Episode #348: Vauhini Vara Extras
Where Self Meets Technology
Hello iPhoneistas, Facebookers, Instagrammers, AI-ers, and life searchers!
Write-minded: Weekly Inspiration for Writers kicked off in September 2018 and has aired every single week since. Now, with the launch of Memoir Nation, we’re rebranding.
We have always been a podcast for writers craving a unique blend of inspiration and real talk about the ups and downs of the writing life, and that won’t change. Though we’ll focus on memoir, we’ll continue to bring in industry experts and cross-genre interests.
Write-minded features a segment called Substackin’ at the end of each episode where we draw from our own weekly Substacks (Writerly Things and Intimations), and sometimes the Substacks of people we admire, too. Brooke and Grant share a deeply held belief that everyone is a writer, and everyone’s story matters.
Memoirs that inspect the author’s experience alongside technology:
Uncanny Valley: A Memoir by Anna Wiener
The Empathy Diaries: A Memoir by Sherry Turkle
Gamelife: A Memoir by Michael W. Clune
Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology by Ellen Ullman
The Boy Kings: A Journey into the Heart of the Social Network by Katherine Losse
Hybrid Humans: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Man and Machine by Harry Parker
Breathing Machine: A Memoir of Computers by Leigh Alexander
Partial transcript from the show
Grant: I’m Grant Faulkner, a person who is both fortunately and unfortunately shaped by the technology I’ve chosen to use or the technology that’s chosen to use me. I’m with my Memoir Nation co-founder and co-host, Brooke Warner, and, Brooke, I’m very interested in talking with our featured guest Vauhini Vara today because she’s written a memoir called Searches, but it’s a memoir that’s very different than other memoirs. I’m calling it a techno-memoir because Searches refers to several different kinds of searches, the search for a dead sister, the search for self and all of the manifestations that takes, and then searches as in Internet searches, which also form themselves around all sorts of manifestations. I think it’s a really important memoir because one function of memoir is to reveal the textures of a life, to delve into what makes a life and to explore the labyrinth of its conflicts and desires. When I think of the heritage of memoir and what it’s known for I think of books on mental health, addiction, dysfunctional families, and cancer—problems that are very much a part of our bodies and our minds. But this memoir focuses more on how we’re technological beings as well, and the companies behind that technology. And strangely enough, I hadn’t thought about myself as being so much a part of this weird Meta algorithmic cyberspace until reading this because Vauhini essentially grew up with the Internet, and I guess we all grew up with the Internet, no matter our ages, at this point. I’m 60, and the Internet has essentially been a part of my life for 50 percent of it now—to the extent that I’m having a harder and harder time remembering what my life was like pre-Internet. I ask myself, How did we get places? Did maps really work? So on that note, I thought we could explore our technological selves as if we were writing a memoir like Searches. What is your first Internet memory, Brooke, or first technological memory where technology literally shaped you?
Brooke: Wow, what a great question—and even writing prompt. I remember clearly when the internet came into my awareness in part because I was living abroad in Spain so my friends were writing letters to me saying that there was this thing called email. So that was an interesting experience because I couldn’t wrap my mind around it—one of my friends was saying that I could get an email address and then we could communicate. The whole concept was so foreign that he might as well have been asking me to teleport home. Looking back, Grant, I’m so grateful that I did that year abroad that year—becuase it was pre-internet, and I would have had a very different experience abroad if I’d had email. In fact, I did have another experience abroad a few years later after college in 1999—my first year abroad was in 1993—and there was email, and I felt far less disconnected to home, but I wouldn’t say that was better for me. The internet connects us, but there’s something so wonderful about being disconnected, and I’m sad for the generations that followed us that the only way they’ll get that is to really force it upon themselves, rather than the experience of being out in the world being a kind of imposed separation, if that makes sense. I just don’t think a lot of kids (or even their parents) have the willpower to not communicate when a kid is trying to launch and go discover themselves in the world in ways that were just natural for us. What about you, Grant—first internet experience, memory?
Grant: It’s so weird, but I can barely remember. I often joke that I was literally one of the last people to go to college with a typewriter in hand, not to mention several bottles of White-out. I’m not sure my kids know what White-out is. But when I got to college, there was a sort of campus-based email system, and people were beginning to type their papers on the school computers. It was kind of like a text system. I think we were anonymous, but I can’t quite remember. I remember odd flirtations, jokes with friends, but I don’t quite remember how it worked. I once talked to an English teacher who told her students that they needed to become good writers in order to become good flirts online, and I always thought that was funny—and accurate—so maybe that’s my first memory: flirting through text. We had to print our papers on that dot-matrix paper that was connected in a big stack with perforated pages. I actually typed my papers on a typewriter through college, though, and I typed my stories for submission to lit journals for at least a couple of years afterward. So I didn’t feel technology shaping me for a while. I was an early luddite. But look at me now. I check my phone about every 10 seconds. If I don’t have my phone in my pocket when I leave the house, I feel like I left my arm behind. Literally. My phone feels like a physical appendage. And my head and my thoughts definitely live in cyberspace to a large degree. Brooke, I remember one of our first technology discussions was during a car trip we took to some speaking engagement we were each booked at, and we were joking that if we were more attuned to social media, we’d be filming ourselves in the car, and coming up with a plan to post photos of ourselves driving and speaking and everything. The irony is that I think we both got much more involved in social media after that, and now we’re each regular posters on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. So going back to social media now that we have a deep history, what’s your first social media memory?
Brooke: Many of my social media memories in general are around Seal Press because that’s where I was working when all of that was starting—most of my authors were early adopters. In my awareness, first it was Facebook, later was Twitter. It made more sense to me that my authors were on it and for a long time I just didn’t think I belonged there because I was an editor and not growing my own platform. I was just working. It wasn’t in the early days something that I saw for myself, but then my friends started getting on there and asking why I wasn’t there—like everything, I am a late adopter. So that reluctance very much hasn’t changed and now I’m on every social media platform minus TikTok and Bluesky. But as I’ve said many times, the one platform I really love is Substack so at least I can be a champion of one platform that’s kind of blog-y.
Grant: I guess I still have some of that reluctant attitude myself, but I’m not even sure any more because it has become such a part of my life. It’s interesting to go back in time and chart our Internet experiences because Vauhini does various searches of herself online and—even though she’s tying this to a larger point about capitalism and technology companies who own this information—it’s almost like she’s paging through a scrapbook, except instead of a scrapbook with photos, newspaper clippings, etc., she’s going through things like all of her searches on Google. It’s the same for me going into my timeline on Facebook, which shows that I joined in late 2008, which is when I joined Twitter as well, although I’ve since deleted that account. I didn’t remember any of my initial posts until I went back to read everything. I was posting pieces I wrote on my blog, and I read a bunch of my comments. One of note is that on December 29, 2008, my birthday, I wrote that I was “making endless trips to load the car and questioning whether a trip to the snow is actually worth it.” So I must have been taking my kids up to Tahoe or something. Some kindergarten parents, who I’m no longer in contact with, commented that the snow is worth it. My current ornery self wondered what would happen if I replied to their comments now, 17 years later, and how they would respond. It’s like the ghost in the machine. The Internet doesn’t age in this way. I can go back in time and have a conversation. So, next question: Has your engagement with the internet shaped you in any way? Has it changed the way you view or experience life, others, yourself? I know that’s a broad question, but if you can think of one small or large way that your consciousness, your feeling or experience of life is different, that would be interesting, especially because we’re talking about memoir and technology.
Brooke: One hundred percent, that is a big question, and funny enough, Grant, I checked and I also joined Facebook in 2008, so we were both late to the party. The Internet has shaped me for sure because it’s so interconnected with what I do for a living. I mean, there’s the Internet and then there’s social media. Where the Internet is concerned, I really can’t imagine modern life without it. Maybe I would be in book publishing still, but I wouldn’t have any of this other stuff—the classes I teach, our podcast, Memoir Nation, our new community. This is all possible because of the Internet. Social media, on the other hand—I think is a net negative for me. I realize it’s a necessary evil for authors, we all use it to build our platforms, and maybe if someone took it away from me I might realize I actually appreciate it, but the feelings it gives me are more negative than positive, and I have to imagine I’m not alone. I think our kids feel this too. I had a very interesting interaction with one of my son’s friends when TikTok was down for a day or two before coming back online and he said “I wish it didn’t come back.” So still this answers your question in the affirmative—I’m shaped by all of it; I think about it a lot; we interact daily with existential questions and challenges ranging from interactions on social media to AI. Given our work, too, we’re all up in it, and I don’t see that changing unless I drop out and move to Iceland, which you know, felt kind of tempting while I was there on my recent trip in March.
Grant: I think the connectivity to so many people is life altering, even though we take it for granted now. I mean, pre-Internet, a lot of people sent Christmas cards and went to their high school reunions, and now fewer and fewer people do each of those things—because there’s less need to. By pre-Internet standards, it would be unlikely I’d know where so many people from my past live, what they eat for dinner, how they voted, what illnesses they had, and where they went on vacation. Or maybe I’d entirely forget them. But I know so much about hundreds of people and I don’t have to have a brief conversation once every 10 years or once every lifetime at a high school reunion to find that out. That said, I often say, “Thank God I grew up before the Internet.” I’m so glad I got to experience the world in that way, and I’m sad that my kids won’t. I think that’s a subtext in the book, perhaps, that one of the Searches is just how to live in this new world, even when growing up with it. For example, Vauhini goes through her own ethical dilemma of shopping at Amazon, and it is a personal soul search and behavioral search for her. She has a debate with a friend of hers who won’t shop at Amazon at all for political and ethical reasons, but also just to exert control over her life, not give it up to Amazon and its algorithms and conveniences. It’s interesting to watch as Vauhini reckons with Amazon on similar levels, and then also how Amazon has embedded itself into our lives. For example, her child’s teacher has an Amazon Wish List, so she has to buy things from that Wish List for the class so that other parents can see what has been purchased. The ways questionable companies have embedded themselves in our lives is disturbing to me, Brooke. I recently got rid of my Twitter account and had to say goodbye to all of my 10,000 followers there because of Elon Musk’s politics and the environment he created there, yet I’m on Facebook and Instagram, and I don’t agree with many of the things Mark Zuckerberg has done. For example, he created social media to be addictive. That’s part of the business model—it’s known. Facebook is no different than a cigarette company, and it’s harming us and our kids as much as tobacco does, yet there I am everyday, enjoying my smokes, or my likes, you might say, and not only enjoying them, but Facebook and Instagram are instrumental and necessary tools for my career. I’m guessing you feel similarly.
Brooke: Yes, well—the aforementioned necessary evil. I think the difference is that you’re enjoying your smokes and I feel much more conflicted about it than that. I haven’t always felt this way, but I think because of politics, becuase of the echo chamber, becuase of the outrage—which I’ve participated in by the way, so I’m so very fully complicit in all this—it’s just become a harder place for me to be. And my authors are there, which I both love and find challenging because I can’t stay on top of it and so oftentimes capitulation is my best strategy. Not tending to social media very intentionally is kind of like crawling up under the covers and hiding—and I think that’s my vibe about 80 percent of the time these days. Grant, I’m curious, if you were to write a memoir like Vauhini’s, how would the Internet be a part of it?
Grant: You know, I’d never thought of the Internet as a personal scrapbook. When Vauhini goes through her search history to see what Google knows about her and how it might monetize her searches, I checked into mine. I disallowed Google from collecting my searches, but I don’t remember doing this. I found out, though, that YouTube has a record of every video I’ve watched, and I took a lot of pleasure both in seeing the somewhat kooky, somewhat predictable videos I’ve watched over the years. It was a type of playlist of my life, both in terms of the music and the videos of writers and other people speaking. I once read one of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s biographers say that he was an interesting subject for a biography because he kept meticulous track of his expenses, so the biographer could essentially tell his life story through his receipts. We actually create a much more comprehensive life story through our searches, and that’s one thing that makes Vauhini’s memoir so interesting: we’re searching creatures, and now all of our searches are essentially being recorded, for better and worse.
Brooke: Isn’t that the truth, and dear listeners, you might curiously go search online to remind yourself what year you joined Facebook, especially to see if you were earlier adopters than me and Grant, while we enjoy this short musical interlude on our way to our interview with Vauhini Vara.
This week’s Substackin’:
This week’s Substackin’ explores the idea of art as an act of defiance. If you’re a writer—or any kind of artist—you are engaging in an act of defiance by the very fact of putting your writing (or art) front and center in your life. All artists know that you have to fight for it—for time, for validation.
I love this quote Virginia Woolf wrote in A Room of One’s Own: “Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.”
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ABOUT VAUHINI VARA
Vauhini Vara began her journalism career as a technology reporter at the Wall Street Journal and later launched, edited and wrote for the business section of the New Yorker’s website. Her latest book is Searches is a work of journalism and memoir about how big technology companies are changing our understanding of our selves and our communities that we’re going to talk about today. Her debut novel, The Immortal King Rao, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and her story collection, This is Salvaged (Norton, 2023), was longlisted for The Story Prize and the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award.