#1 – What’s This All About / Searches by Vauhini Vara
An introduction to the newsletter and a report back on the Future Present Book Club's first selection.
Hi everyone!
Last month was the first meeting of the Future Present Book Club, a new series I’ll be leading in partnership with the great Toronto bookstore Flying Books (which, I’m obliged to mention, is also the publisher of my novel). Every two months, I’ll choose a book – mostly non-fiction but also the occasional novel – that explores how things that once seemed unimaginable, or part of a distant future, are uncannily creeping into the present. The club is open to anyone (meetings are in person at Flying Books’ bookstore/cafe/wine bar), and tickets are sold for single sessions (i.e., there’s no commitment to join for more than one).
The first book we discussed was Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age by Vauhini Vara (see more below). Our next meeting will be about No Straight Road Takes You There by Rebecca Solnit (if you’re in Toronto on October 22, join us! Tickets include a glass of wine and a $20 book credit).
The books reflect two aspects of what is driving the book club for me. Not only the way the future is crashing into the present (e.g., rapid advancements of AI, increasingly prevalent impacts of climate change), but what it might take, in this moment, to conceive of new futures.
So why this newsletter?
First, it’s a way for anyone interested in the series to keep up to date on what we’re reading. I’ll include information about coming books and sessions as part of the posts.
Second, it’s a way to keep a running thread of the series. Since there is no expectation that people will join for every session of the club, each discussion will stand alone. By posting after each meeting, I’ll be able to keep track of running themes and connections between the books.
Importantly, the content for this newsletter will only be taken from what I used to prepare for the club and won’t include anything from the actual discussions – no one needs that pressure for a night out talking about books over a glass of wine! What I’ll post after each meeting is the icebreaker question that I posed at the start of the meeting (which will be related to the themes of the book) and then the 5-10 takeaways – themes or ideas from the book that stood out to me and that I used to guide discussion.
Got ideas for things we should read in the future? Please do send it along by replying to this email. After No Straight Road we’ll be reading Second Nature by Nathaniel Rich. I’ve got other books in mind for further down the road, but would love ideas!
Okay, now on to our first book.
Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age by Vauhini Vara
Icebreaker: What is your first memory of the internet or your first meaningful interaction with it?
For me it was logging on to ICQ and MSN Messenger. What’s interesting to me about these experiences is how, despite taking place online (and despite that I was a pre-teen at the time), they were oddly like going to a neighbourhood pub. Because no one had phones or their own computers, you couldn’t be online all the time, and so when you logged in, you were partly checking to see who else had decided to show up at that same time, and maybe logging in and out several times over the course of an hour in hopes of catching a certain person (this last part would, admittedly, be much more awkward at a bar).
Five Takeaways
Complicity. Vara’s essays all explore the way technologies (smartphones, AI, etc.) and technology companies (Google, Amazon, Facebook, and others) have reshaped core aspects of human life. Vara’s writing is at its best when it explores her inner conflict at the benefits and costs of these changes. The essay made up of Vara’s Amazon product reviews, part of an experiment she undertook to reduce her use of the website by forcing herself to review anything she purchased, is particularly adept at covering this ground. “Perhaps what makes life easier isn’t always better,” she writes at one point in the book, while acknowledging readily her complicity in wilfully choosing the easy path.
Insatiability. A common thread of the technologies Vara discusses is their insatiability. They will consume ever more of us – our searches, our products, our desires – and they will feed us ever more content and products in return. The question that comes out is, where is the end point? Where is the satisfaction?
Exploitation. Vara has a really interesting discussion at one point of how speculation – the ability to “imagine a future unlike the present” – and innovation – the work to realize that future – are uniquely human traits. Is there a way that the pace of technological change is dulling these traits even as it results from them? How do we take control of the future when it seems to be arriving so fast and happening without our control?
Parts and the Whole. Maybe the most fascinating aspect of Searches was how it asked, in various ways, whether insatiable modern technology can ever fully consume us. Will something always be missing? Are we more than just the information and data points that can be fed into the machine?
Remembrance. The death of Vara’s sister runs through the whole book. The technologies Vara discusses help her memorialize and mourn her sister. There is an aspect of the internet, of the smartphones in our pockets, of so much new technology, that helps us hold and keep things. But the eerie and potentially nefarious is always there as well – for instance, the Synthetic Memories project, which claims to use AI to help people recapture memories that were never caught on camera.
Thank you for reading! I will be back in late October with the next issue. And don’t forget to join us if you are in Toronto to read Rebecca Solnit’s latest!