However how will we retain management over our our bodies when companies and the medical institution have entry to our most private info? What occurs when people cease counting on their village, and even their household, for recommendation on having a child and as an alternative go surfing, the place there’s a relentless onslaught of knowledge? How will we make sense of the contradictions of the web—the stress between what’s inherently synthetic and the “pure” strategies its denizens are so keen to advertise? In her new e-book, Second Life: Having a Little one within the Digital Age (Doubleday, 2025), Hess explores these questions whereas delving into her firsthand experiences with apps, merchandise, algorithms, on-line boards, advertisers, and extra—every promising a neater, more healthy, higher path to parenthood. After welcoming her son, who’s now wholesome, in 2020 and one other in 2022, Hess is the proper particular person to ask: Is that basically what they’re delivering?
In your e-book, you write, “I imagined my [pregnancy] check’s pink dye spreading throughout Instagram, Fb, Amazon. Throughout me, a techno-company infrastructure was locking into place. I might sense the promoting algorithms recalibrating and the branded newsletters assembling of their queues. I knew that I used to be supposed to consider focused promoting as evil, however I had by no means skilled it that approach.” Are you able to unpack this a bit?
Earlier than my being pregnant, I by no means felt like promoting know-how was significantly good or particular. So when my Instagram advertisements instantly clocked my being pregnant, it got here as a little bit of a shock, and I noticed that I used to be unaware of precisely how advert tech labored and the way huge its attain was. It felt significantly eerie on this case as a result of to start with my being pregnant was a secret that I stored from everybody besides my partner, so “the web” was the one factor that was speaking to me about it. Promoting grew to become so customized that it began to really feel intimate, despite the fact that it was the alternative of that—it represented the company obliteration of my privateness. The being pregnant advertisements reached me earlier than a physician would even conform to see me.
Although your e-book was written earlier than generative AI grew to become so ubiquitous, I think about you’ve considered the way it adjustments issues. You write, “As quickly as I received pregnant, I typed ‘what to do while you get pregnant’ in my telephone, and now advertisers had been supplying their very own solutions.” What do the rise of AI and the dramatic adjustments in search imply for somebody who will get pregnant right now and goes on-line for solutions?
I simply googled “what to do while you get pregnant” to see what Google’s generative AI widget tells me now, and it’s largely spitting out commonsensical suggestions: Make an appointment to see a physician. Quit smoking cigarettes. That’s adopted by sponsored content material from Babylist, a web-based child registry firm that’s deeply enmeshed within the ad-tech system, and Perelel, a startup that sells costly prenatal dietary supplements.
So whether or not or not the search engine is utilizing AI, the knowledge it’s offering to the newly pregnant just isn’t significantly useful or significant.
AMIE CHUNG/TRUNK ARCHIVE
The web “made me really feel like I had some sort of relationship with my telephone, when all it was actually doing was staging a scene of knowledge that it might monetize.”
For me, the oddly tantalizing factor was that I had requested the web a query and it gave me one thing in response, as if we had a reciprocal relationship. So even earlier than AI was embedded in these programs, they had been fulfilling the identical position for me—as a sort of artificial dialog associate. It made me really feel like I had some sort of relationship with my telephone, when all it was actually doing was staging a scene of knowledge that it might monetize.
