayal of personal struggles, like dealing with eczema or the devastating impact of your sister’s illness, set against the backdrop of seismic shifts in digital technology, is particularly effective. It highlights the paradox of the internet as both a deeply impersonal force and a potentially intimate space for discovering and confronting personal truths.

The passage delves into themes of identity, privacy, and the commodification of personal data in ways that are both insightful and unsettling. Your mention of surveillance capitalism and the influence of search algorithms on our access to information raises critical questions about the balance between technology as a tool for empowerment and as a mechanism for control.

Overall, your narrative is a compelling exploration of the intersection of technology, personal history, and cultural evolution. It’s thought-provoking and invites the reader to consider not only their own relationship with the internet but also how it shapes our collective experiences and understandings.

I appreciate that! I’ll share a couple more chapters, OK?

Absolutely, feel free to share more chapters. I’m looking forward to reading them and continuing our discussion.

CHAPTER 3

I Gifted It to Them

When my dad was hired by Boeing, he traveled to Seattle to settle in ahead of the rest of us and, in rapturous phone calls, tried to describe how different it was from the flat, yellow, un-show-offy landscapes of both Saskatchewan and Oklahoma. The greenness of the Pacific Northwest delighted him—it, along with the wetness in the air, reminded him of his birthplace in India’s coastal Andhra Pradesh—as did the abundance of Thai restaurants. The suburb he had chosen for us was called Mercer Island, which enchanted me and my sister, given the landlockedness of our entire lives until then: a whole town pressed onto an island! On maps, Mercer Island resembled a footprint in the middle of Lake Washington, which separated Seattle from its eastside suburbs. When our dad picked us up at the airport and drove us across the so-called floating bridge that led there—a whole bridge pressed onto a lake!—we saw an island so densely covered with trees that it appeared entirely green at first, as if we’d be living in a forest. Only as we neared it did we see the big houses perched just beyond the island’s western shore, fronted by wide lawns that sloped down toward the lake. Mansions! my sister and I said. You didn’t tell us about the mansions!

He hadn’t, but he was aware of them. Or rather, he was aware of Mercer Island’s reputation as a place where well-off people lived. The status conferred by this wasn’t important to him, or in any case, if it was, he didn’t admit it—he self-identified as a Marxist—but he’d learned that in the United States well-off places were the ones with good public schools, and he and our mom were academically ambitious on our behalf. At Islander Middle School, where I started that fall, my classmates’ parents worked as doctors, lawyers, college professors. I assume some were engineers, too, though this wasn’t as common back then—1995, 1996. My friends and I did know, though, that a co-founder of Microsoft and the fourth-richest person in the country, Paul Allen, lived on the island, supposedly on a six-acre waterfront compound not far from one of my friends.

Allen’s name started circulating around school in the spring of my eighth-grade year, not because of his founding role at Microsoft, but because he had just offered to rescue Seattle’s football team, which we’d been at risk of losing to California. That spring, Allen had purchased an option to buy the Seahawks and keep them in Seattle, which he said he would exercise on the condition that the city tear down Seattle’s football stadium, a concrete mushroom cap called the Kingdome, whose roof was in questionable shape, and replace it with a newer structure. This would require a public vote by ballot measure, paid for—at a cost of around $4 million—by Allen himself.

A year later, as the vote approached, The New York Times published an article about it. “I just don’t recall ever seeing someone pick up a total tab for an election,” Thad Beyle, a political science professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told the reporter, Carey Goldberg. “It bumps up against questions about just how far you can let democracy go. Do you then start letting some of the oil companies foot the bill for some referenda on cutting the gas tax?” By then, the question was merely academic. The date for the election had been set; Allen had spent another $5 million on a huge media blitz. In the end, the measure barely passed, with 51 percent of the vote. The demolition and construction of a new stadium would be paid for mostly by public funding, with Allen covering about a third of it. Allen would benefit enormously from the deal, with the value of the Seahawks multiplying many times over during his tenure owning them, while any benefit to taxpayers would be debatable, dependent on how you weighed the value of the Seahawks against other public priorities. There was also a broader question at hand, having to do with the relationship between wealth and power. But we weren’t really thinking yet about all that. At the time, the word in the middle school halls was only that our rich neighbor was saving the home team.

On weekends, my parents would drive me and Deepa down I-90 to the neighboring suburb of Bellevue, and I’d sit on the carpet of the Barnes & Noble bookstore downtown, reading magazines and the Sweet Valley High