But how do we keep control over our bodies when corporations and medical establishment have access to our more personal information? What happens when humans stop trusting their people, or even in their family, for advice on having a child and instead connect, where there is a constant avalanche of information? How do we make sense of internet contradictions: the tension between what is inherently artificial and the “natural” methods that its inhabitants are so anxious to promote? In his new book, Second life: Have a child in the digital age (Doubleday, 2025), HESS explores these questions while deepening your first -hand experiences with applications, products, algorithms, online forums, advertisers and more, each promising an easier, healthier and better way for fatherhood. After welcoming his son, who is now healthy, in 2020 and another in 2022, HESS is the perfect person to ask: Is that really what they are delivering?
In your book, you write: “I imagined my [pregnancy] The pink test is extended on Instagram, Facebook, Amazon. Around me, a corporate technological infrastructure was blocked in its place. I could feel the advertising algorithms and the brand newsletters gathered in their queues. He knew that he was supposed to think about advertising directed as evil, but I had never experienced it in that way. “Can you unpack this a bit?
Before my pregnancy, I never felt that advertising technology was particularly intelligent or specific. So, when my Instagram ads immediately recorded my pregnancy, it was a surprise, and I realized that I was not aware of how exactly the advertising technology worked and how vast was its reach. He felt particularly spooky in this case because at the beginning my pregnancy was a secret that I had left of all, except my spouse, so “internet” was the only thing that was talking about it. Advertising became so personalized that he began to feel intimate, although it was the opposite of that, it represented the corporate obliteration of my privacy. Pregnancy ads came to me before a doctor even agreed to see me.
Although his book was written before the generative AI became so omnipresent, I imagine that he has thought about how things change. You write: “As soon as I became pregnant, I wrote” what to do when it is pregnant “on my phone, and now the advertisers were providing their own answers.” What mean the emergence of AI and dramatic changes in the search for someone who becomes pregnant today and connects online to obtain answers?
I just searched in Google “what to do when you are pregnant” to see what the generative widget of Google’s the AI tells me, and is spitting to a large extent common recommendations: make an appointment to see a doctor. Stop smoking cigarettes. This is still sponsored by Babylist, a online babies registration company that is deeply tied in the AD-TECH system, and Perelel, a startup that sells expensive prenatal supplements.
So, if the search engine is using AI or not, the information it provides to the newly pregnant itself is not particularly useful or significant.
Amie Chung/Trunk Arch
Internet “made me feel that I had some kind of relationship with my phone, when everything I was really doing was organizing an information scene that could monetize.”
For me, the strangely tempting was that I had asked the Internet a question and gave me something in response, as if we had a reciprocal relationship. So, even before AI was integrated into these systems, they were fulfilling the same role for me, as a kind of synthetic conversation partner. It made me feel that I had some kind of relationship with my phone, when everything I was really doing was organizing an information scene that could monetize.
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