However how can we retain management over our our bodies when companies and the medical institution have entry to our most private data? What occurs when people cease counting on their village, and even their household, for recommendation on having a child and as a substitute go surfing, the place there’s a continuing onslaught of data? How can 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 guide, 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 individual to ask: Is that basically what they’re delivering?
In your guide, 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 may 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 notably good or particular. So when my Instagram adverts instantly clocked my being pregnant, it got here as a little bit of a shock, and I spotted that I used to be unaware of precisely how advert tech labored and the way huge its attain was. It felt notably 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 turned so personalised that it began to really feel intimate, despite the fact that it was the other of that—it represented the company obliteration of my privateness. The being pregnant adverts reached me earlier than a health care provider would even conform to see me.
Although your guide was written earlier than generative AI turned so ubiquitous, I think about you’ve thought of the way it modifications issues. You write, “As quickly as I acquired pregnant, I typed ‘what to do once you get pregnant’ in my cellphone, and now advertisers had been supplying their very own solutions.” What do the rise of AI and the dramatic modifications in search imply for somebody who will get pregnant in the present day and goes on-line for solutions?
I simply googled “what to do once 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 health care provider. 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 isn’t notably useful or significant.
AMIE CHUNG/TRUNK ARCHIVE
The web “made me really feel like I had some form of relationship with my cellphone, when all it was actually doing was staging a scene of data that it may 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 techniques, they had been fulfilling the identical position for me—as a form of artificial dialog accomplice. It made me really feel like I had some form of relationship with my cellphone, when all it was actually doing was staging a scene of data that it may monetize.