Lately, I’ve had to deal with several medical related (doctors, dentists, lab tech, medical services, eye doctors, surgeons) and financial institutions (banks, credit card companies, insurance, investment corporations). My life has never had an equal distribution of these; they always come in clusters.

This time I started noticing things. The calls to these places have been remarkably similar.

Male computer voice: Thank you for calling X. If this is a medical emergency, please hang-up and dial 911. For English, press one. Para español, oprima dos. We are experiencing higher than normal call volumes. Please note wait times may vary. Thank you for your patience. One of the most convenient ways to schedule an appoint, refill a prescription, or contact your provider, please our patient portal at xxx.yyy.com

Then a female computer voice.

Female computer voice: Thank you for calling X. If you are a medical provider, please press one. Para español, oprima dos. We are experiencing higher than normal call volumes. Please note wait times may vary. Thank you for your patience.

Then the call tree. If you are a doctor’s office or a clinic calling, press one. For Y, press two. For Z, press four. For routine scheduling and questions about your records, please use our online portal.

I was relieved that they thanked me for my patience because I had wondered where it had gone 12 minutes into the call, now I knew.

The next place I called had a slightly different version.

Male Computer voice: Thank you for calling Z. If this is a medical emergency, please hang-up and dial 911. If you are a medical provider, press one. Para español, oprima tres. For English, stay on the line. We are experiencing higher than normal call volumes. Please note wait times may vary.

Then computer voice Ava appeared almost instantly.

Ava: Hello, I’m Ava, your personal assistant. How may I assist you today?

Me: I’m returning a call.

Ava: To assist you further, may I please have your first and last name and date of birth to verify you?

Me: Ken Anderson. 07/14/60.

There was a pause.

Ava: I don’t have that name in my system. Could I please have the first and last name and date of birth of the patient to verify you?

Me: Kenneth Anderson. 07/14/60.

That worked.

Ava: Thank you. In order to access your records, I need you to follow the link I sent to your phone. Please use it to verify yourself.

Me: OK but as I said, I’m returning the call, which is about the blank report.

I follow the link in the text message that gives me two options “Yes, it is me.” And “No, it is not me.” I press the Yes button.

Ava: Thank you. I see your health records. Would you like me to transfer to an agent.

Me: Yes, please transfer me.

Ava: I’ll transfer you now. Thank you for your patience.

Muzak.

Eventually Veronica, a human, answered.

Veronica: Hello, this is Veronica. How can I assist you today?

I explained that I was returning a call about lab tests.

Veronica: Can I have your first and last name and date of birth to verify you?

Me: Ken Anderson. 07/14/60.

Another pause.

Me: Kenneth Anderson. 07/14/60.

There I was.

I remember during the pandemic when institutions really were having staffing problems. Call centers closed. People were sick. Everything was disrupted. “We are experiencing higher than normal call volumes” made sense.

That was six years ago.

If you’ve been experiencing higher than normal call volumes for six years, I have some potentially upsetting news about your normal call volume.

A few days later, I went to a doctor’s appointment.

At the front desk:

Receptionist: First and last name and date of birth?

Me: Ken Anderson. 07/14/60 for a 9:40 appointment

Receptionist looking at her screen. Then looking at me confused. Nothing.

Me: Kenneth Anderson. 07/14/60.

Receptionist: Oh, I have you. Thanks. We’ll be with you as soon as possible.

I had brought a book with me, Locked In, one of the Department Q novels.

At my previous appointment I’d brought only my phone. I answered emails, looked at Instagram, Facebook, did whatever it is we do on phones while waiting for something else to happen. I used to read on airplanes. I don’t fly much anymore, and at home there is always something else to do. It turned out waiting rooms and exam rooms are just like libraries and library carrels.

Eventually someone came and took me through the door into the part of the medical office you can’t just wander into. Someone took me to an exam room.

Medical assistant: First and last name and date of birth?

Me: Kenneth Anderson. 07/14/60.

She did a kind of verbal check how I was, why I was there, and some basic weight, oxygen level, blood pressure stuff. Noting this down on her tablet.

“Someone will be with you shortly.”

“No problem,” I said. “The chair is really comfortable.”

She smiled and left.

I went back to Locked In.

Eventually someone else appeared and moved me to another room. I appeared to be advancing.

“The PA will be with you shortly.”

“No worries. Just take your time. I’ll be here.”

Another smile.

I found my place again. Detective Carl Mørck was in prison. There was a contract on his life. I was two pages from the end of the chapter.

The door opened.

“Hi, I’m Anna [PA]. First and last name and date of birth?”

“Kenneth Anderson. 07/14/60.”

I closed the book.

The PA asked some the same questions the previous person had, wrote some notes, then explained about my circumstances.

“The doctor will be with you shortly.”

“Sure,” I said. “I’ve got nothing planned for the morning.”

She smiled.

I opened the book.

Eventually the doctor arrived.

“First and last name and date of birth?”

“Kenneth Anderson. 07/14/60.”

I didn’t even try Ken.

I was in the medical office for about two and a half hours. I spent less than twenty minutes with another person.

Verification

Kenneth Anderson. 07/14/60.

Kenneth Anderson. 07/14/60.

Kenneth Anderson. 07/14/60.

Kenneth Anderson. 07/14/60.

Kenneth Anderson. 07/14/60.

Kenneth Anderson. 07/14/60.

Patience

Thank you for your patience.

Thank you for your patience.

We’ll be with you as soon as possible.

Someone will be with you shortly.

The doctor will be with you shortly.

On my drive home, I got a text for a post-visit survey. It asked had the staff been friendly.

They had.

Deep breaths.

You open the email.

“I’m writing to ask if you’d be willing to serve…”

You know this isn’t really a question.

“…to serve on the committee for…”

We’re doing this again?

Again?

I

t’s a rhetorical question you ask yourself, because of course we’re doing this again, you’re reading the email asking you to take on the work of doing it, again.

Do I categorize this as “Kafkaesque” or a “Bullshit Job” or just a Tuesday?

You wonder why. Not because you have no idea why, but because you’re curious about which of the reasons why fits here.

Are we doing this because we don’t want to “lose face” with our peers? I hadn’t heard that phrase in a long time, but I’ve heard it quite a bit the past few years. We want to appear to be doing what our peer institutions are doing.

Otherwise, what? Otherwise we might be perceived as being in trouble, having difficulties? But we are, of course. So are they.

Also, why don’t we just call our peer institutions our competitors? Because we seem to be in competition with them. Else why would we want to (so desperately need to) keep pace with them?

These euphemisms are exhausting. Because pretending is exhausting when you have to do it all the time.

One could see the choice to do something different than our peers as an example of this thing called “leadership.” But the number of institutions willing to lead is scant.

Despite all the claims of innovation and disruption, it turns out what most really want to do is keep an even keel. Claiming to be a leader in software or education or service delivery means we do what you do, but better, faster, more efficient (and sometimes prettier).

We keep more boats afloat.

Where are they going?

That’s not what matters. Look how many more boats we have, how nice their sails are, and how well they float. This year we’re going to build another, maybe three.

But where are they going?

What do you mean? There they are!

Often, we’re doing this because this is just what we do. It’s what we’ve always done.

Of course, it isn’t what we’ve always done.

It’s amazing how “always” is sometimes actually just since last year.

At some point, we did something else and we didn’t do this. Now, we have to do this. And part of doing it is pretending that we’ve always done it.

This is just what we do.

I suppose in good times, maybe this make sense, or makes more sense.

But aren’t good times. There, I said it.

The financial situations we find ourselves in adds a wrinkle we don’t want to talk about. Because, actually, we aren’t doing what we did before. We aren’t doing what we did last year. We’re doing two-thirds of it with half the budget. But’s it’s still the same and we’re still doing it because it’s what we do.

Somewhere in all of this I realized I wasn’t really thinking about committees anymore.

I know so many others have written about this. I’m not discovering some new workplace phenomena.

Even so, I think it’s worth sharing.

Why?

Because I think there’s a value in openly and repeatedly acknowledging these situations. They aren’t going to stop.

The emails and asks will keep coming, because, even if it isn’t really what we’ve always done, it is what we’re doing now.

And now is all that matters.

And, of course, the future!

Strange how most of these institutional futures depends on us doing this thing we’ve always done before, again and again

As if we want things to continue as they are.

“If you can’t serve on this committee, please let me know and recommend someone to take your place.”

Deep breaths.

Image Credit: Marching Band, Weigle, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

A friend asked me to be a beta reader for their novel. I said yes before I thought about it. I was diagnosed with dyslexia in grad school. Correct writing has never been my strong suit. I was hoping other readers would be doing exactly what novelists want beta readers to do. Give them something actionable. What characters were confusing, where did the reader get lost in the plot, what scene arrived too early, or when did one of the characters act in a way that didn’t make sense. I spent four days writing up something that might be described as “a wander.”

Monday morning, I thought a main theme was about home. By Monday night, I thought that was all wrong and it was about thresholds. I wrote up a page about why I believed that why I went wrong before. That lasted until about noon Tuesday. I left the home and the thresholds content in place, and just added onto it about why the novel was about institutions. I’m not sure why I just kept adding and didn’t start anew. Maybe it was about evidence that I had put thought into it. By Wednesday I had 3 different novels on my hands. I wasn’t ready to part with any of them.

Somewhere around noon Wednesday the author asked “How’s it going?

“Almost done.”

This was obviously not true. But I didn’t think I was lying to them exactly. It was more like hope I was reporting as a fact.

By Thursday, the book stopped being about anything, instead it started to watch me read it.

I know that is odd but I don’t have any other way to describe it. I had my notes for the author open. I kept adding a paragraph after another not just about my experience reading the book but about the paragraph I had added yesterday. Thursday night, long after most people had gone to bed, I was still in my chair trying to pin down my experience with the novel. It felt like whenever I got close, it moved.

Around page six of my notes, I had that feeling you get when you’ve been talking in a meeting for several minutes and know you are now answering a question no one had asked. It is not that you had done anything wrong, just that you were now expecting people to take you seriously about something you couldn’t explain yourself. I putzed some more. When I finally sent my notes to the author, they were eight single spaced pages long.

I didn’t hear anything. A few days later I asked the question every beta reader eventually asks.

“So were my notes useful?”

“They were,” a slight pause, “a little overwhelming.”

That seemed fair. Eight pages describing my evolving relationship with a novel might be a tad more than what is expected from a beta reader.

Then the author casually added, almost as an aside, “I asked ChatGPT to pull out the actionable parts”

I laughed. “Well, that makes sense. I’d have done the same.” It did make total sense. Eight pages of Jack Kerouac writing on the road through the novel probably wasn’t going to tell the author how to rethink a scene, or cut characters, or clarify a transition. We continued talking about something else but not sure what. They assured me they’d return to the full notes. “They’re really good.”

For a couple days, whenever I’d talk to friends, I’d tell them how the author feed my beta reader notes to ChatGPT to figure out what was actionable. It got a laugh. No one was surprised. But I also wanted to emphasize that the author was still holding onto the eight pages and going over them again.

About a week later, I mentioned the author incident to Carl. I was trying to explain why a couple minute conversation was still haunting me.

“So, what were they?” he asked.

“I don’t know”

“No, really, what did you write”

“That’s just the problem.” Then I paused, like the way a person does when they can’t quite remember their own social security number. “They were notes.”

“No,” he chuckled, “that is what you called them. . . What were they?”

I put the iPhone on speaker so I could open the notes on my laptop. Not sure why. Maybe I was hoping the notes would explain themselves to me so I could tell Carl something. I scrolled to some random paragraph and read a line in it to Carl. It said something like “it isn’t the place that matters, it is how you become while you’re in it.” I didn’t remember writing it. In fact, not sure if it was mine or from the novel. But there it was, ten days old and still in the notes. I wondered which person I was as a reader when I wrote it. I began scrolling though the novel looking for the part that had me write the note.

It wasn’t the kind of note you to point to something in it and say, “See? That’s what I meant.” If anything, it made Carl’s question harder to answer.

“It wasn’t feedback, exactly, “ I said

“Nope”

“I wasn’t reviewing it either, I guess”

“No”

“I don’t think I was telling the author what I thought about it.”

There was a pause as Carl let things sit for a moment, like a wise advisors do with grad students.

“So, what were you doing?

“Ahh, I don’t know.”

Thankfully, the conversation switched over to the weather. Afterwards I couldn’t let go of the question. What had I spent four days doing? The author was still reading the notes. I didn’t know why. But when a relatively reasonable person like Carl asked me what it was I had been doing, I realized I couldn’t explain it. I could describe what I had written – I had read parts to him. But I couldn’t describe what I had been doing. I wasn’t trying to explain the novel. I wasn’t simply describing my experience reading it either. I had written eight pages that fell into a space between those two things. Somehow I’d spent four days in that space without ever asking myself what I was doing.

For the next week, that question keep bumping into me. I’d be making coffee and the question would find me. Out on a morning walk, in a new neighborhood, and the question would find me, even when I didn’t know where I was. Standing in line at the grocery store behind a man in a cowboy hat who was buying what struck me as an improbable number Friske’s pâtés stacked absurdly high in his cart. What had happened during the four days? The pages of notes weren’t a mystery; they were easy to open anytime. The mystery was what had I been doing while I wrote them.

I began trying to think of new and better ways to explain it. I felt eventually I’d land on something. But every explanation seemed to make the notes smaller. For example, if I said I had been describing my experience of the novel, it sounded self-indulgent. On the other hand, if I said I was helping the author understand their book, it sounded too grand. Or if I said, I was doing a careful reading, then the four days and the eight pages would disappear into one sentence. None of them stuck. I got tired of my own explanations before I was anywhere near the right one. Finally, it occurred to me that the eight pages didn’t seem nearly as bothered by this question as I was.

One afternoon I opened the notes up again. I was relived they really did exist. I hadn’t imagined the whole thing. I scrolled down a couple pages and started reading it again. To my surprise, this time I could recognize who had written. But I still didn’t recognize the activity. I could remember sitting in front of the TV with Perry Mason continuous streaming, one solved case after another. I could remember cutting out paragraphs and pasting them back, then putting them at the end until I found a better place for them. I could remember me changing my mind about what the book and then changing my mind and deciding to put that in the notes too. What I couldn’t recall was a simple answer to Carl’s question of “what are you doing?”

I had to think about that. It almost never happens. We usually know what we’ve been doing, even before we know if we’ve done it well: writing, teaching, research design, driving to Albuquerque . . . The outcome might be uncertain but the activity is perfectly ordinary. This felt like a different situation. The activity was done. It had happened. I had a file to prove it. The author had read them. They said they had mattered to her.

A few days later I walked past their office and peeked in. They were sitting and revising. I saw my notes open on the one side of the monitor and the manuscript on the other.

“You are still reading all those notes?” I asked

They looked up, “I told you I was.”

“I figured the summary would have been enough.”

“It wasn’t.” They looked back at their screen and scrolled down a bit.

“The summary was very useful. It gave me actionable stuff. It told me what I might want to fix.” Then they clicked back on the notes file. “But I keep coming back to these.”

I went to make more coffee. As I was holding my cup, I looked back in. The author had the summary minimized and the eight pages open. I thought it was about time to see what was up with Perry Mason.

For a while now I’ve been interested in Black Mountain College. It’s an example of a school that melded together many ways of knowledge and making through an experimental approach to learning and teaching. It’s also not too far away, in a part of the country that’s grown meaningful to me. The closeness, culture of the place, and familiarity of the landscape add to its appeal.

Over the past few years, I’ve collected and been gifted quite a pile of books on Black Mountain College. Many of them are gorgeous volumes of photographs of the school, the people, and all the things made there, and I’ve often flipped through them. But it’s only in the last year I’ve been seriously reading these books, studying Black Mountain College.

There’s no reason to be familiar with Black Mountain College, so a bit of background. The college was an experimental liberal arts school that operated from 1933 to 1957 in the Blue Ridge Mountains near the town of Black Mountain, North Carolina. It was founded by John Andrew Rice and a small group of faculty after Rice was dismissed from another college over disputes about academic freedom and his progressive educational philosophy. Together, they envisioned a school where learning would be driven by inquiry rather than rigid curricula, and where the arts would occupy a central place in a liberal education.

What’s not to love?

From the beginning, Black Mountain attracted an amazing faculty. Josef and Anni Albers arrived after the closure of the Bauhaus. They were joined by composer John Evarts and philosopher and educational theorist Theodore Dreier. Black Mountain is perhaps best remembered for the artists who passed through, including John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Buckminster Fuller as visiting faculty, and students like Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, and Ruth Asawa. Writers including Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, and Robert Duncan made the college an important place for American poetry.

All tucked into the hot, human, and ridiculously beautiful hills of Appalachia.

To give a sense of the learning environment…there were two divisions for students, Junior Division and Senior Division. It was up to the students to decide when they had learned enough to take the exam to move from one division to the next. The exam consisted of two days of written questions followed by an oral examination that lasted… as long as it had to. For the written exam, students were allowed to use their notes, the library, their experience, really anything they had access too. The questions weren’t limited to topics covered in courses; they were questions that tested a student’s ability to engage in investigation and analysis. Imagine being asked: “How do you know the Philippine Islands exist?” and given nine hours to discover and write-up an answer.

One of my favorite books so far is Martin Duberman’s Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community. Most of the other books I have are about the arts of Black Mountain. This one, as the title suggests, is about the community, the people who came together to found, create, and sustain, the place. It’s a massive history book, over 500 pages, and Duberman spent years interviewing folks who had been part of Black Mountain College, including faculty, visitors, and students, and pouring over all manner of documents in the archives, from faculty meeting minutes to fundraising letters.

And one of the things we learn is that Black Mountain College was a mess.

From the start, it was unstable. Finances were precarious. The buildings in the first few years were rented from a summer camp. The relationship with the nearby towns was shaky due to all manner of rumors and truths about the goings at the college (they wore sandals and rolled-up dungarees!). The cast of characters were opinionated to the point of being stubborn, and most all of them were exceptional at arguing—a dangerous combination. The courses offered depended entirely on the faculty present, their interests and abilities. Lauded progressive endeavors, such the farm work program, were tumultuous. The democratic governance of the school, for which it was renowned, was tenuous and at times served to reinforce conservative positions. The value of the education was uncertain and the college was never actually accredited. Very few students “graduated,” whatever that might mean in such an open educational context.

Perhaps none of that instability is surprising. There’s nothing about the structure of Black Mountain College that would suggest financial stability, or any kind of stability for that matter. In fact, it seems it was almost intentionally unstable, or at least, many of the things that usually provide institutional stability were purposefully omitted from its operations. Governance is often difficult, but especially so when undertaken by a group of people self-selecting against authority and routine.

In other words, a mess.

And also, it worked.

Reading through this, I’ve tried to make sense of it.

How did it work?*

Was it the extraordinary faculty? Maybe, but also, the extraordinary faculty were part of what Black Mountain College difficult, doggedly holding their educational ideologies dear and often teaching ideas that had yet to be fully thought through. Was it the democratic approach to decision making? Well, as with many democratic communities, charisma and authority were strong forces of influence. Was it freedom from familiar institutional traditions? Yes, but that that freedom also limited access to funds and made accreditation impossible.

There’s probably some organizational theory that explains this, which I just don’t know.

Here’s what I’ve come up…

It worked because they had a mess they believed in and were committed to.

Part of that belief and commitment was attending to the mess.

For folks at Black Mountain College, it wouldn’t have been enough to sit in a library are read theories of progressive education. They did the work of cultivating and sustaining those conditions. They made the school happen, and kept it open for decades. They built programs, such as the farm work program, and they debated those programs for hours over and over again, while also doing them. It was an abstract ideal, but put into steadfast practice. They were committed to doing the work of trying to learn and teach differently, because they shared the principles that motivated that work.

And, part of that belief was also a willingness to let the mess be, because there seemed to be an understanding that the mess it was necessary for the vision.

A mess without belief is a problem, and we’re often driven to clean it up, mostly for the sake of not having a mess anymore. The mess makes our work more difficult, so putting it to rights is the right thing to do because it lets us better get on to our work.

But what if the mess is the work?

For Black Mountain College, it maybe the mess was the work. It had to be relatively contained, occasionally rearranged. But it also had to remain a mess.

They weren’t careless in this. They worked incredibly hard at maintaining an institution that remained unstable but also able to be responsive when needed.

Consider grades, a basic thing in most colleges. At Black Mountain College they did away with grades (of course). But also they also kept a record of grades so, if needed, students could have transcripts. One can imagine the exchange…

Student: “Am I passing my courses?”
College: “That’s the wrong question.”
Graduate School: “We need the student’s grades.”
College: “Oh, we have those.”
Student: “What are they?”
College: “Don’t worry, they’re not important.”

Over twenty-some years, the faculty and students of Black Mountain College could have made all sorts of decisions that would have made the operations of more orderly. But they didn’t.

It was methodical, but it wasn’t efficient.

Digging a ditch, drawing with Josef Albers, milking a cow, taking “Group Dynamics” with John Wallen, debating admissions policy in a hours long meeting, participating in a theatre production of No Exit, reading towards your research…all could be in in week’s work at Black Mountain College, maybe while paying tuition, maybe not, maybe your contract for teaching would be renewed, maybe not. But you would learn, in a Black Mountain College sort of way.

What seemed to make it work, for lack of a better word, was faith: a confidence and devotion to the shared endeavor.

This is the tension that ken wrote about last week.

It’s not being in a mess that’s a problem.

The problem is being in a mess that you don’t believe in.

But a mess you believe in. That can be brilliant.

Image Credit: From the Black Mountain College Research Project Papers, Visual Materials, North Carolina State Archives, Raleigh, NC.

* One could argue that it didn’t work because it’s not still a school, it eventually closed (and that’s another part of the story). But it did run for over twenty years, with more than a 1000 people involved and affected, nurtured some of the most influential creatives of the twentieth century, spawned many books, articles, exhibitions, and continues to be inspirational today. So, as far as I’m concerned, something about it, in some way, worked. In fact, it’s still working.

For a while, whenever I tried to think about our move to Santa Fe, my mind wandered somewhere else entirely. A few weeks ago, I realized it hadn’t been wandering at all.

When Anne and I moved to Santa Fe a few years ago, we chose our neighborhood with our daughter very much in mind. She is an adult and lives with us but doesn’t drive. So, where we lived mattered. Our previous house was in a beautiful neighborhood with huge pine trees. A problem was, you had to walk a mile before you could reach any destination, and that was a bus stop.

One of the features of that house was a park bordered our backyard. Every morning and evening people walked their dogs. Our daughter walked ours too. Naturally, conversations happened around dogs, at first, then other things. Before long she was regularly seeing people in our neighborhood.

When we found our house in Santa Fe, we thought we found something better. We now live within walking distance of lots of things. The Plaza is less than half a mile. Canyon Road is even closer. And the Railyard wasn’t much farther. There was a small grocery nearby. Tourists spend lots of money staying in Airbnb’s on our street.

We thought we were solving a transportation problem. Except walkability turned out not to be the same thing as independence. We are downtown, but doctors aren’t. Or dentists. Or most places that do hiring. Neither are the stores where people who actually live in Santa Fe shop. Tourists, though, there are plenty of them around.

When I was working for a tech company, our privacy meetings had a smell. It wasn’t a bad smell, like a gym locker. Just coffee that was made hours before the meeting. Stale cookies, left in a box from some earlier time, half-eaten, then forgotten. The box lid fit very precisely. The meeting had engineers, lawyers, designers, policy people sitting around a table with a Polycom. One of the product managers kept a tennis ball on his desk and squeezed it when things got tense.

Someone would describe a new feature. Someone else would raise a risk. Then someone would wonder about what users might give up for convenience. One time, before we’d even finished arguing, a calendar invite showed up for the next meeting. Same room. Same time, next month. Subject line already written. The “discussion” continued on. For years I thought that was just the third Thursday of the month stuff. Except my memory keeps dragging it in somewhere else.

Hangzhou. China.

I was doing fieldwork there around the same time as I was going to privacy meetings. In fact, I was there to do privacy research. The city had just put up cameras that could do live facial recognition in public. The cameras were everywhere. We asked people what they thought. I expected the usual list. Surveillance. Control. Privacy. Instead, people looked at me like I’d asked something about flying cows. The cameras were already up. Criminals were getting caught. Everything seemed to be working just fine. It was a little humbling.

Later that year, I did some privacy research at a police department in a small town in Oregon. They were testing a facial recognition system that had much smaller ambitions. They used only recorded video footage. It was trained to search just for people who had already been convicted of something. For every match, a person had to sign off on it. People were furious.

It was easy enough to call the difference culture. I think I wrote that in a report. And then of course, moved on. It just never felt like enough. Culture can be handy for explaining everything, which is probably why it bothered me. That difference stuck in my head — the way a splinter does, once you’ve stopped noticing it’s there.

Half dozen years ago, I taught a course called Ethnography and Wicked Problems. It went smashingly well. The students took the problems seriously. They examined wicked problems in the local context around the university like housing, climate change, and food deserts. They created some actionable solutions that were more than thought experiments. And the course got a teaching award, which is the university’s way of telling you that you did the thing correctly. But I never taught it again. Looking back, I still can’t tell you exactly why.

A few weeks ago, I read something that made these things feel connected. I don’t actually remember who wrote it. Probably not what the author was hoping for. It argued that “problems” are situations we expect to resolve. They have solutions. “Tensions” are different. They don’t resolve so much as move back and forth between different social forces.

I paused on the section a little longer than necessary. A kind of a “huh.” Not because I agreed with it but my mind started to wandered off to those conference rooms with the stale cookies and bad coffee. Apparently, my mind keeps an office there. Nobody in those meetings really expected issues around privacy and security to get solved. At least not permanently. We talked as if we were solving them. Every meeting ended with a decision. Every decision mattered in what people would do. Then, another meeting was already on the calendar.

Then I thought about Hangzhou and Oregon. For years I’d thought the interesting question was why people in two places reacted so differently to the same technology. I’d even convinced myself I knew roughly knew the answer. Reading that article, I realized I no longer believed my own question. I wasn’t so sure the technology had ever been the thing I was actually studying.

Embarrassingly late, I thought about the title of that course: Ethnography and Wicked Problems. It had sounded perfectly sensible at the time. Timely, even. I don’t remember ever questioning the noun. Not when I designed the course. Not while I taught it. Not even for years afterward.

Once that distinction got into my head, old scenes started looking different. The first memory to come back was the tennis ball, mid-squeeze. Nobody in those meetings expected privacy and security to be settled. Every decision mattered at the time but nobody expected the meetings to end.

The privacy meetings made sense to me first and then I thought about Hangzhou and Oregon. For years I’d thought the interesting question was: why people in two places reacted so differently to the same technology? I’d even convinced myself and a company that I knew the answer. Reading that article, I realized I’d been asking the wrong question.

Which brought me to the course: Ethnography and Wicked Problems. I never questioned the title for the course. Problem simply seemed like the natural place to begin.

Now I’ve began noticing the word problem everywhere. A friend, who is a UX researcher, was trying to solving for onboarding friction. At a Santa Fe city council meeting, someone referred to the affordable housing problem. The next ten minutes were spent explaining why there wouldn’t be a solution anytime soon. A consultant’s strategy workshop included a slide with a photo of a knot labeled The Problem. A few slides later, the knot was just gone.

The knot struck me as interesting. Somebody had to take the photo. Then somebody had to decide it belonged on a slide called The Problem. And that the problem should be the first content slide. All of that happened before anyone had said anything. By the time the first slide appeared, the situation already had a name. And when the second slide appeared, it had a solution.

By the time anyone has started talking, the situation was already a problem. I thought back to the privacy meetings and realized nobody had ever needed to say “Maybe this isn’t a problem.” We’d already decided that’s what it was, without anyone saying so. Calling something a problem doesn’t simply describe the situation. It shapes not only what we do next, but what we can imagine doing at all.

This week I was working with AI. I was trying to figure out how to have a conversation I wasn’t sure how to have with the plaster contractor. I pasted in an email exchange with them in. I hit Enter, and back came options. A plan. Steps. Priorities.

Yeah, no surprise here. It’s what we expect AI to do. We ask it to help solve things.

What did surprise me was a thing that didn’t happened. Neither of us stopped to ask whether this was the kind of situation that wanted a solution. I’d apparently answered that before I finished typing. AI simply got to work on it.

That’s when I realized I was seeing the same cultural habit again. The privacy meetings. The course title. The consultant’s slide. Software. By the time any of us started thinking about what to do, we’d already agreed what kind of situation we were in. It was a problem.

Calling something a problem doesn’t simply point us toward solutions. It also determines who can be part of the conversation and which kinds of expertise become relevant. Engineers. Consultants. Product managers. Therapists. Policy analysts.

And now AI. We’ve built AI systems inside institutions that increasingly understand intelligence as the capacity to solve problems. AI didn’t invent that cultural orientation. It inherited it.vOnce the situation becomes a problem, an entire culture already knows how to proceed.

Lately, I’ve started noticing how early situations get set. Somewhere in the first few minutes, someone says, “So, the problem is...” Friday I have a meeting with some former colleagues. I don’t remember exactly what is about. I would bet somewhere near the beginning of it, someone is going to say, “So, the problem is —”

I’ll still reach for a pen. I just have a feeling I might start taking different notes.

I wonder whether we’ve become so accustomed to beginning with “So, the problem is...” that we don’t even notice we’re making a choice.

There’s a course number, a title, attendance policy, and all that.

But I’m not sure what I’ll actually be teaching.

In large part, because I’m not sure what these students should be learning.

Conversations about AI are prompting some of this confusion. But it would be too easy to say AI is disrupting teaching and learning. Really, AI is just an accelerant, making the light brighter on the issue. If AI had a smell, it would smell like gasoline.

There’s a bigger misalignment that’s been happening for a while.

The problem isn’t that I don’t know how to teach. The problem seems to be that there are now very different demands on what education is supposed to do.

And this isn’t just about teaching. Plenty of us of are wondering if we’re participating in a profession, a community, a society, that’s becoming something else.

The course is Design Foundations and it’s part of a required sequence for incoming Master’s students. All the incoming Master’s students in Human-Computer Interaction take this course, and it’s only those students. In many ways, there’s a shared ground among the students that should make teaching the class easier. The problem is, I’m not sure I share that ground.

This is a professional Master’s program. Students enroll because they want a particular kind of job when they graduate in two years.

I no longer fully understand what that job is, and much what I do understand, I’m leery of.

The expectations of the job market make this all a bit more consequential and difficult.

Students begin the process of looking for summer internships in January. These summer internships are crucial because the 1^st year summer internship can lead to a job offer after graduation. Even if not, that 1^st year Summer internship can be a distinguishing feature of experience and prestige that helps them get the job they want, or think they want. To apply for those internships, they need a portfolio of industry relevant work, by January.

This is a challenge because in those first classes they are, or should be, learning. And learning involves taking wrong turns and making mistakes. But there’s very little time for that when the outcome of those classes, in the form of portfolio projects, is perceived to be so crucial. Add to this that students believe (and they may be correct) that those projects must be fairly formulaic, they have to display fairly circumscribed processes and results.

In other words, they have to demonstrate professional expertise in design in sixteen weeks, and that demonstration has to look enough like everyone else’s’ expertise to be legible, but also, somehow, stand out.

We could summarize the situation neatly. “Students need to learn. Industry needs evidence they already know.” That’s true, but the situation isn’t quite that neat. These institutions of knowledge and work—like many institutions—seems to be drifting further apart, while the ground is also shaking,

Part of me wants to say “That’s not my problem.” And that’s true. It’s not. Or at least it shouldn’t be. I’m not being paid by industry to train to their workers. That’s not my job.

But part of me also feels a responsibility to the students.

About a quarter of these students have design degrees. The rest come from computer science, psychology, anthropology, sociology, and elsewhere. For most of them, this is their first design class.

Which is to say there’s a lot to learn of Design Fundamentals. There are ways to introduce these over that semester, so that students can work to develop them throughout the remainder of their graduate education. But those ways don’t always, or at least not easily, translate into a professional portfolio projects.

Yes, AI complicates this. Take a topic such as information hierarchy and how to convey that through typography. This is still important knowledge. There are many exercises to learn and practice those principles. At the same time, students can prompt a visual mockup in less than a minute. What would have previously taken students two to three hours of wrestling with a tool and exploring compositions is done in about the same amount of time it takes to flush a toilet. Are they missing out on learning? Absolutely. Does that matter for their jobs? I don’t know. From what I hear, maybe not.

Then there’s the character of contemporary design.

Increasingly, I find myself asking not simply whether students can do the work, but whether they should want to do the work.

So much of it is surveillance and extraction. One could reasonably argue that design has always been (at least in part) about seduction. But so much of design today is unabashedly surveillance and extraction. At least, so much of the work these students are off to do.

We don’t need 1000 pages to explain surveillance capitalism. I could just show you a few projects. It’s not just disappointing, it’s frankly scary and exhausting.

Of course, this isn’t all of design. But does seem to be a lot of UX design in Big Tech, which is where many of these students are off to.

And I’m well aware that the core and bulk of design has always been service to industry. I’m not here to naively damn design or UX.

I’m just sharing my uncertainty about what it is I’m supposed to be doing, while I’m taking a break from moving things around in the syllabus.

Maybe the simplest and most responsible thing for me to do is to stop teaching this class.

But I don’t want to, at least not yet.

The question that keeps swirling around in my head is “When institutions, expectations, and cultures drift, who gets to decide the way forward? And do we have to follow?”

…..

As I keep trying to redesign the course, I’m realizing that every iteration assumes something I no longer trust.

And I’ve come to conclusion that I’m making the same mistake I often tell students they’re making—I’m assuming we (I) have to teach (or design) to expectations. But we don’t.

In fact, maybe, part of my responsibility is not doing that.

…..

Now I have to remake the rubrics.

…..

By the way, if you happen to be a student taking my class, don’t worry. It’ll be great.

My computers have always been full of strange folders.

Not the useful ones. Everybody has those. I mean folders containing things I couldn’t quite explain why I saved. A sentence from a meeting. A photograph. Something a user said once. A question from a student. A phrase overheard in an airport. Most never became talks, papers, classes, or projects. Half the folder names stopped making sense six months after I created them.

I kept them anyway.

For years I assumed I was collecting ideas. Now I think I was collecting something else. Looking back, what strikes me is that most of these weren’t ideas. They were things I couldn’t stop thinking about. Often they were interruptions. Small disturbances in an otherwise coherent picture. Observations that seemed larger than the situation that produced them.

Things that followed me home.

Teaching produced moments like this constantly. One of the things I miss most about teaching isn’t teaching. It’s being interrupted. Not the ordinary interruptions—the student who arrives late, the laptop that won’t connect, the question about the assignment that was answered twenty minutes ago.

I mean the other kind.

A student asks something that initially sounds confused. The question doesn’t seem to belong to the discussion everyone else is having. You answer it as best you can and move on. Then ten minutes later you realize they’ve stepped on an assumption you didn’t know you were carrying. Sometimes the question changes the conversation. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes you aren’t really engaged with it until you’re walking home afterward. The value wasn’t that the student was right. Often they weren’t.

The value was that they weren’t me.

Looking back, a surprising amount of my professional life depended on encounters like this. Engineers asked questions that seemed backwards. Executives worried about things I thought were irrelevant. Anthropologists, designers, marketers, and software developers routinely used the same words to mean entirely different things. Looking back, I spent less time generating ideas than I did recovering from other people’s.

The older I get, the more suspicious I become of things that make perfect sense immediately.

Most of the ideas that have stayed with me started somewhere messier: a question that lingered longer than it should, an observation that resisted explanation, a comparison that felt wrong and useful at the same time. The important part isn’t understanding it immediately.

The important part is that it keeps working on you after the encounter itself is over. Which is probably why I found the first generation of large language models so interesting. Not because they were intelligent. Certainly not because they were reliable. Usually they were neither.

But every now and then they produced something that felt oddly larger than the conversation that generated it. A comparison I wouldn’t have made. A question arriving from an unexpected angle. A line of thought that wandered somewhere I hadn’t intended to go.

I remember spending part of an afternoon talking with one of the early models about organizational change. At some point it drifted into a comparison with migratory birds.

The comparison was ridiculous.

Also, not entirely wrong.

I spent the next hour thinking about it. Not because I believed organizations behave like birds. They don’t. But because the comparison illuminated something I hadn’t been seeing. The value wasn’t in the answer. It was in the pause.

There used to be a BBQ restaurant in East Palo Alto whose reviews split almost perfectly between “terrible” and “best meal I’ve had all year.” Which made me want to go immediately. The disagreement was the signal. Something interesting was happening there, whether the restaurant was good or not. I found myself thinking about the reviews for days afterward..

These days I can usually predict the rating before I open the page. The McDonald’s has a respectable score. The airport Marriott has a respectable score. Most places have a respectable score. The platform improved. The surprises became harder to find.

Lately I’ve found myself wondering whether something similar happens whenever a system becomes exceptionally good at understanding us. The recommendations get better. The responses get better. The fit gets better.

Increasingly, the AI systems I use understand not only what I’m working on but how I tend to think about it. The metaphors feel familiar. The directions often resemble directions I was already considering. The machine has become remarkably good at inhabiting my frame.

Most of the time that’s exactly what I need.

But it has also made me realize that some of the things I value most didn’t arrive as answers. They arrived as observations I couldn’t quite place.

That’s why I keep coming back to those folders. The fragments. The odd observations. The things that seemed larger than themselves. Most of them mattered because they resisted immediate explanation. I’ve started thinking that what I was really collecting wasn’t ideas at all. It was observations that didn’t fit categories, and so hadn’t finished becoming knowledge. They stayed unresolved long enough to attach themselves to something else: a paper, a conversation, a class, a problem I hadn’t encountered yet.

They needed time.

The folders are still there. They don’t make complete sense. Things that followed me home. Things I couldn’t quite place. Some of them took years to attach themselves to anything. I think they needed that time.

What I’ve started wondering is whether our newest tools will become so good at helping me place things that fewer linger long enough to work on me.

[Slightly cropped photo from a Matthew Yapchaian original.]

I wrote about Carrer del Consell de Cent in Barcelona, but it’s not that there aren’t special places like that closer to home. There’s a place just as special down the street: the Lake Claire Community Land Trust.

When we moved into the neighborhood about two decades ago, we knew it was there. But we didn’t really know what “it” was. The land trust was described to us as “sort of like a park” and “sort of like a commune.” Both of those statements were sort of right, but also not really.

The Lake Claire Community Land Trust is just under two acres, about the size of 6 contiguous city plots. It’s bordered by streets on its South, East, and West sides, and along its North side by houses. Two of the streets (East and West) are standard fare neighborhood streets with typical Atlanta bungalows, most from the mid 1900s. The South edge overlooks Dekalb Avenue, which is a thoroughfare that runs through the city. On the other side of Dekalb Ave is a MARTA train line and a freight line (MARTA is the Atlanta public transit system).

In the early 80s the land belonged to MARTA, owned as part of its eastside line. A few neighbors in the Lake Claire neighborhood thought it would be ideal space for the community, once cleared of the raging kudzu that engulfed everything. So, when the land went up for auction in 1986, they bought it.

Today the land trust has over 50 community garden plots, a bandshell, a playground, a three-season kitchen and outdoor gathering space, a pond, trails that ramble through the land trust, and perched on top of a ridge overlooking Dekalb Avenue, two tall wooden chairs that require steps to ascend. The garden plots are mostly used by neighbors to grow vegetables or flowers. You can host children’s birthday parties there or weddings. Classes are occasionally offered, and you can propose a class to teach using the spaces and buildings onsite. There are monthly gatherings and events of different kinds (yes, drum circles, and also, this month, a death café). Every day, people wander through the land trust, sometimes for a cooler place to gather in the brutal Summer heat, sometimes as a more pleasant path to the train station a few blocks away, sometimes alone, sometimes as couples or more.

Living at the other end of the street, you almost wouldn’t know it’s there. Some of my neighbors have never been or been only once or twice. Others are there every day.

Teenagers from the surrounding neighborhoods frequent the land trust in the afternoon and early evening. It’s a place for them to go and hang out where they don’t need to spend any money. “Going to watch the sunset at the land trust” is practically a euphemism for “Going to get high.” They do actually watch the sunset. Most evenings there’s several teens sitting in those tall wooden chairs perched on the ridge. Most of them don’t seem to notice the chairs face more south than west.

There’re many ways to describe the land trust, what it offers, and its value. It’s not really public space in the usual conventions of that term, but it’s a space that’s intentionally been made public and there’s value in that, for the opportunity to freely gather.

For me, there’s two other values of the land trust that make is so special.

One is that the land trust offers respite.

This comes in many forms. It’s respite from the heat, from the blaze of the Summer sun and the shimmering heat islands of concrete and rail just 100 feet away. It’s respite from incessant noise, though you can still hear cars and trains, their sounds are muffled and mixed with those of trees, birds, insects, dogs, and conversation. It’s respite from the pace of hustle. The land trust is a slow place, it’s meandering, there’s nothing to gain from being there other than being there.

It’s also respite from the dominant and domineering ideals that characterize so many cities. Despite its important place in the history and ongoing struggle of civil rights, and despite its claim of striving to be the “Beloved City,” Atlanta is a city that regularly chooses commerce over care and community, with rampant gentrification and displacement, and little commitment to anything that might resemble a public good. The land trust offers a reprieve from those ideals, while also being part of, embedded within, that same city.

What the land trust also offers is a demonstration that making our worlds otherwise is possible.

It’s not a prototype of what might be. It actually is, and it actually works. What began as the imagination of a handful of people became, with significant and ongoing effort, something we can experience, a world we can inhabit.

What’s more, it shows us that such experiments in living otherwise can endure.

Will the land trust last forever? No. But it’s already lasted for forty years. That’s longer than almost all the businesses nearby. That’s almost as long as the mall a few miles away, which opened in 1965 but since 2020 has stood empty and decrepit. Just about 2 miles down Dekalb Ave, what used to be an abandoned lot about the size of the land trust is now a subscription dog park, with shiny camper trailers (that never move) selling beer and tacos while dogs run around on astroturf and their owners mingle, for about $20 a visit. I wonder how long that will last?

It can be dangerous to wax poetic about the land trust and other places like it. There’s an allure and intimacy to the local and small-scale that can be misleading. At the same time, dismissing such places and organizations because of their local-ness and because their inability or resistance to scaling can also be dangerous.

How those residents came to buy that land is an important story.

The Lake Claire Community Land Trust is an institution. A legal organization. It exists because of other institutions. The folks who bought the land weren’t real estate developers. They didn’t have ready access to capital. Purchasing a kudzu covered lot for some vague community use wasn’t the sort of venture most banks would be clamoring to back. What’s more the Lake Claire neighborhood was, at that time, a redlined neighborhood, making it deliberately difficult for residents to secure bank loans.

But it so happened that a few years prior, the BOND community credit union was established one neighborhood over (in Little 5 Points), in part to help provide loans to residents. Some of the founders of the land trust had loans from BOND, so there was an already existing formal relationship. Even still, a ragtag gaggle of Lake Claire residents (frankly, hippies) weren’t necessarily the ideal buyer for MARTA, and they knew this.

To make themselves legitimate to MARTA, they formed the Lake Claire Community Land Trust before the land was ever purchased, establishing themselves as a civic entity that would be legible to the transit authority, or at least more understandable and authentic than the motley group they actually were. The structure of the land trust as a legal entity that aligned with the norms and expectations of a civic organization, together with the community credit union as a recognized and accessible source of funding, made possible the purchase of the land, and what we know today as the Lake Claire Community Land Trust.

Sometimes, institutions have to be made for other institutions to come into being.

And that work of building and sustaining institutions, is, well….work.

We often forget that. With enough time (which turns out to be very little time, really) the work disappears and is replaced by our experience of the place.

Three years ago the intersections along Consell de Cent in Barcelona were cordoned off with orange fencing. This summer the orange fencing was gone and the plants were larger. The arguments over the Superilles had mostly gone quiet and the memory of all that advocacy and all those negotiations and compromises was fading.

Of course, the work continues still. It always continues (until it doesn’t and things fall apart).

At the land trust there are volunteer days, board meetings, budget reviews, and disagreements. Institutions don’t sustain themselves any more than they make themselves.

I think it’s important to remember that, to acknowledge the work that goes into these sorts of places…what had to happen before a place like Consell de Cent or the Lake Claire Community Land Trust could be there, what has to keep happening.

Along with appreciating the plants and paths, the shade and respite, it’s worth appreciating the work of making and sustaining these places. It’s an important kind of noticing.

Photo Credit: From The Lake Claire Community Land Trust website. Photographer unknown (but if you know, let me know).
https://www.lcclt.org/miscellaneous

You can learn more about The Lake Claire Community Land Trust here:
https://www.lcclt.org

“Needs stronger empirical grounding.”

I kept running into the phrase.

Reviewer comments. Conference abstracts. Grant proposals. Research decks with titles like “Behavioral Insights” and “Evidence Framework.” LinkedIn posts written in the careful professional tone people use when trying to sound both optimistic and rigorous at the same time.

Sometimes the phrase attached itself to computational methods. Search analysis. Sentiment modeling. Large-scale scraping. Sometimes it just meant charts. Not always. But often enough that after a while the word itself started sounding slightly different. I found myself listening less to what people meant than to the work the word seemed to be doing.

Empirical. Heavier somehow. More administrative.

What finally stuck in my head was an anthropologist describing a study of search behavior as helping provide “more empirical grounding” for conversations about the discipline’s future. The work itself was thoughtful. Perfectly reasonable. But I kept thinking about the phrasing.

Watching what people search for is obviously empirical. So is telemetry from laptops and phones. Darwin counting finches was empirical. Margaret Mead sitting with islanders was empirical too.

For years, research teams I worked on used pretty much every digital method we could get access to. Telemetry. Interaction traces. Location data. Sentiment analysis. Sensor tagging. Visualizations designed to help people see patterns they otherwise wouldn’t notice. We were constantly experimenting with new tools, usually before anyone had agreed on what counted as good practice with them.

At one point we tagged laptops, backpacks, and phones with sensors to better understand how devices moved around in their homes. One finding that got a surprising amount of executive attention was that people were taking laptops to bed with them at night. Execs loved this one. It showed up in talks for years.

The recession was still reshaping work. Jobs felt unstable. Social media was beginning to blur older boundaries between professional and personal identity. People were reconnecting with former coworkers, checking freelance requests from other time zones, trying to maintain weak ties in case something collapsed. LinkedIn still felt vaguely humiliating then. A little desperate. MySpace somehow even more so.

The laptop in bed was partly about email. But it also seemed connected to anxiety, employability, and the slow disappearance of any stable boundary between being a worker and being a person.

I gradually stopped asking which method was better. I started paying attention to when they refused to agree. The telemetry mattered. The fieldwork mattered. The interviews mattered. The visualizations mattered too. We often used visualizations as boundary objects because patterns became easier to discuss once people could actually see them.^[1] Some of us built careers on learning how to make lived situations travel upward through organizations.

A few years later, when I was teaching at Princeton, we experimented with synthetic interlocutors. What has stayed with me wasn’t whether the synthetic participants were “realistic.” It was how quickly they became useful alongside interviews, telemetry, and observational work as another way of seeing the same situation. The gaps between those ways of seeing often turned out to be more informative than any one of them alone.

A slide titled “Voice of the Customer” contains no actual human voice.

A participant crying during an interview becomes “elevated emotional friction.”

Exhaustion becomes “workflow inefficiency.”^[2]

The graph enters the room and wins.

Not long ago, during a research review, somebody asked whether an emotional response we had observed was “statistically meaningful.” The conversation paused for a second. Not because the question was outrageous. Mostly because everybody understood what was being asked while also sensing, faintly, that something slightly odd had just entered into the discussion.

The question itself made practical sense. Organizations make decisions across large groups of people, and large groups require representations that can move upward. A spreadsheet moves quickly.

Some stories do too.

Execs repeated the laptops-in-bed finding for years because it condensed a much larger shift into something portable. Personas worked similarly. They were abstractions, obviously, but good personas preserved enough texture that teams could use them to make coherent decisions over time. People referred to them in meetings as if they were mildly difficult coworkers who had stepped out for coffee.^[3]

By then I'd started watching for the places where different ways of seeing the same situation refused to settle into a single story.

The same language started showing up in wildly different places.

The sciences dean presents retention metrics while faculty are trading unofficial lists of students they’re worried about but want to keep outside the university reporting structure.

A farmer is using drone imaging, sensor readings, predictive weather models, and soil telemetry while quietly ignoring parts of the recommendation system because the land behaves differently along one edge of the property where runoff changed after a road expansion ten years ago. The models are sophisticated—often impressively so—but precision agriculture turns out to involve a surprising amount of inherited local knowledge, grudges against weather patterns, and remembering where water used to sit before the county rerouted drainage in the late 1990s.

The useful moments often arrived when the methods stopped agreeing. Telemetry showing stable engagement while participants quietly taught each other workaround behaviors to survive a platform. Survey responses describing satisfaction while interviews drifted toward exhaustion or resignation. Sentiment analysis suggesting dissatisfaction while field observations showed people deeply attached to a device they still complained about constantly.

The contradictions weren't something to explain away. They were often where the situation became visible.

Those moments rarely came from a single dataset or interview or dashboard arriving with the answer already inside it. They usually appeared in the friction between different ways of seeing the same situation. The places where the dashboard and the interview and the workaround and the story refused to line up cleanly.^[4]

I think about conversations with my doctor over the years. Same office. Same guy for more than two decades. He used to talk occasionally, half amused and half exhausted, about how much of medicine had become documentation. New reporting systems. Insurance templates. Required categories. Symptoms translated into codes that could move through insurance billing.

Last time I saw my doctor, he spent most of the appointment facing the screen. Not because he was inattentive. Mostly because the visit itself now had to pass through layers of required documentation while it was still happening.

At one point he stopped typing and asked me whether something had still been bothering me from the previous year. The question had nothing to do with the template on the monitor. I remember the conversation changing immediately once he asked it.

Not less empirical exactly. Probably more.

But it produced the kind of knowledge that moves slowly. The kind that depends on familiarity, accumulated context, noticing hesitation, remembering what somebody sounded like before things got worse.

The screen stayed open between us the whole time.

Photo Credit:
Home From Work From Home
Søren Anderson

^[1] Susan Leigh Star and James Griesemer’s idea of “boundary objects” feels right for here. Their whole point was that people often coordinate through shared artifacts without fully agreeing on what those artifacts actually mean. In practice, a surprising amount of institutional life works this way. (Star and Griesemer, “Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations,’ and Boundary Objects,” 1989.)

^[2] Marilyn Strathern and Michael Power both spent years circling versions of this problem. Audit systems don’t just measure organizations. Over time they reshape what organizations learn to recognize as legitimate evidence in the first place. People eventually start speaking back to institutions in the language the systems can absorb. (Strathern, Audit Cultures, 2000; Power, The Audit Society, 1997.)

^[3] Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star remain useful partly because they treated categories and classification systems as active infrastructure rather than neutral description. Categories coordinate action. They also quietly rearrange what becomes visible inside institutions and what disappears into the background. (Sorting Things Out, 1999.)

^[4] Donna Haraway’s “situated knowledges” gets at something the contradictions kept teaching me. Her argument was that objectivity doesn’t come from a single view from above, the one that pretends to see everything from nowhere. It comes from holding partial, located, sometimes incompatible views together and refusing to collapse them into one. The friction isn’t a failure of method. It’s where the knowledge actually lives. (Haraway, “Situated Knowledges,” 1988.)

This Summer, I spent six weeks living in Barcelona. That means I’ll probably be writing about Barcelona for the next six months. Please bear with me.

Carrer del Consell de Cent is one of many streets in Barcelona transformed into a pedestrian thoroughfare. On any given night, families are lining up for ice cream at a shop in one of the intersections turned into a plaza. An older couple strolls hand-in-hand and a gaggle of children rowdily chase a ball. Performers with their makeup done but not yet in costume are chatting on a bench while a young woman sits alone reading on the next bench over. Restaurants and bars have tables set outside, spilling into the middle of what used to be a street, overflowing with people eating, drinking, and laughing.

I sat at one of those bars about a decade ago, with a table set precariously on the curb as cars whisked by. This evening, and every evening now, the street is still bustling, but with people, not cars.

Some say you can’t change the car culture of modern cities, that the politics and infrastructure make it too difficult. But Barcelona proves otherwise—you can, at least a little bit. Carrer del Consell de Cent is part of the Superilles (Superblocks) program, an ongoing experiment to transform the city. As Salvador Rueda, the former Director of the Urban Ecology Agency of Barcelona, described, “We want these public spaces to be areas where one can exercise all citizen rights: exchange, expression and participation, culture and knowledge, the right to leisure.”

You can see, hear, and feel those rights in all their exuberance and messiness on Carrer del Consell de Cent. You’re energized in the moment and, afterward, left with a sense of possibility: this is what a city can be like.

Such a sense of possibility is crucial for a vibrant society. Through it, we recognize how else we could organize our activities, spaces, and institutions. And we don’t just see this from afar. We participate in it. We walk down the street and we become part of that environment, making that vision of a city real. In doing so, we manifest difference. We create and demonstrate other ways of living together.

But such a sense of possibility is also increasingly difficult to come by. Our social, political, and environmental problems are rampant. This leads to feelings of pessimism and cynicism. It’s easy to disparage experiences such as walking down Carrer del Consell de Cent as mere blips, glitches in otherwise unpleasant and overbearing conditions. I can hear someone reading this saying, “Even if there are a few nice streets like that in Barcelona, well, that’s Barcelona…most cities are still really unfriendly…and anyway, there’s a lot of problems with the Superblocks too.”

Such a sense of possibility is also increasingly difficult to come by because the marketplace of ideas is monotonous and conservative, more and more dictated by the actual market economy. Distinctiveness is either shunned or made generic to scale and sell better. This perspective feeds into cynicism about the unescapable recuperation of all things into commodities.

Although the feelings of pessimism and cynicism are understandable, they stunt us. They thwart us from appreciating the people and places that are making a difference, by making things different. If we want a vibrant society, we need to make, experience, and value experiments like Carrer del Consell de Cent because they offer alternatives that move us.

Admittedly, when I hear the word “alternative,” I cringe. It reminds me of awkward youth culture. It feeds back into cynicism because so much of what was once “alternative” quickly ended up in shopping malls and is now available online alongside everything else.

But the word is actually meaningful. It marks something as distinctive, unconventional, and an option. We just need to let go of our expectations.

We expect alternatives to be lasting and, at the same time, to continue to be novel. We expect alternatives to have significant effect, to collide with the status quo and change it—but not to lose its edge in that collision. In other words, we expect alternatives to succeed without changing. We expect alternatives to be uncompromised. We expect alternatives to be spectacular.

These are unreasonable expectations.

Maybe when I cringe at hearing the word “alternative,” what I should be cringing at are my dogmatic beliefs. Maybe this is true for many of us.

If we let go of these expectations, we find ourselves surrounded by remarkable ways of living that can inform and inspire us.

Of course, there are very real and significant problems with the Superblocks—not the least of which is tourism. Of course, we can’t simply replicate what happens in Barcelona in Sante Fe or Atlanta or Minneapolis, or London. Of course, these 800 words or so gloss over the immense amount of work that went into making strolling down Carrer del Consell de Cent possible: the lobbying, the negotiation, the spending, the labor to tear up and remake streets and the labor to maintain these remade streets.

But also, and at the same time, we shouldn’t discount the possibility that, through all that work, some things can be made otherwise.

I logged back into LinkedIn after a brief absence and discovered anthropology had become empathy.

This apparently happened while I was away.

At first I thought maybe it was one isolated post. But then it appeared again. And again. By Thursday empathy had spread into executive leadership discourse, AI futures, organizational resilience, and something called “human-centered transformation,” which sounded faintly threatening.

One post cited a World Economic Forum report listing empathy as a critical future workforce skill. Another explained that anthropology trains people in empathy, deep listening, flexibility, systems thinking, and human understanding. Somewhere around the third mention I began to feel like an anthropologist wandering into a village where everyone suddenly worships a small ceramic object labeled EMPATHY™ now available for enterprise teams.

This surprised me because I had apparently missed several major developments in the field.

Bronisław Malinowski: stakeholder engagement specialist.

Margaret Mead: leadership empathy strategist.

Clifford Geertz: customer journey architect.

Victor Turner: liminality onboarding consultant.

Marcel Mauss: psychological safety thought leader.

Evans-Pritchard (The Nuer): frictionless collaboration framework.

The thing is, anthropology traditionally studied kinship systems, rituals, classification structures, exchange networks, symbolic orders, bureaucracies, infrastructures, cosmologies, colonial entanglements, and the strange ways societies convince themselves their arrangements are natural.

Somewhere along the line this appears to have become:
“really good listening skills.”

Now, to be fair, anthropologists do often listen carefully to people. Sometimes for years. Occasionally in stackable chairs. But this is a little different from saying anthropology is empathy, in the same way geology occasionally involves hydration but is not itself water.

Still, empathy continued spreading.

Soon it appeared in innovation discourse.

Empathy maps.
Empathy journeys.
Empathetic leadership.
Empathetic AI.
Empathy-driven organizational transformation.
Somewhere, presumably, empathetic blockchain.

At one point I encountered “radical empathy,” which sounded less like anthropology than a wellness tincture sold in a dark bottle near the cash register of a bookstore that also sells crystals.

What fascinated me most was not the word itself but where it kept appearing.

Banks now apologize empathetically.

Airlines thank us empathetically while stranding us on the runway for six hours with one packet of almonds.

Universities hold empathetic listening sessions while adjunct faculty assemble IKEA bookshelves between classes.

Apps gently validate our frustrations while extracting every measurable human impulse into a dashboard.

The more incapable institutions become of changing material conditions, the more emotionally articulate they seem to become.

It’s possible empathy has become a kind of atmospheric coating sprayed lightly over systems that would otherwise appear openly hostile.

Like lemon polish on a filing cabinet.

And maybe that’s why anthropology getting folded into empathy language feels so strange to me.

Anthropology was never mainly about agreeing with people, affirming people, or emotionally mirroring people. Quite often anthropologists encountered systems that were confusing, unequal, irrational, contradictory, violent, beautiful, incomprehensible, or all six at once.

The point was not:
“How does this individual feel?”

The point was often:
“What strange arrangement of meanings, habits, rituals, institutions, incentives, histories, and assumptions made this world seem normal to the people inside it?”

Even Geertz’s famous “webs of significance” were webs. Not feelings.

But feelings scale better on LinkedIn.

“Anthropology is empathy” sounds wonderful in a leadership seminar. It fits comfortably beside adaptability, storytelling, systems thinking, and collaborative innovation. It travels well in slide decks.

“Anthropology notices that your organization’s underlying reward structure quietly produces the behavior you claim to oppose” tends to clear an executive meeting room, even when there is free lunch buffet.

At any rate, I remain fascinated by this new empathy-based anthropology and hope to learn more about it.

I assume there will be a workshop.
I assume it will be very moving.

We want to believe there are ways of moving through the world uncorrupted. The best it seems we can do is try to live in good relations, knowing that all relations are messy.

A few weeks ago, one of my favorite restaurants posted a message to social media: they had inadvertently accepted funding from Flock Safety, a “public safety technology” company that’s become massively successful selling and installing surveillance cameras in cities around the United States, tracking cars and people, providing the data to law enforcement and other organizations.

The restaurant began about a decade ago, small, tucked into what had been a long-abandoned corner in the neighborhood. With time it became beloved. Good food, drinks, and outdoor seating. Many afternoons and evenings a line stretches around the block and people take their time, especially when the weather’s nice, which it often is. So, they opened a second location, which was also successful. And when they wanted to open a third location, they took out a loan. They tried to do what they believed was the right thing, to take a loan from a local investment company, comprised of local funders. They were unaware that Flock Safety was one of those local funders. It was only after the loan was secured that they became aware that Flock Safety was, now, a significant investor in that loan, in their business.

Residents where the first restaurant is located are currently contesting the city installing Flock cameras in their neighborhood. The founder himself is “no supporter of Flock, and staunchly anti-ICE.”

And yet, here we are. Despite the efforts of trying to do the right thing.

The situation is relatable.

Perhaps we aren’t seeking a loan to start a restaurant or some other business, perhaps we’re doing something much more mundane. Regardless, our systems of resources and exchange are fraught, intentionally complex and opaque.

Sometimes, all we can do is to acknowledge the situation after the fact, forthright and culpable, and take steps towards trying to make it right, once again. Over and over again.

This isn’t an abdication of responsibility. It’s a story about accountability. In trying to be accountable, we choose to make ourselves answerable for our actions, to those we are in relationships with. And this is incredibly difficult because of how knotted and snared our institutions and system are.

Anna Tsing talks about this as contamination: living in worlds in which nothing exists in isolation. ^[1] Instead of imagining worlds in which we can stand outside of compromised institutions and systems, she asks how we might learn to live responsibly within these entanglements, recognizing that collaboration, survival, and even care often emerge from damaged conditions.^[2]

We see this in small, everyday ways. The coffee we drink ties us to colonial history and global trade. Algorithms shape our moods. The air in our cities carries pollution and wildfire smoke from far away. Our favorite spot for tacos and margaritas is funded by private equity, including money from Flock Safety.

Calling this “contamination” isn’t about making excuses for harm. It’s about describing the situations where we have to be responsible. If purity is impossible, then responsibility can’t mean avoiding entanglement, it means figuring out how we act within it.

A neighborhood restaurant may be less entangled and less consequential than other examples, but its everydayness is important because that’s where we dwell, that’s where we encounter these complicities and contradictions.

The owner of the restaurant was contrite. He accepted responsibility, shunned the source of the funding, and committed to paying off the loan as quickly as possible. Publicly. Some responded with support, others with indignation. Should he have known? Yes. Was he naïve? Perhaps. Is he without blame? No.

But being accountable in these situations doesn’t mean you’re innocent. It means you’re willing to remain visible and answer for your actions, even after things get complicated.

Meanwhile, the Thriving Cities fund, to which Flock Safety contributes, continues to promote its support of small businesses in the redevelopment of South Downtown. They continue to sell a story, not of accountability, but of access and opportunity made possible by capital, of prosperity and flourishing made possibly by surveillance. They don’t seem to be at all concerned about the indignation, about the repudiation. They’ve bought something by association, even if that association is resisted. They—like so many corporations—seem to know they’re living in contaminated conditions and making the most of it.

There’s a fantasy in contemporary politics and consumer culture: if we research enough, boycott enough, optimize enough, we can become unentangled. Too often, we think of ethics as a problem of distance: if we can avoid the bad actor or detach from the compromised institution, we might emerge intact. But there’s no outside position from which to remain untouched. The problem isn’t that we become entangled. The problem is pretending we’re not already entangled.

^[1] Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015).

^[2] Another excellent book on this topic of “compromised conditions” is from Alexis Shotwell. Reading Tsing and Shotwell remind us, this is nothing new. That reminder is important. Alexis Shotwell, Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016).

Image Source: John Ramspott, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Not a portfolio. Not a set of side projects. More like a record of small irritations he had decided not to keep living with.

A pitch-tracking app for his son. A high school course planner pulled out of an 83-page PDF the district apparently believes someone is reading. A version of YouTube with most of YouTube removed. A way to watch Mariners games in Portland, despite rules that say he can’t.

He sent it because he thought it was funny. It had accumulated.

He is not a programmer. Sociologist by training. Works at a tech company. Builds these things in the evenings after dinner using what he called “vibe coding,” which seems to mean the threshold for making software has dropped enough that you don’t have to think of yourself as someone who makes software.

At first glance, the list reads like hobby. Or productivity. Or the kind of quiet personal optimization people don’t usually admit to.

Eight things. None of them dramatic.

Then you look again.

The course planner shows four years at once. Boxes you can actually move. Requirements that don’t disappear into footnotes halfway down page 47.

The YouTube version opens to a blank screen. No recommendations. No autoplay. Just a search bar and the videos he already knows he wants.

The Mariners game plays as if the blackout rule never existed.

Nothing has been fixed.

And yet, each one changes the terms on which something else is allowed to operate.

It’s easy to name this and move on.

Hobby. Workflow. Personal tooling.

Those names let the whole thing slide back into the category of “guy with projects,” which feels incomplete somehow. But I kept coming back to it.

The course catalog still sorts students. Tracks, prerequisites, eligibilities. That structure hasn’t gone anywhere. But now it sits inside something that can be moved around. The sorting still happens. Just not in only one direction.

YouTube still runs. The same videos, the same infrastructure. But it no longer gets to decide how attention is assembled in that room.

The blackout rule still exists. It hasn’t been challenged or overturned. It just stops applying, there, in that moment.

None of this is unprecedented. People have always found ways to live alongside systems that don’t quite fit. Rewriting forms. Ignoring rules selectively. Carrying unofficial practices next to official ones.^[1]

What feels different here is that this is just somebody tinkering in their house after dinner.

Not around the system.

Inside it.

At home. Without much ceremony. By someone who wouldn’t describe what he’s doing as political and would probably be uncomfortable if you did.

There’s a familiar way of describing this kind of activity. You encounter a system. You navigate it. Maybe improve it. Reduce friction. The system remains what it was.

That description works fine right up until you actually look at what changed.

He didn’t improve YouTube. He changed what YouTube does in his living room.

The course catalog wasn’t understood more clearly. The situation it created—someone trying to piece together a four-year plan from a document built for administrative use—was replaced with something else.

The blackout rule still defines who is allowed to watch what, and where. But the situation in which it applies has been rerouted.^[2]

After that, it’s hard to look at the list the same way. Less like a set of projects. More like someone deciding, piece by piece, which parts of these systems get to live in his house.

There’s a long-standing argument buried in infrastructure and classification work that systems like this don’t just describe the world. They arrange it. They decide, quietly, what counts and what doesn’t before anyone shows up to use them.^[3]

You don’t usually notice that arrangement.

You notice it when fitting starts to cost you something.

Or when you stop fitting at all.

These adjustments are narrow. They don’t travel well. They depend on time, access, and a certain proximity to the system itself. The kinds of advantages that are unevenly distributed and likely to stay that way. The systems that matter most are still mostly untouchable. Housing. Healthcare. Decisions you don’t really get to refuse.

Their rules still prevail.

Which makes this moment harder to place.

Something has become adjustable.

Just not evenly.

And not where it would matter most.

There’s a version of design that announces itself. It stages an intervention. It makes a case.

This isn’t that.

No one is staging anything here. It’s just a guy trying to watch baseball.

Still, it’s not an entirely different thing.

The course planner changes who controls the pace of a family’s planning conversation. The stripped-down YouTube changes how attention gets composed. The VPN shifts where a boundary holds.

Each move is small. The kind of thing you barely notice while it’s happening.

But together they unsettle an assumption these systems rely on: that once they enter a household, they arrive intact.^[4]

We don’t quite know what to do with this when it happens this way. The louder versions at least make themselves visible. This one tends to disappear into the background. Registered, if at all, as someone who built a few things to make life easier.

It keeps the work from being counted. It makes it harder to see what, exactly, has started to change.

Somewhere in Portland, a baseball game is playing in a living room it technically isn’t supposed to be in.

Eight small adjustments in one house. Nothing that would register with the systems involved.

And still, it is enough to suggest these systems are maybe not arriving quite as intact as they once did.

^[1] Michel de Certeau would probably recognize some of this. His whole argument about “tactics” was basically that people keep finding ways to operate inside systems they don’t control, usually without permission and often without announcing it as politics (The Practice of Everyday Life, 1984).

^[2] This also brushes up against Paul Dourish’s long-running push to think about computation less as interface and more as lived arrangement. Not screens exactly. Situations. Habits. What systems end up doing in practice once they arrive somewhere. (Where the Action Is, 2001; The Stuff of Bits, 2017).

^[3] Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star remain useful here because they treated classification systems as active infrastructure rather than neutral description. Categories do things. Usually quietly. You mostly notice them when they stop fitting your life very well (Sorting Things Out, 1999).

^[4] Carl DiSalvo’s work sits somewhere nearby too, though his examples tend to be more public and deliberately political. What’s happening here feels smaller, more domestic, less interested in announcing itself. Still, the family resemblance seemed worth mentioning (Adversarial Design, 2012).

AMI is being debated in City Hall, once again.

AMI, or Area Median Income, is a statistical measure marking the midpoint of income for a geographic region. Among other things, it’s used to determine access to housing services and programs. For instance, you might qualify for affordable housing if your income is below 80% of AMI.

In a sprawling region with massive income disparity—like Atlanta—AMI is a fraught measurement with immediate and significant material consequences. Often, AMI is based on another construct, the Metropolitan Statistical Area. For the Atlanta region, this includes the city proper and the surrounding suburbs. The effect is that the AMI skews high, which disproportionately impacts the most economically vulnerable.

Advocates for affordable housing debate the use and setpoint of AMI, arguing that it leaves low-income and working-class people behind because it doesn’t accurately reflect the economic conditions of a region. Some want AMI differentiated within a region, others want the AMI setpoint adjusted, while others argue against using AMI as the defining metric of need, and instead, argue for expanded understandings and measures of “affordability.”

The calculations of AMI may be complex, and housing policy may be obscure, but at the same time, they’re exemplary of situations that are simple and familiar. A tool or technique constructed to order and measure the world, perhaps even with good intentions, falls short and in the process causes harm. Because it’s embedded in our institutions and procedures, because it adheres to the standard worldview of how things work, it’s accepted and incredibly difficult to contest, let alone change.

This sort of situation is well-known to most of us.

It’s not just housing; it’s also healthcare, education, energy, and the environment, along with all manner of goods, services, and systems. Many of our institutions, including those meant to safeguard our well-being, are under stress. In some cases, they’re being dismantled. It’s also not just a problem for government and the public sector; it’s rampant throughout industry and all modes of work and commerce. Think of KPIs and the annual ritual of declaring objectives to be measured by, 12 months hence. Data and automation aren’t helping. Why wait for reflection when we can have real-time analytics and agentic operations?

What are we to do?

Especially since this isn’t a surprise. It’s not as if we don’t know….its not as if we haven’t tried…

We aren’t offering methods or frameworks to save us. That approach continues to be part of the problem.

We also aren’t offering the sort of comfort that comes from criticality one-step removed, because we’re part of the problem. We don’t mean that as blame. We mean that we’re part of these institutions and systems. We work within them.

What we’re offering are stories and reflections to think through this together and, along the way, perhaps learn. We’re interested in what it means to remain responsible under conditions where reform is insufficient, exit is unevenly available, and the work continues anyway.

And often, the work repeats.

Because AMI was debated at City Hall years ago.

Years ago, we were invited to work with residents, housing activists, and advocates to engage city council representatives, regional policy organizations, and philanthropy on the issues of AMI. We helped host a public forum, brought people together, prompted dialogue, and lively debate. We resolved nothing.

A cynical response would be to say none of it matters—not the participation, not the engagement, not the working for change. But such cynicism is a privilege of those who can afford to disengage.

We can’t afford to disengage. We also can’t rely on the strategies we’ve used before.

So, what are we to do?

Maybe the way to begin is by acknowledging these situations and working to better describe them. Not as critique. Nor toward reform or resolution. But as a way of pausing, in order to learn.

Because if we can disengage and we can’t rely on the strategies we’ve used before, we have to learn to see, and understand, and do differently.