{"id":17510,"date":"2025-05-05T14:29:23","date_gmt":"2025-05-05T18:29:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/?p=17510"},"modified":"2025-05-05T14:29:25","modified_gmt":"2025-05-05T18:29:25","slug":"episode-637-vauhini-vara","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/episode-637-vauhini-vara","title":{"rendered":"Episode 637 – Vauhini Vara"},"content":{"rendered":"

Virtual Memories Show 637:
\nVauhini Vara<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/traffic.libsyn.com\/secure\/virtualmemories\/Episode_637_-_Vauhini_Vara.mp3<\/a><\/audio><\/div>

Podcast: Play in new window<\/a> | Download<\/a><\/p>

Subscribe: Spotify<\/a> | TuneIn<\/a> | RSS<\/a> | More<\/a><\/p>\n

“I’m interested in power, the relationship between individual agency and how we define meaning for ourselves, find value for ourselves.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>With SEARCHES: Selfhood in the Digital Age<\/a> (Pantheon), tech writer Vauhini Vara<\/a> explores how our sense of self has been co-opted, quantified, and exploited by big tech as a way of selling us more stuff or selling us to third parties. We talk about what we talk about when we talk about our Google searches (& Amazon purchases, Twitter subject preferences, etc.), the interface of exploitation and self-expression, what selfhood means to tech companies vs. what it means to us, and what she learned when she fed chapters of her book into ChatGPT. We get into agency vs. coercion, how the promise of tech so often gets inverted, how ChatGPT tried & failed to express her grief from her sister’s death from cancer<\/a>, why she brought memoir into SEARCHES<\/em> alongside its other experimental modes, how her husband serves as a low-tech foil in the book, and whether or not we have a say in how the online era plays out. We also discuss why she doesn’t post about her personal life, how the book’s multiplicity of voices offsets the corporate voice of ChatGPT, what she got out of Bill Gates’ biography<\/a>, the importance of non-VC-funded technology to help us escape exploitative models of information, whether an essayist ever really<\/em> changes over the course of an essay, and more. Give it a listen!<\/a> And go read SEARCHES<\/a>!<\/p>\n

“I was thinking of the way in which big technology companies’ products are both a site of self-expression and communication and a site of exploitation.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n