In Vauhini Vara’s most recent genre-bending book, Searches, the critically acclaimed author chronicles the rise of today’s tech titans alongside an examination of how the internet, artificial intelligence, and the rise of e-commerce is integrated into her own life. Deeply personal, powerfully insightful, and wildly experimental, Searches takes a scalpel to our modern lives in a way that only Vara can, to reveal both our collective humanity, and the ways we may be bargaining it away.
In this email interview, Vara and I talked about her relationship to technology, her fascinating creative process, and where vulnerability in art can take us.
Talia Lakshmi Kolluri: Vauhini, thank you so much for taking time to chat with me. As you know, I've followed your work for some time and I've been looking forward to Searches ever since it was announced! To be honest, I’m at a point in my life where I'm feeling very ambivalent about the outsized role technology and in particular AI is playing in all of our lives. But my relationship to it wasn't always so fraught. I also grew up adjacent to the growing tech industry and I think you and I are only a couple of years apart in age so I really related to the idea that at one point it was thrilling and hopeful to be in a world where what we imagined the future could be was forming before our very eyes. As I was reading, I sensed that the book begins in this same space of hopefulness and excitement at the possibilities that technology allows, but eventually turns to reveal a sinister underbelly that permeates almost everything. What was it like to revisit these early days? Can you talk a bit about how you decided to structure this book?
Vauhini Vara: I wanted to start the book with my earliest memories of the internet in part because they are so sweet, so infused with curiosity and excitement. Those experiences were really meaningful to me and to my development of a sense of who I am in relation to myself, my community, the wider world. Sometimes when we talk about the internet, it's easy to act as if the early internet was a force for good, before it developed into a force for bad. But while I wanted to capture the genuine goodness of my own experience with the early internet, I was also interested in showing that the internet was shaped by financial concerns even in those earliest days; it just wasn't as visible to us then. Starting the book there felt like just the right jumping off point for a book that, from beginning to end, is trying to contend with the interconnected goodness and badness of the internet.
TLK: I grew up in Silicon Valley and we got a PC in my childhood home when I was about five years old, so I tend to describe myself as an early adopter of emerging technologies. But truthfully, I've always harbored a combination of both fascination and distrust when it came to connection through technology. For example, I was afraid of chat rooms as a teenager and never logged into them, and I got an email address much later than my friends by a couple of years. But you dove in with what feels like a much greater level of trust and curiosity. Was this book a reckoning with that trust in any way?
VV: In my case, I think it was less a matter of trusting that using the internet to connect with people would be safe and secure than ... not really being concerned with issues of safety and security, to be honest? Ha. The truth is that, in surveys, a majority of people consistently say they know that technology companies know an unprecedented amount about us — and they also consistently say that they're not really that concerned about it. When I reveal myself, in the book, as being one of those people who is aware of the surveillance and yet continues to use these products, I'm in some ways positioning myself as a rhetorical stand-in for any of us.
TLK: I think there’s also a third option, where a person can be aware of and concerned about the level of tech enmeshment or surveillance, but also overwhelmed by what feels like the inevitability of it all. Do you think it’s possible to truly untangle ourselves from the modern tech world?
VV: Yeah, definitely! I was referring earlier to my thinking back when I was a teenager and wasn’t yet thinking all that critically about my own technology use. By my early twenties, I was definitely both aware and concerned — and I still am. I guess the argument I’m making in the book is that by resisting the narrative of inevitability offered by Big Tech companies and their CEOs and investors, we might open ourselves up to other possibilities — maybe possibilities we haven’t even imagined yet — which might let us take advantage of what we love about the technologies we use while finding a way to not have that be bound up in Big Tech dominance: perhaps turning certain technologies into public utilities, or otherwise owning them communally?
TLK: I absolutely see the glimmer of possibilities that you were exploring, particularly with the ways this book spoke about archives, which I found really moving. You talked about how digital archiving has been meaningful for you. One of the things that struck me in particular about part of your personal archiving was the chapter on your history of internet searches (aptly called "Searches"). Can you talk a bit about how and why you decided to put this chapter together?
VV: I started by making a list of all my Google searches over a decade that started with a question word: who, what, when, where, why, how. It was long and fascinating, but that, by itself, wasn't a piece of literature, because it didn't have a meaningful formal shape. For all the experimentation in my work, I often find that chronology provides a really compelling arc, and in this chapter, I started by arranging all the questions starting with a given word in chronological order to figure out what kind of narrative might emerge. Because the decade covered by these searches was a decade in which I went from having few personal responsibilities to having significant ones — I got married, I had a child — I found that what emerged, in terms of narrative, was the uncertainty of becoming an adult, which is to say, of forming one's adult identity. It felt really meaningful to me, and very much in keeping with the theme I mentioned earlier, that conveying all this through Google searches could simultaneously show how poignant it is that I have such a revealing record of that decade and how strange and maybe upsetting it is that Google also has that record.
TLK: That’s really the core of the issue with technology, isn’t it? It’s amazing that it can do so many things, and also, it’s terrifying that it can do so many things. Was this one of the first form experiments you did for this book?
VV: It was!
TLK: I was surprised at how touched I was by "Searches" (the chapter) because the concept was deceptively simple but it's so incredibly vulnerable and personal. It also felt like it has the capacity to be more honest than the kind of record I create with a diary. Your searches are, in a way, the record of the internet as an unobserved observer, and through them we see a version of you when no one is watching. In my notes I called this chapter, "Vauhini as seen through her questions." What was it like to see yourself in this way? Did you want to curate this at any point and leave things out?
VV: As I mentioned earlier, I did curate the initial list of searches and leave things out but it was in the interest of creating meaning from the material, not in the interest of protecting my own ego — or my own privacy, for that matter. The truth is that, since the chapter is in part about just how honest we can be when searching on the internet — more honest than we can be, sometimes, with our flesh-and-blood family and friends — I sort of had to keep the most awkward, embarrassing ones in there to make my point.
TLK: That’s one of the things that makes it most compelling to me. I think this chapter, as well as several others, highlighted the many ways that vulnerability, particular emotional vulnerability is what makes us human to both ourselves and others. Was this a theme that you intentionally had in mind?
VV: I’m not sure I consciously had it in mind, but I can definitely see your point.
TLK: I'm sure some of our readers are familiar with "Ghosts" as it was published in The Believer. It was actually the first piece of yours that I ever read, and I was really intrigued to see you revisit and revise this piece, and also to read about your relationship to its life after publication. From a craft and business-of-writing perspective, it's not that unusual for a writer to revise a previously published piece when including it in a collection. But since this was such a widely read when it first came out, revising it now feels like a much more significant action in that it's almost like it's a correction to the archive you are building. I know you discuss this pretty directly in Searches, but can you share a bit about why it was important for you to revisit it?
VV: When I publish a piece of writing, I'm reluctant to argue that people should read it in any particular way — and I don't feel that other people's readings should be the same as mine by any means; I actually find it more interesting when they're different from mine. With this chapter, though, I realized that a formal choice I'd made in the original version — to give the AI model the last words — weakened it, undercutting a kind of formal meta-argument I'd been developing up until then about the primacy of my own words versus those of the AI model. Without giving any spoilers, I'll say that I wanted to revisit the ending so that the argument felt more consistent to me.
TLK: That makes sense, particularly when I compare the two versions. It opens the door to a lot of interesting questions about AI as a tool versus AI as a writing partner. Would you consider using AI again this way in the future?
VV: I think in all my writing, once I’ve done something once, I’m reluctant to do it again — so, no, I don’t think I’d use AI again in quite this way.
TLK: I can understand that. One of my favorite chapters was "I Am Hungry To Talk," where you write an entire piece in Spanish about your relationship to languages, including Spanish, and then you run it through Google's translator, with its output printed alongside your original. I have to admit that my Spanish is so rusty that I relied mostly on the translation, but I loved it so much! The heart of it, which focused on the yearning to communicate and to be understood, shone through so brightly! I thought it was such a perfect way to show that all communication is ultimately a translation of our wordless internal selves, it will always be imperfect, and the hunger to communicate is really the point. Can you talk a bit about your process for that chapter, and what it meant to you to have so many layers of translation?
VV: This is another chapter in which I really had to swallow my own embarrassment. I first drafted it — in Spanish — while living in Madrid after having studied Spanish there for less than a year. During the time that I revised it, my Spanish improved a lot, but in order to maintain the integrity of the piece, which is about whether using machines to translate language helps or hinders communication, I made a decision to keep my original Spanish — with tons of mistakes —intact. I found the experience of writing the chapter in Spanish and translating it using Google Translate to be such a nice encapsulation of both the ways in which this kind of technology improves our ability to communicate (it smoothed over tons of my Spanish mistakes, translating them into perfectly legible English) and hinders it (it mistranslated tons of my correct Spanish; furthermore, in turning my bad Spanish into correct English, it masked my errors, making it more difficult for me to recognize and address them).
TLK: This is so fascinating because I guess I’ve always assumed that if the language that is fed into the translator is correct, then it will be translated correctly. But it sounds it can still be pretty uneven. This widens the gap in connection and true communion, doesn’t it?
VV: Maybe the way I would put it is to say that I believe connection — even communion — can happen even between two people who don’t speak the same language at all, because all it requires is some kind of mutual understanding, which can sometimes transcend language. But machine translation — the kind of AI used in Google Translate, for example — isn’t really concerned with mutual understanding between humans; it’s concerned with making statistical predictions about which words should appear in which order. So by definition it evades real connection and communion.
TLK: Another theme that emerged for me in Searches was the ways that tech has flattened our lives both in the built environment and experientially. I'm thinking of the chapter "I Gifted It to Them," the demise of the Denny Triangle Elephant Car Wash, and how that was a harbinger of how Seattle's unique character was eroded in a way by the corporate sameness of Amazon. I'm also thinking of how shopping on Amazon takes away the place based experience of shopping in exchange for convenience. But perhaps the best example of this flattening is in the chapters that you co-wrote with Chat GPT. I have been itching to talk to you about this! I know how these chapters feel to me as a reader, but what I really want to know is what you think about Chat GPT's contributions!
VV: Argh, as I said earlier, I really hate to answer these kinds of questions, because part of the fun of writing literature is to see how different readers interpret it differently — and I think that's particularly true of those interstitial ChatGPT conversations. So far, I've had conversations with only a few people who have read the book, but their readings have already been so different as to be almost opposite. I find that delightful and worry that saying out loud what I think will put a finger on the scale for my own interpretation!
TLK: Fair! I would definitely expect the reactions to be wildly different between readers. Did you decide early on that you wanted to incorporate ChatGPT conversations into this book or did that component come later?
VV: It came really late, on the suggestion of my former editor, Lisa Lucas. I hated the idea at first, but then tried it — just to see what it would reveal about ChatGPT — and when I found myself really interested in what it revealed, I realized it could add a compelling, provocative new dimension to the book and the argument it’s making.
TLK: As a tech journalist, you had unique access to the architects of the digital world that we are all stuck living in, but ultimately, this collection is not a journalistic work in the traditional sense. From a craft perspective, how did you balance your history of objective reporting with the kind of incisive interrogation of our tech landscape that this collection required?
VV: As a journalist, I really wanted the book to be deeply researched and fact-based; even though the mode of writing is really personal and is situated in my subjective perspective, I wanted it to be situated on solid journalistic ground. I hope it feels that way to readers. That said, I think a lot of us who have been doing this for a long time — for me, it's been twenty years — are interested in finding ways to acknowledge and convey our own subjective experiences and perspectives, using both traditional journalistic tools and tools that aren't usually considered journalistic, as a way to go beyond communally agreed upon facts and contend with how it feels to be an individual human being living through this historical moment.
TLK: Speaking of historical moments, since I finished reading Searches the political influence of tech companies has grown exponentially, faster that I would have expected. As you were writing this, did you have a sense that things would develop as they have?
VV: No — I didn’t expect any of this. I mean, I imagined a world in which it was possible, but I can’t say that I really believed it would happen.
TLK: As I watch more and more news come out of D.C. I can’t help thinking about your novel (The Immortal King Rao), and the concept of shareholder government that you envisioned as part of that novel. Can you talk a little bit about how your non-fiction writing and fiction writing inform each other, if at all?
VV: Yeah, so, there was this system of corporate government that I invented in the novel, where AI algorithms are used to make all kinds of decisions about how society operates (education, criminal justice, all of it). That was definitely informed by my experience as a reporter covering tech starting in the mid-2000s; a lot of us could see what was happening even back then, in terms of the rising wealth and power of Silicon Valley, and extrapolate ahead to where we might end up if the trends kept moving the way they were. All that said, I’m still shocked every day by the news.
TLK: I think we all are. Can you share a bit about what you’re working on now?
VV: Another novel — and it also has to do with AI, argh.
TLK: Ha! Well, personally, I can’t wait to read it! I’m sure it will stick with me the way all of your work has. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me!
Vauhini Vara is the author of Searches, named one of the most anticipated books of 2025 by Esquire, Foreign Policy, and others. Her previous books are This is Salvaged, which was longlisted for the Story Prize and the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, and The Immortal King Rao, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. She is also a journalist, currently working as a contributing writer for Businessweek, and an editor, most recently at The New York Times Magazine. She teaches at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop’s Book Project.
Talia Lakshmi Kolluri is a mixed South Asian American writer from Northern California. Her debut collection of short stories, What We Fed to the Manticore (Tin House 2022), was a finalist for the 2023 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction and the 2023 Northern California Book Award for Fiction, and was selected as a 2023 ALA RUSA Notable Book, among other honors. Her short fiction has been published in The Common, One Story, Orion, and elsewhere. A lifelong Californian, Talia lives in the Central Valley with her husband and two cats.
Headshot credit: Brigid McAuliffe