I cut my teeth as a participant observer in academia. As a child, I regularly accompanied my medievalist father to the university where he taught. It was not a fancy school, not the ones featured in academia noir movies or the public imagination, but a second-tier state institution in a no-name city in the kind of state that Americans, no matter what region they’re from, tend to forget. He’d visited once before while in grad school, to see a colleague who was in the federal penitentiary for refusing to go to Vietnam, and assumed he’d never return.

On those campus trips of ours, I’d hold his hand as we walked from his mailbox in the campus union to his dim closet of a first floor office, then to the library for some interlibrary loan books, and finally for me to throw a few pennies into the sprawling geometric fountain. If he needed to do some work, he would gift me a yellow legal pen and black felt tip pen from the History Department’s supply closet, and I would scrawl stories in my imaginary cursive, page after page of childlike scribbles that resembled an EKG chart rather than actual letters.

My dad was essentially marooned at the school. He had been a star grad student winning prizes and whatnot, armed with a full Ivy pedigree and a MacArthur “Genius Grant.” But, for various reasons, he was blacklisted. Some of them were his fault. Some were the result of compounded personal tragedies at profoundly inconvenient, life-altering times. And some were, of course, firmly rooted in the culture of academia itself. I’d wager his occasional stutter didn’t help, which is, of course, problematic in a different way. And I’m confident he had a knack for pissing off the wrong people. But the aftermath of this unforeseen career halt would have profound implications for my family, which I’ll get into another time.

I thought of this history, along with the other examples of academia’s collateral damage, in the hours after reading about British sociologist Jason Arday’s death. It made me deeply sad in a way I didn’t understand at first. I know nothing of Arday’s work and only learned of him from the recent flurry of news scandals, which I will not get into as they’re easy to find. But I felt the familiar shudder.

I hold two truths deeply about academia, this industry that nurtured me for nearly four decades, from my earliest memories until I left it willingly after my parents died. First, as an anthropologist who pursued a PhD despite my personal knowledge of academia, I had a fairly easy experience. I never felt wronged, unlike many of my colleagues. I had an easy go of it, despite keeping a foot planted firmly outside, and I was keenly aware of my stance throughout.

Which brings me to my second point: more than any industry I’ve worked in, academia will chew you up and spit you out in a way that is deeply, intensely, almost perversely personal. And this can destroy or, at best, irrevocably alter, lives.

It’s odd, thinking back to the many examples, which range from tepid to tragic. A former undergrad professor was kicked out for sexually inappropriate behavior toward students. And one of the most prominent anthropologists of a generation was accused by multiple students of sexual misconduct and professional retaliation, and even allegedly gained access to one of the accuser’s mental health records. All of this was tolerated for years by a discipline obsessed with power and identity.

I know of multiple women who were sexually assaulted during their dissertation fieldwork, and at least one who was shunned by some colleagues for having what looked like a breakdown in the aftermath. A few years ago, a student from my graduate program and his fiancé were murdered while driving through Mexico en route to his fieldwork site. Magically, the story barely made a ripple in the news cycle.

If I squint, I can remember an undergrad sociology classmate who was later kicked out of a tenure track professorship for trading sex for grades. (This didn’t actually surprise me, which also speaks volumes to how people get elevated in this industry.) Sex aside, academic prestige will make people do strange things: a professor in my former department was outed for faking their ethnicity to support scholarship. They literally wrote a book on the subject, in true Basic Instinct fashion. They are still teaching and, despite the current political climate, somehow the story stayed out of the news. (A good PR team is worth their weight in gold, eh?)

But for me the most visceral example will be my father’s colleague and dearest friend from the history department, a man I often saw on those visits to the campus where they both taught. His family always came to our house for Christmas. We celebrated Hanukkah with them. At my wedding, he pulled me aside and confided how happy it made him that I liked modern art and not the stuffy antiques that filled my childhood home. He called me to come home during my mom’s first health crisis, a decade before the bigger one, when my dad couldn’t bring himself to do it. I am still grateful.

The summer before my mom died, which was the summer before my dad died, this family friend and fellow academic was murdered by a colleague. I believe it was August, the kind of sultry evening in the Ozarks where the emerald hostas look glazed by Vaseline, cicadas buzz, and glowing fireflies dot the air. The colleague was a younger guy, around my age if I remember. My father spoke highly of him. Ivy educated in classics, I believe, but had the familiar story of struggling to land a good tenure track job. He was a lecturer. In my dad’s final book, he thanks both of these men back to back, a page I look back to from time to time because it simply feels cursed.

Around seven or so on that August evening, he stormed into our friends’ home and stabbed the man to death in front of his wife. They had been watching tv. Afterward, the younger academic stumbled outside. Newspaper pics show him sitting on the curb next to his Mercedes station wagon, head in his hand, floppy parted hair falling into his face. He’s wearing loafers, rolled up khaki pants, and a button down. He looks like he’s heading to a clam bake or wine tasting. At least, that’s how I remember it. I couldn’t find the image when I looked.

I’ll never know why it happened. There was speculation that he felt the victim had kept him from getting a better position in the university, but in truth the older man had just retired and had no power. My guess is that the attacker was just unstable. Unwell. Whatever we want to call it. There were stories from other universities where he’d worked. And his family was incredibly prominent, his father a renowned humanities scholar who regularly published think pieces in the NYT. It’s a safe bet that strings were pulled along the way, as they tend to be.

The attacker’s family hired a local criminal defense lawyer, the one notorious for defending the worst of the worst — siblings who murdered siblings while on meth, a teacher whose family was brutally murdered while he was away one weekend, the kinds of Ozarks’ stories I grew up with that still make me look over my shoulder. So, as everyone knew, it ended with temporary insanity.

I smiled when I read a few years later that the man’s father had died. I’ll admit it. Because dirty, immoral systems do that to us — they pull us in, like an ocean downcurrent dragging deeper and deeper, and then we can’t help but be relieved that others are stuck along with us, sharing in our bad luck.

I thought of all of this when I read of Arday’s death. Not because I knew him or his work. Not because I understood that the deck was always stacked against him, even when it wasn’t. And not because I even care about allegations of academic integrity or dishonesty or lying. Because, as an anthropologist, I’m far more interested in structures than individuals, and academic structures are some of the ugliest I’ve seen. They are perhaps uniquely individualistic in their scope. You are a star until you are garbage. You are a genius until you are forgotten. And, when your name is everything, this leaves very little unless you can extract yourself fully. People will turn on you in an instant. You can and will be forgotten. Smeared. Erased. It happens all the time.

This is not a diatribe against academia. I am no longer an academic. I have no personal vendetta. I did not go on the tenure track because I knew it was not for me, precisely because of these things. It was an extremely rational, unemotional decision. But as a lifelong participant observer in the field, I have to say: if anthropology is about suspending judgment, this is no longer feasible.

People should not die because of their work. They should not be vilified or ridiculed. They should never be bullied, much less subjected to a media onslaught. Full stop. None of this actually matters. It. Does. Not. Matter. The stakes are simply not this high.

Maybe it feels especially ugly in this moment, where billionaires are reshaping politics, senseless wars rage on, job markets are reconfigured daily, and we all just need a little light. Maybe it feels that much more desperate and sad.

But what a shame to waste a life, any life, on a system that spins this same tale, time and again.

“Once upon a time there was no alphabet. Only numbers.”

That’s the first line of the children’s book The Numberlys. Published in 2014, the story feels oddly prescient these days. My family’s copy is held together by tape, but I pulled it back out recently.

The story begins with elfin characters, round and cherubic, navigating a grayscale world where there are only numbers, no letters or words. The numbers are fine and neat, ascetic and orderly. They resist temptation and standardize shared experiences, and the nuance of daily life unfolds as a series of increasingly long numeric codes. There are, the authors caution, no jellybeans or pizza. You can add numbers endlessly, but they yield only increased data and size — not experience, sensation, or delight. It is a cautionary tale of algorithmic shades of gray.

In the book, a small cohort of renegades decides that they want something more, something different. They begin experimenting with shapes and the strange, linear blobs gradually give way to letters. Here, the reader encounters the first reds and blues. There is joy and ice cream, glee and smiles, and colors explode, giving way to something qualitatively different, richer, more human.

The Numberlys came out before the current AI frenzy, with gorgeous Claude ads “What if we started to be more human again?” and instructing people to “Keep thinking.” The book also predated the proliferation of self-tracking tools like the endless apps and wearables that promise to measure nearly every aspect of our mental, physical, and emotional experience.

A decade ago, we did not yet quantify minute details of our daily lives. Fitbit would go public the following year, more than doubling its revenue and registered users. We did not yet speak of “getting our steps” or accepted that 10,000 steps a day for baseline health was a research-backed claim rather than a legacy from a 1960s Japanese marketing campaign. Wellness as we now know it — a catchall for everything from healthy eating to cannabis, meditation, vibrators, and supplements — did not exist, and biohacking was just beginning to seep into the mainstream via Silicon Valley’s self-maximizing subculture.

I thought about The Numberly’s the other day, as I stumbled my jet lagged self into the kitchen and greeted my husband by announcing I was tired of self-surveillance and tracking apps. My Apple watch band was about to snap in half, which I took as a sign.

And yet, the reigning culture of self-optimization celebrates the grayscale. We track our walking and calories, our menstrual cycles and our emotions. Find an aspect of life that supports health, joy, or pleasure, and there’s an app for it. A recent NYT piece mused that self-tracking has finally crossed a line, thanks to a new device that sits nestled in one’s toilet bowl designed to assess bowel outputs.

As a culturally and historically situated way of knowing, this obsession with quantifying our lives deserves a closer look. In the U.S. in particular, we pay more for health care than other countries yet have worse outcomes. Our life expectancy is three years below peer nations and our suicide rates trend higher. The loneliness epidemic continues unabated, with 54% of Americans feeling disconnected. We consume more drugs and have more people with substance abuse disorders than any other country. It’s not even close.

Given reality on the ground, the cult of self-tracking gives pause. It has become a dominant feature of this era, fueled by tech we carry in our pocket, venture funding for SaaS, and the modern cult of self-maximization.

But if living in grayscale isn’t working by the numbers, why do we do it?

Strong language

In his writings on religion and postcolonialism, anthropologist Talal Asad examined the deep inequalities embedded in language and discourse. Classed, racialized, and gendered ways of communicating, for instance, are allocated power in ways that seem “natural” or self-evident yet maintain the status quo. Same for the historical strength of colonial discourses versus those of the colonized, the supposed objectivity of Western post-Englightenment thought, or the systematized strength of bureaucracies. Anyone who’s operated within power differentials and adjusted themselves accordingly knows this.

But here’s the catch: the languages of power are not innately more powerful. They are granted this power by history and the social order.

Asad expanded these initial ideas to include one of the strongest languages of contemporary life: numbers and statistics, which are imbued with the myth of quantitative rigor. Anyone who’s clicked mindlessly through a survey or knows that numbers (claims like “98% user satisfaction!”) can be misleading, yet modern life accords stats with an assumed intrinsic power. Numbers scream of objectivity, not because they are inherently objective but because modern ways of knowing and theories of knowledge have taught us to believe in numbers as truth.

This contemporary cult of the quantifiable is a deeply cultural, historically rooted way of seeing the world. And it’s now at our fingertips constantly.

In the post-2010s SaaS boom, fueled by technoutopian visions and endless investor funding, self-tracking apps exploded. Whether these emerged from or paved the way for the current “wellness” catch-all, which encompasses everything from vibrators and creatine to weed, is debatable — but here we are.

At the announcement of the first Oura Ring in 2015, one of the founders got onstage at the San Francisco Convention and asked: “We all know the charge level of our mobile phones, but do we know the charge level of our bodies?”

The question of whether know our own charge levels feels slightly gross, sure, but it beautifully captures the nagging physiological functionalism of the modern age. Early functional anthropologists like Bronislaw Malinowski and Emile Durkheim conceptualized societies in terms of functions. The institutions and practices of a culture existed to support equilibrium, and the anthropologist’s task was to understand the specific roles of these parts. Other anthropologists, like A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, took this slightly farther, comparing culture to a living organism or cell.

This way of thinking proves seductive in an era of hacks, maximalism, and technoutopian promises. Our experiences, sensations, reactions, and bodily habits have become quantifiable outputs and inputs to measure our value, potential, and shortcomings. It’s a deeply anti-humanist perspective ripe for staggering profits.

And, while information about habits or tendencies seems great and can be, I wonder how this broader trend might contribute to overthinking and even anxiety about even the smallest aspects of our embodied or social worlds.

Living in grayscale

I was curious about the scale and scope of tracking apps, and the internet confirmed my suspicion that possibilities were even broader than I imagined. Name an aspect of your daily life and there’s a tool to track it, no doubt emerging from a hybrid or remote office or coworking space teeming with bright young whippersnappers passionate about the mission while really just supporting sales numbers and engineers who could just as easily be in any other company.

Because, again, this is where we are.

Want to track orgasms or sexual positions? The app Intimassy lets you add data points about all things sexual and then even crunches the numbers to provide pie charts and graphs — data viz, as we say in marketing. Users can even rate their partners. According to online reviews, sex tracker Fapstats is an excellent chastity tracker, evidently a thing in the BDSM and kink communities. (Kudos to the team that named it, by the way.)

You can track friendships, which now fall under the umbrella of social wellness, using tools like Fabriq. According to its website, the app is “designed to help you strengthen personal relationships and maintain social habits…allowing you to set reconnection goals, track connection history, and add notes about important life events.”

Or maybe, like every parent I know, you wonder how you can be better. Worry not, there’s an app for that. The Happy Child has over 20K reviews and 500K downloads, and includes snack-sized parenting lessons and tools to track parental feelings and triggers, as well as their children’s responses. Supposedly, 67% of users describe the tool as “life-changing” and 78% report better relationships with their partner and children.

Clearly, this is why kids and teens are doing so great these days.

Anthropologically, part of what intrigues me about self-tracking is how it straddles the individual and the aggregate. It is both extremely personal and even intimate, while unfolding at the scale of mass tech tool consumption. And, ultimately, I find myself wondering why so many users have so much faith — or even a hint of belief.

I found some answers in the /QuantifiedSelf community on Reddit, which has over 25K members with a sometimes shocking commitment to number crunching. People post screenshots from their dashboards, tracking everything from the pages read per minute to their weight, driving, blood glucose, and even the time spent tracking.

What surprised me was the number of people who said they tracked not to self-optimize, but as an act of preservation and memory. They use it to capture their days, weeks, and months, and make note of how they pass the time. One user lamented: “At some point this stopped feeling like self-knowledge and started feeling like I accidentally became my own annoying manager.”

This fascinates me, given the proliferation of tools literally at our fingertips and in our packets during most waking hours — tools designed to record, to photograph, to note, to send voice memos. How can it be that we have never had easier ways to preserve or record experience, and yet there’s a feeling of disconnection from our selves, lives, and worlds?

It made me wonder about the mystery of misremembering, and what happens if we deny this blurriness of the mundane. And, as an ethnographer, I was taught to pay attention to silences and gaps. Missing pieces are often loaded with more power than we realize.

And what if these omissions make us more human, not less?

Forgetting to lose ourselves

As I loaded this piece into Substack, my youngest child woke up and I took a break to read the NYT on my phone while sitting in their darkened room as they fell back to sleep. In the process, I saw a recent op-ed on the rise of medical self-tracking, whether it’s actually good for us, and how doctors feel about it, and made a mental note to read it later. Clearly, I’m not the only one thinking about this.

But it’s curious, isn’t it, this collective desire to quantify these deeply personal, intimately embodied moments and textures of our lives? It makes me think of the fallout of this level of hyperfocus and what might get lost. I suspect there’s poetry in the bits we leave out — or have until now.

It made me reflect on some of the seminal moments in my life and how fuzzy they are in parts. I cannot recall the day of the week my children were born, but the dates are etched in my brain, as are the dates of my marriage, parents’ deaths, the murder of a close family friend, or the day I learned my father had a volleyball sized tumor nestled deep in his abdomen. I still struggle to remember the year for each of these massive life events as it is less significant to me than the day or even hour. I recall details like the sound of the screen door slamming as I reached for my phone, the smell of the night air, the sweaty clothes fresh from a run as I dashed to preschool pickup. The qualitative textures of these pivotal instances.

I could not tell you what date I met my husband, but I remember the evening later that same week when he joked about riding a scooter he hadn’t yet purchased to visit my hometown 700 miles away and I knew something was about to happen. I was sitting in my friend’s backyard, eating tofu takeout because I was in my vegetarian phase, wearing a boxy burgundy leather jacket I picked up at a thrift store in college. Yet I forget our wedding anniversary each year.

There’s something to be said for the mystery of how memories live in our bodies and subconscious, whether we can grasp them or not. It makes me wonder how this massive, app-fueled experiment in tracking creates noise we don’t need.

It becomes too easy to lose focus on significance when everything can be broken down into charts and graphs, trends and patterns. To mistake overthinking for action, to forget that these so-called innovative tools are designed, first and foremost, to make money by planting their flag on something to improve or even maximize — whether or not it’s actually useful. It’s the core logic of marketing, which I know because I did it: 1) identify a market need, gap, desire, or fear; 2) craft stories and generate data to show why your product solves the problem. It is often a problem people didn’t realize they had — and it doesn’t even need to be real.

I can’t shake the nagging sense that corporate language of OKRs, efficiency, productivity, and impact has infiltrated our daily lives and bodies.

Ah, but the numbers, the numbers!

What might happen if we give them a rest? How might we start, bit by bit, to push back? And what might we gain by stepping from grays into color?

My first job in tech was at a certain well-known job board. The vibes were great, the CEO genuinely valued progressive politics, and it was the era of bringing your whole self to work. Employees used to say that the company would never have layoffs, believing that it was antithetical to the mission and values, and would also yield terrible optics. “Leadership cares about us and wouldn’t do that.” I had my doubts.

Fast-forward a few years and, like virtually every tech company out there, that one has faced multiple rounds of layoffs. The numbers speak for themselves: an estimated 150,000 tech workers have been laid off already this year, building on the momentum of over 245,000 tech job losses in 2025. Are the halcyon days of tech over or are we just seeing a shift toward business as usual, with workers as collateral damage? Either way, it’s a reality check after an era of workplace wellbeing, girlbosses, greenwashing, and cash to burn.

Responding to ongoing layoffs, one tech worker recently cautioned: “This is exactly why you should ‘never’ sacrifice too much for these companies. You are always disposable to them.”

I pulled this quote from a recent New York Times article, which in turn pulled it from Blind, an app for anonymous shop talk among tech workers. The piece explored how techies’ morale continues to plunge amidst ongoing industry turbulence, AI, and the most employer-friendly job market in a decade, examining how workers use Blind to share information, predict layoffs, compare severance packages, and commiserate.

I was intrigued by the portrayal of Blind as a Robin Hood-infused whisper network for tech employees as they navigate ongoing precarity. This framing pulled at the heartstrings, sure. It also obscured the reality that Blind is, to quote one NYT reader comment, “essentially 4chan with a corporate email gate.” But could both be true?

Anthropology claims to “make the familiar strange,” but I’ve always thought one of its biggest strengths lies in making the shocking or even abhorrent intelligible. In that spirit, I began to see Blind as a rich ethnographic playground — a cultural artifact offering an unfiltered window into the worries, belief systems, and dirty underbelly of tech, as well as the ambivalence of many people who are just trying to get by.

So I took a closer look.

Onboarding lessons

Blind was part of my unofficial onboarding during week one of my first tech job. In anthropological terms, onboarding is a ritual designed to transform outsiders into insiders. As a new hire, I attended my three-hour training session on day one, got my company tshirt, met my manager for lunch, and then received a deck mapping out the next few months of my work life. I was told how my skills and responsibilities would develop in 30, 60, and 90 days. I got a list of resources, including what SaaS tools to use for which granular tasks. I found out that my new employer offered pet insurance, along with the human kind. And, most importantly, I received a list of around a dozen colleagues to meet with individually in 1:1s (a term I also learned that day).

These meetings socialized me into the language and norms of the company more than any proper training session. Some colleagues were buttoned up, others asked me rapid fire questions about my background and goals. One, I distinctly recall, told me that the first thing I needed to do was get on an app called Blind. This would give me the real lay of the land.

The process was simple enough. I downloaded the app, signed up with my corporate email for verification purposes, and then received an anonymous username which I used to access a world of anonymous posts from fellow tech workers. In Blind, I could see open posts from random people or else click on my company to read posts exclusively (in theory) from current employees. These were the boom days of tech, so there was only so much to see. Gripes about new or outgoing leaders, perhaps, or the occasional HR scandal.

As a woman and anthropologist who’s been on Blind for over seven years, I was intrigued by the feel good portrayal in the NYT. The article didn’t even mention the trademark ultimatum for posts: TC or GTFO, short for “total compensation or get the f%$* out.” Or the fact that the comp listed by even the most anxious Blind users is often in the multiple six figures at a time when 67% of Americans are actively stressed about money.

Indeed, I’d long ago dismissed Blind as an entitled, male-dominated space. The internet troll vibes loom large, from sexist rants about which cities have the “hottest girls” or crowdsourcing feedback on whether someone’s wife is cheating. There are anti-H1B tirades, remarks that anyone over 40 is unemployable, and thirty-somethings comparing net worths well into the millions.

But if that was all it offered, why were so many people still lurking? Why was I?

Dissertation déjà-vu

An anthropologist’s role is to suspend judgment, even (or especially) when it feels impossible. Do I think Blind is a festering stew of capitalism, corporate anxiety, and the broligarchy? Sure, but it’s not that simple. It’s also a space where workers in a rapidly changing industry can gain insight into the darker side of their work life — things like disappearing team members targeted by stealth layoffs, vastly unequal pay packages, gut checking fears about company instability, or, of course, trading inside intel on layoffs.

To my surprise, digging deeper into Blind’s post made me think back to my dissertation research on digital community building.

Beginning in 2010, I conducted a multi-year study on how ideas about visible, but undiagnosed or extremely rare, disabilities were shifting due to a combination of rising awareness, genetics innovations, and the internet — particularly social media. The last point sounds somewhat dated today, but was a lifeline to many families I met.

For many, connecting with others navigating similar situations provided key emotional and logistical support they could not get otherwise. In some cases, parents even solved their child’s medical mystery, securing a diagnosis to a one in a million syndrome after connecting with others who had similar symptoms or features. More typically, they got recommendations for medical or genetics experts, learned about niche organizations dedicated to rare conditions, or simply met others grappling with diagnostic ambiguity.

My research in this space was in the good old days. It was before Elon bought Twitter and Meta helped sway elections, before deepfakes and AI slop, before the stinky swamp of online commenters, grifters, bots, and scams. It wasn’t quite a utopian time, but one could imagine the cup being half full. The families I studied needed information on an existential level, but they yearned for something else: belonging and community, which they found online, sometimes for the first time.

Thanks to these digital spaces, they were able to connect, communicate, and feel heard in ways that felt impossible otherwise.

Social creatures, social connections

People can weather tremendous challenges on their own, yet still crave a community that understands them. At the same time, we are hardwired to assess our environment continuously, take in data about what could jeopardize or improve our current state, and act accordingly. These are the roots of innovation and technology, and it’s also why we are herd animals — not out of laziness or a lack of imagination, but as a strategy for protection, survival, and adaptation in an unpredictable world.

Information sharing plays a tremendous role in this process and includes gossip, a powerful social glue. In today’s digitally disjointed world, people come together daily to trade information and misinformation about health, politics, relationships, childrearing, you name it. You don’t have to take my word for it: Reddit’s market cap is over $33 billion and the company is little more than a bulletin board for people seeking answers or trading opinions. This is also why, despite rolling my eyes at Blind, I still find myself peeking at posts alongside 10 million fellow users.

The ongoing job losses have created a new community of sorts, with approximately 400,000 people laid off in the last year and a half. This is a huge huge pool of professionals navigating a similar experience, on top of the others who are still employed and increasingly nervous. I suspect the real number is higher, since official figures likely don’t include more targeted “stealth layoffs” that are often masked as performance issues or reorgs. Nearly everyone I know in tech feels the tension.

But losing a job is not only about salary or perks, particularly for highly paid workers with resources, networks, and, of course, severance packages. Work plays a tremendous role in our daily lives, shaping everything from economic stability to a sense of self. It gives us daily uniforms, rituals, jargon, and friends, structuring our days in ways that are both visible and intangible. And the social bonds we experience at work play a huge role in how we feel on and off the clock.

As with any relationship, building connections and sharing information requires open communication and an element of trust — both of which are harder than in the past, since our interactions are increasingly mediated by tools. Despite the many logistical benefits of remote work, research indicates that these mediated connections differ qualitatively from face-to-face; we are wired for the latter form, but rely increasingly on our screens. I’m sure I’m not the only person who’s commuted to an office only to have video calls with other people in the same building. And don’t get me started on Slack.

For all the talk about mythical “water cooler conversations” as a catalyst for productivity and innovation, there’s noticeably less attention paid to how hard it is for today’s workers to build genuine social bonds. Many of us come together in open offices, where even meeting rooms can have iffy soundproofing. Catered onsite lunches make it hard to tuck away for a quiet conversation. We have faster, superficial, and indirect access to more people than ever, yet the quality and tone of the interactions is fundamentally different.

This is where Blind comes in.

Reality bites

That which frees us in some ways constrains us in others.

A grad school prof said this casually in a theory seminar one fall semester and I still repeat it all the time.

Blind’s shortcomings aren’t subtle, and posts often feel more like an SNL skit about toxic masculinity than anything remotely work-oriented. Some recent examples include a one titled “Lack of sex in marriage,” which netted over 220 responses in less than a week. The advice ranged from “Feed her cow broth, she will get back her libido in no time” to “Start smashing college girls, they love tech money.”

Then there were the posts from Blind users responding to the NYT article. “Bunch of losers with schadenfreude in the NYT comments,” said one, echoing the common refrain that anyone who dislikes big tech is jealous. “We all have to start getting our mixologist degrees,” said someone else.

But another recent post asked what users would do when, not if, they got laid off. “I’d like to get a simple $90K job…so I can spend time with my kids after school, that pays for health insurance and offers a 401K, and does not force me to use AI.” Another commenter wrote: “Probably teach (my dream).”

Nestled between dubious posts about living paycheck-to-paycheck while banking $600K annually were polls gauging whether coworkers felt ominous in the air. Others simply said they were “milking it while it lasts” and cautioned fellow anonymous users to not take work too seriously, have a backup plan, and understand that the perceived security of the recent past is gone — at least, for now. These are precisely the types of guidance that are harder to share without anonymity, and downright risky in most tech offices.

These sentiments coincide with an interesting shift in our broader cultural moment. Tech money and power have shown themselves to be much like other forms of money and power. The political climate is tenuous at best. Waves of Gen X nostalgia are everywhere from the soapy romance Off Campus, which references Dirty Dancing and Rent, to young people lashing out at Millennials’ stereotypically try-hard attitudes mid-century modern, succulent loving aesthetics. All of this coincides with rising inequality in the US. The top 1% now holds over $50T of wealth today, a threefold increase from 15 years ago.

In spaces like Blind, we find competing and discordant forces. There are the MAGA-sounding, money-loving, crypto-schilling bro types. There are racist, xenophobic, and sexist diatribes that are the stuff of thick HR files. There are demands for “TC or GTFO” and posts asking if $11M net worth is enough to retire before 40.

But, simultaneously, there are efforts to prepare for and predict layoffs, which toss workers aside amidst rising profits, speculative product development, and the ongoing crush to get AI right, whatever that means. There are posts asking if you can, in fact, negotiate a severance offer or hire an employment attorney. Or what to do if you suspect you’re being put out to pasture or getting PIPed after parental leave. When to jump ship versus stand your ground. And whether tech is the right path at all, if such a thing exists.

Webs of meaning

Sociologist Max Weber wrote that humans are “suspended in webs of significance.” We created these webs and they structure our lives and worlds, yet they do not exist outside of or without us. Not so coincidentally, Weber also literally wrote the book on the religious underpinnings of the capitalist work ethic.

I go back to the webs of significance again and again. The key idea is that we live in a world that we have created. We exist within these social constructions, but they still matter. The ideas, institutions, and methods of organizing society are creations, yet they are real. They are arbitrary products of history and culture, but they are ours. The trick is to understand them as such — not as natural elements, but as having distinctly human origins — while still taking them seriously.

Work is a powerful example. It organizes our societies and provides livelihoods. It is how we make the things that we need, want, and perhaps later discard. Work keeps us busy and active, fills our days and structures our weeks; it provides tasks to keep the brain engaged, money to put food on the table, and connections to scratch our deep social needs.

This is a transitional moment and I don’t just mean because of AI, although that’s part of it. Many of my professor friends are struggling with student AI usage alongside restricted academic freedom. Politics has a larger hand in scholarly and scientific research than at any point in my lifetime. Yet as headlines tout the renewed value of the humanities and social sciences, these disciplines are under attack.

At the same time, morale among tech workers — the sector that dominated my work life and fundamentally reorganized the city where I live — has never been lower. Some are voicing this publicly. In the last week alone, I’ve seen multiple posts on LinkedIn from tech professionals lamenting the prevailing sense of burnout, uncertainty, and a lack of direction beyond all things AI. Just this week, that politically engaged CEO from my first tech job announced that he saw AI as the civil rights struggle of our time and is now working to fight the AI lobby’s role in US elections.

But for others, anonymity is a lifeline. It enables them to say what might feel unsayable and gauge whether their feelings or worries are valid. It’s an opportunity to ask what might be different or better, or lament that seeming like they “have it all” might not feel as good as they thought. And it carves out space for imagination.

To that end, I think of political historian Benedict Anderson’s concept of “imagined communities.” Writing on the rise of nationalism, he explained how print journalism helped usher in an era of imagined shared identities, or horizontal kinship, by members of a group who would never meeting in person. Although Anderson focused on countries and nation-based belonging, it’s interesting to apply shades of his thinking to contemporary work, where affiliation with a particular company or sector often spans geopolitical borders. Rather than printed newspapers, we now rely on digital spaces like LinkedIn and Blind to create those shared identities.

What we see now is that, amidst widespread political, economic, and cultural shifts, those identities are in flux. Yes, Blind in particular and social media in general are fraught, generating a slew of problems for everything from public health to politics, mental health, and, of course, work.

But there’s more to the story. The paths that felt secure are not anymore. The companies that pretended to be different and better are not. “Corporate’s gonna corporate,” but what does that mean for workers who no longer want to play ball?

More and more people are thinking this way. More are trying to work it out, map their next moves, and ask what else might be possible.

And, anonymously or otherwise, they’re coming together.

Since I live in Texas and ID is required to vote, I had a few moments to make conversation. I casually remarked how much I preferred this location to my previous early vote spot: a bingo hall in another strip mall a mile or so up the frontage road.

“The one that smells like donuts and cigarettes,” I said.

This led to a flood of comments from the poll workers, all women in their fifties, sixties, or seventies. How are people allowed to smoke in there? Who still smokes, anyway? Nobody I mean nobody smokes in Mexico anymore (?). Young people these days don’t smoke, they vape.

I mentioned recent media reports that depictions of smoking are on the uptick in film and television, and speculation that Gen Z thinks cigarettes are cool again, and noted my surprise at seeing trendy twentysomethings smoking outside of Austin bars and shows.

“Things are like that,” said the white-haired woman moving to Mexico with her boyfriend. “They go away, but they always come back.”

Unraveling the promise of progress

I’ve studied culture for over 20 years and my belief in cyclical change is as strong as ever. Forget clear linear paths and continuous evolution — we were never meant to apply such loose Darwinism to our daily lives. I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, amidst the rising tide of the “damn the man” ethos from my Gen X youth.

Anthropologists and other social scientists pay special attention to the dominant conceptual frameworks that guide our lives, behaviors, and beliefs, and the more natural these concepts feel, the more important it is to analyze them. Think about the role of time in contemporary life. It feels straightforward enough, but there’s a reason I had at least two professors announce “I do not believe in time” in graduate seminars. The very things we schedule our lives around, such as the five-day workweek or 9-5 work schedule, are in fact distinctly modern human creations. And, as we poke further, we see clearly the relationship between time, capitalism, and labor as key organizing principles in daily life.

Time is money. Killing time. Saving time. Wasting time. Off the clock. Free time. Out of time. Against the clock. Time starved. Revenge time.

These ideas are firmly embedded in our lives. The idioms reveal a deeper story, which is how language works. Consider how corporate America recently borrowed the term burnout from a study of volunteers at a 1970s substance abuse clinic, translating deeply human-centered psychological fallout into the grind of modern knowledge workers. Kinship language is another example: until the recent wave of layoffs, companies often positioned themselves as good guys by levering kinship language, waxing poetic about being their employees’ work family and creating supposedly inclusive environment where people could “bring their whole selves” to work.

How odd, then, that one of the foundational underlying models of modern life goes back to those famous studies of finch beaks and giant tortoises: evolution and natural selection.

Indeed, linear notions of progress and natural selection are everywhere. The language is baked into corporate parlance, and I know because this was my job. A new feature becomes “a new stage in our product journey.” A company pivot or revised mission is framed as “evolving.” Reorgs and layoffs are, increasingly, positioned as unfortunate blips on the path to future perfect. Impacted employees are no longer right for the next stage in the company’s “evolution.”

AI “unleashes human potential and creativity” or maybe it “augments” it or, if we don’t evolve appropriately, replaces us in a classic “survival of the fittest” way. There is no ebb and flow. Success is linear, upwardly mobile, and oriented toward the end stage of a final form. We are allowed to move backward, but only if it gets us closer to our true essence — which we then use to rocketship into our next evolutionary stage.

But evolutionary models aren’t just about business or tech, they’re everywhere. Diet trends turn back to quasi-evolutionary arguments about what human ancestors did or did not eat, and how we need to get back on track if we are to flourish. Each generation is supposed to be better than the last. Each medical breakthrough gets us closer to that elusive next stage. We have biohacking, sleepmaxxing, looksmaxxing. Crypto is the natural evolution beyond the boring, bureaucratic systems of, you know, money and stuff. Even grief is mapped out against a progress model — we just have to check off the stages to get past it.

And at the end of the line? Promises of utopian visions, whether of politics, technology, health, longevity, or beyond. But the chinks in the the armor are showing.

People are ready for change. This deserves a closer look. But first, let’s back up.

Lessons from my obsession with a Russian social theorist

Halfway through college, I made the questionable decision to go all in on social and cultural theory. I became a devoted follower of one professor in particular, a charismatic Iranian sociologist who fled his home country due to political persecution. We knew little about him, except that his beautiful German wife roamed our small college town with her long blond hair, black motorcycle jacket, and unreadable expression. At the time, his bread and butter was teaching incredibly dense social theory classes to undergrads who either became obsessed or ran for the hills. He would walk into the classroom silently, pause, and then launch into a 70 minute stream of consciousness lecture on Kant and Hegel. I took every class he offered, and he was my senior thesis advisor.

At the time, I was young and craved different perspectives on how to understand the world. I am now several decades older and the urge is just as strong, if weathered. I used to joke that I pursued anthropology because I love travel, but that trivializes both the discipline and my intellectual chops — I did it because I believed, and still do, that these different frameworks build a richer picture of the human experience. And, in my eyes, attempting to understand that breadth of experience is a lifelong exercise.

Theory gets a bad rap, in no small part because the writings are often, as my advisor once said, so arcane and jargon-heavy that they are a “crime against humanity “ (his words). Yet that early training in undergrad still shapes how I view everything from history to culture, politics, and the arts — more than similar classes in grad school, in fact.

For me, these theoretical frameworks are like a refractor, that unwieldy metal contraption at the eye doctor that determines the correct prescription.

“Which is clearer, A or B? One or two?” the optometrist asks, and I wring my hands not wanting to get it wrong.

Like the glass slides that help pinpoint our prescription, theory offers a lens that helps clarify the blurry world around us, revealing contours, shades, and textures that we might otherwise miss.

Anthropologists tend to follow family trees, and I’m no exception. My dissertation advisor was known for her attention to minutely detailed and poetic writing that captured snapshots of everyday life. Her advisor, a noted Australian anthropologist, was deeply influenced by Marx and focused on critiques of capitalism. I emerge squarely from a combination of these traditions, along with my charismatic undergrad advisor, but I rarely talk about one of the biggest influences on my thinking: a little-known Russian scholar from the early-20th century.

Pitirim Sorokin, a sociologist by training, fled Russia after being jailed multiple times for his anti-Bolshevik and “revolutionary” politics, and landed at the University of Minnesota and later Harvard. Sorokin left behind over three dozen books and hundreds of articles, yet his legacy does not reflect this. But for me, his work was transformative.

Sorokin argued that societies’ social and cultural dynamics followed predictable cycles. Each period, he wrote, fell into one of three distinct types: sensate (empirical and material), ideational (emotional or spiritual), or idealistic (a combination of the other two). He used this framework to trace the history of Western (i.e., American and European) history, culture, and politics. It was a lofty goal and feels dated in its regional focus, but I’ve been revisiting his core ideas as I observe the ongoing large-scale shifts in the contemporary U.S. and beyond.

Sorokin saw the sensate, ideational, and idealistic supersystems as the dominant organizing principles of their time, which shaped the worldviews, arts, politics, and cultural experiences. Unlike a progress model, Sorokin was explicit that one supersystem was not superior to or more evolved than the others:

...they are ‘subordinated’ to quite different masters: one to hedonism, to emotions and sensations; the other to Ideational and Idealistic values of religion, morals, civics, science, philosophy, etc...Both are free and unfree, pure and impure, but each in a different way and in regard to different values (Social and Cultural Dynamics: Volume I: 670).

To be clear, Sorokin’s ideas are more useful for inspiration and alternative viewpoints than anything more concrete. I am not saying we should slap labels like ideational and sensate onto modern life, simply that they can inform how we interpret our world — particularly, how we understand the parts of our world that present as preordained or natural.

We all lean on similar theoretical frameworks whether we realize it or not. They shape our understandings of work and community, of identity and belonging, and, to quote corporate speak, of “what good looks like.” And we absorb the message that good, invariably, means inching continuously closer to perfection. Or, following Sorokin’s lead, what if it doesn’t?

In praise of cyclical change, not linear perfection

As an anthropologist, I rarely make claims about human nature. However, I believe deeply that we are, as a species, hardwired to assess risks and benefits in our environment and react accordingly. This situational awareness and adaptability enable us to change with a changing world, which we do at the aggregate level — crucially, not just as individuals.

Humans are designed to learn from our environments, and we do this on the individual, community, and aggregate level. Constantly. We take in multiple inputs at all times, then use these data points to make sense of our world. We use them to determine relative safety versus danger, gauge risk, and maintain equilibrium. We have agency, yes, but we are herd animals by design. And the relationship between the individual and aggregate remains one of the biggest mysteries of philosophers and social scientists.

Despite endemic evolutionary speak, a quick peek beneath the surface reveals that cyclical patterns are everywhere. Here’s why: just when a trend seems inescapable and even inevitable, it becomes gauche, over, or even irrational and dangerous. Sometimes we tire of it. Other times, as in the case of shifting trends in recreational drug use, enough time passes that people see the long term impacts and change course. And, in the case of cigarettes that I started with, they simply lose sight of the risks.

This is why midterm elections are often the death knell to the party in power, with voters often hungry for a change, and large scale political shifts often follow global waves. It’s why the buttoned up Wall Street boom of Reaganomics gave way to the economic populism of the nineties, complete with a sax-playing philanderer from Arkansas in charge. The liberatory, inclusive rhetoric of the Obama years catapulted the country into what came next.

We are constantly assessing and learning from the world around us, giving new things a chance until they disappoint yet again, and then changing gears. Social and cultural shifts move in cycles, not direct lines from point A to B. They shift, circle back, make mistakes, overcorrect, and then make new ones. This feels like common sense, yet it flies in the face of the myth that we are all, always, progressing and evolving.

And it can help understand the shifting tides of the chaos and contradictions of this moment.

Damn the man, save the empire

Let me be clear: we are living in a time of massive chaos and tremendous change, and I’m not even talking about politics. As an anthropologist, I’m enthralled.

College students are booing commencement speeches about AI, even as companies fall all over themselves to get ahead of the competition. The “just trust us” charm of the billionaire class has swung firmly into cringe territory. The Devil Wears Prada 2 satirizes tech bros and CEO types as shallow douchebags who are enemies of creativity. I mention this not because it’s a great film, but because the messages we receive in pop culture matter. Speaking of which, who can forget the collective eye-rolling after last year’s Blue Origin space flight, featuring billionaire-by-marriage Lauren Sánchez Bezos and washed up Billboard singer Katy Perry dramatically kissing the ground after cosplaying as an astronaut?

Meanwhile, my LinkedIn network is filled with folks in their 30s, 40s, and 50s who’ve decided (or been pushed) to take a break from their corporate lives in favor of meaning and fulfillment. Hacky sacks are trending, landlines are making a comeback, and SNL even snuck in a few bars from the nineties La Boheme-inspired musical “Rent” a few weeks ago. Over half of Americans report negative views of the president, both political parties, the war in Iran, and ICE; the same survey found that a mere 1 in 4 feel positively about AI.

Everywhere we look now, young people are decrying the rise of tech, going analog, and questioning whether the glitzy six-figure corporate careers of the last decade are worth saving. They are frustrated with the political system, norms, and party identities that we’ve received as historical gospel.

Millennial fashion stalwart Everlane, purveyor of the kinds of pricey, anodyne clothes favored by techies in casual offices with money to burn, is getting acquired by Chinese fast-fashion behemoth Shein. Pilates girls and the ozempic look have replaced body positivity and gravity defying booties of crossfit classes and BBLs. Friends in their forties get a naughty sparkle in their eyes as they tell me about attending local raves where molly (née ecstasy) is abundant, just like my old college roommates two-plus decades ago. Wide-legged jeans have replaced skinnies, my bougie gym yanked out the bikes for spin class to build a reformer studio. Shake Shack and Sweetgreens sales are down, while McDonalds and Taco Bell have surged.

Here’s what Sorokin might say. Take a look at where we’ve been and what organizing principles shaped the past decade or two. Then consider why it seems to be collapsing before us. Call it cyclical change or the pendulum swinging back. Don’t be afraid to get a little prophetic. Ask what might come next, not as an evolutionary stage but as a collective reordering around what we’ve seen and learned in this era.

And then put on your baggy pants, listen to some 90s trip hop, and go get yourself a Crunchwrap Supreme — because when Taco Bell is so delicious, who needs a $15 slop bowl?

(But don’t tell my trainer.)

That did sound fun, but there was a problem: my degree was in cultural anthropology, not archaeology. My typical day looked more like this:

As an anthropologist, I trained to watch, listen, record, and interpret. We call this participant observation, a research method in which practitioners engage in the activities, rituals, and behaviors of daily life. This might be in a community, as was typical of the early anthropologists like Margaret Mead or Claude Lévi-Strauss. The true potential of the discipline, however, lies in its breadth. Anthropologists can work anywhere — because culture is everywhere, and everything is potential fieldwork.

These days, fieldwork increasingly occurs in the institutions and settings of contemporary life and power. Plastic surgery clinics, urban medical centers, human rights organizations; on Wall Street or in poker halls, schools, NGOs, the UN. We study human-animal bonds, religious rituals, food, the sacred, death, love, money. We think deeply about what it means to belong to a group. We take culture seriously as a dynamic process that is always, by definition, in flux.

But no matter the fieldsite or catchy title of our research projects, our task is always to probe bigger questions about the human experience. We study fundamental conceptions of race, gender, class, and the body; we interrogate assumptions; we make the familiar strange. As a discipline, our bread and butter is taking the belief systems that structure our world and revealing them as arbitrary works of human creativity and interpretation. My academic research examined shifting ideas of medical mysteries, with a focus on rare genetic syndromes that caused complex disabilities. It sounds complicated, but centered on a simple question: what does it mean to be visibly different but lack a diagnosis?

But I grew weary of anthropology. By the end of grad school I was tired of the jargon and the politics. Tired of a lingering reluctance for practitioners to do applied work or take their skills outside of academia. Tired of financial instability and unwilling to move my family for a short-term postdoc. I was increasingly unconvinced that publishing super niche articles in peer-review journals, many of which were paywalled, was an effective distribution strategy for research aimed at making a difference. And, as the child of an academic, I’d spent most of my life in this unique subculture. I needed a break.

I spent seven years working in global tech companies — swanky offices, catered lunches, parties with fire dancers, trapeze artists, and champagne fountains. I approached it from the start as an ethnographer. I was a participant observer — a fly on the wall watching the different dress codes and habits across teams, who sat where in the cafeteria, the vernacular of different parts of the organization, and the rituals. When I started, I had no idea what an “all-hands” was. I experienced my first “offsite” during my first full week of corporate life, complete with a former Disney animator in a white kaftan leading a group of marketers in some drawing and chanting; at the end, we each received an amulet and danced in circles around our VP. It was a hell of an onboarding.

I got to work, spending my days doing research, analyzing, and writing about job trends like ghosting, burnout, and supporting neurodiversity in the workplace. I spent a lot of time sitting with my laptop in a $1,300 egg chair while drinking lattes and looking at trees.

In the time that followed, I saw tech go from a sector positioned as a fun, tshirt-clad alternative to traditional corporate doldrums to more of the same obscured by different aesthetics and vernacular. The industry moved from championing DEI, accessibility, and inclusivity, and telling employees to bring our whole selves to work, to just another business model designed to maximize profit. As we’ve all seen, it dropped the veil almost instantly once the political moods shifted. It wasn’t necessarily surprising, but it did make many of us question whether we wanted to be there.

During the last few years, I thought a lot about Weber’s work on the rationalization of charisma in religious movements. The early leaders offer a start contrast to business as usual. They are charismatic and pull people in with their ideas, energy, and promises of a better world. And, as the movements get bigger, they become more rationalized and bureaucratic. To be clear, I never believed that a company could or should be my family — but was fascinated by the audacious concept, because anthropologists know that kinship claims are central to any culture.

Today, we’re in a pivotal moment. This feels hyperbolic, but I don’t believe it is. Working on the inside of the AI boom as a researcher and writer, I saw firsthand how the dominant narratives rested largely on aspirations, buzzwords, and whatever everyone else was saying. Yet there’s no question that these technologies are transformative — and that which frees us in some ways constrains us in others.

AI is the example of our time.

Which is why this is an incredibly powerful time for anthropology to show what it can do: capturing the uniquely human textures of our world in all their incredible nuance, messiness, and complexity.

My youngest child recently asked me what an anthropologist does. We study people and culture, I told him. I felt comfortable with the words, something I never experienced when trying to explain the hybrid space I took up as a writer-researcher in marketing departments.

So I’m getting back to basics. I’m asking what the distinctive methods and theories of anthropology can offer now, what it all means, and how to make it count.

The Participant Observer will explore anthropology’s potential in this unique moment. It champions anthropological insights that are accessible, timely, and jargon-free. It asks how the seemingly simple act of listening and paying attention can transform. Because we live in a world with more sensory and cognitive inputs than humans were designed for — and if it doesn’t make sense, it might be time to change perspectives.

Let’s take a pause from business as usual and a step back from common sense. Let’s suspend judgement and linear narratives, put cause/effect and problem/solution narratives on hold, and dwell in the messy reality of human life.

I ask you to rest here with me and see what we find.