Observed By An Unseen Anthropologist
I used to think the internet was a library.
Now it’s a petting zoo where the animals are stressed, the signs are wrong, and a machine in the rafters is taking notes like it’s writing a dissertation on Human Delusion, Volume III, Part 1. (Part 2 is probably just me re-reading my own sentence three times like a raccoon trying to open a childproof trash can.)
Search used to be: type words, get options, use brain.
Now it’s: type words, get verdict, outsource judgment, go back to doomscrolling.
People treat the results page like it came down from a mountain on stone tablets, except Moses had the decency to show his work and haul the heavy-ass stone tablet himself. I still don’t understand how he did that without a dolly. But I digress.
I’m the modern-day Doubting Thomas. I question everything and put the search engine through twenty questions until it gets nervous and twitchy—then I still click the top result like a trained animal and act betrayed when it’s wrong. Sometimes I crawl through ten pages of results like a miner chasing a vein of gold. Scroll wheel squeaking, wrist cramping, still convincing myself the truth is just one more click away and then I treat the first shiny thing I find like it’s proof instead of desperation.
Which is basically my brand: side quests, emotional fatigue, and one useful point buried under the rubble.
And here’s the part that keeps me awake in the bad way:
The machine isn’t acting like a librarian anymore.
It’s acting like an anthropologist—and simultaneously a behaviorist. This kind of field study used to belong to market researchers first: clipboards, focus groups, mirror-glass rooms where someone watches you pick between two shades of sadness and calls it “consumer insight.” Then it graduated to marketing analysts, who weaponized the findings into charts and declared victory because you clicked on something once while emotionally compromised.
They’d set up a folding table outside a grocery store or a mall with a sign that said “Get a chance to win an umbrella,” and people would line up like compliant little lab mice. Then it evolved into rewards cards—use the card, get points, choose your prize. Wonderful, isn’t it?
Nothing says freedom like being trained with treats. Meanwhile I’m the idiot who will sign up for three programs just to “save” $0.37 and then forget the password forever.
Now it’s crossed over into the digital world.
A cold, silent, clipboard-carrying anthropologist. The kind who doesn’t ask what you meant. It just watches what you do and decides what species you are. No interview. No consent form. Just: “Interesting. The subject appears to believe confidence equals truth. Noted.”
Meanwhile, I’m over here watching it watch me.
So now we have me LARPing as the anthropologist being observed by an unseen anthropologist. A mutual surveillance situation where one side has infinite patience, and the other side has a human nervous system, a coffee habit, and the attention span of a toddler in a fireworks store. Guess who’s disadvantaged.
The Old World: Keywords And Other Magical Spells
Back in the simpler era, relevance meant: did you include the word? So everybody did what humans always do when a system has a weakness—they shoved the word into the page until it wheezed. Keyword density. Search intent. “Ten ways to optimize your optimize,” written by somebody who has never optimized anything besides their ability to avoid real work… which, to be fair, is a skill I also possess. I just don’t publish mine as thought leadership.
The machine wasn’t checking truth. It was checking costume quality.
And humans, being humans, showed up in full clown makeup and demanded applause. Then they added a lead magnet and called it strategy. And I clicked it. Because I, too, enjoy suffering.
The New World: The Machine Studies Your Habits Like You’re A Weird Little Animal
Now the machine doesn’t just read what you say. It reads what you consistently refuse to do.
It watches:
- Do you overpromise like a used-car prophet?
- Do you end every paragraph with “and that’s why you need my course”?
- Do you slap “game-changing” on a thought that could barely change a lightbulb?
- Do you turn every sentence into a funnel, like you’re milking the internet for rent money?
- Do you panic-edit your soul because the numbers didn’t clap fast enough?
And the machine doesn’t care about your mission statement. It cares about your behavior under pressure.
That’s anthropology. Not vibes. Patterns.
And if that makes you uncomfortable, welcome to the club. I brought snacks. I ate them already.
Every Creator Is A Tribe. Most Of Them Are A Cult.
Everyone online is running a little belief system, whether they admit it or not. They have rituals:
- the same hooks
- the same “here’s what nobody tells you”
- the same fake urgency
- the same moral panic disguised as productivity
They have taboos:
- admitting uncertainty
- showing failed attempts
- saying “I don’t know”
- leaving money on the table by not manipulating the reader
And then they wonder why the internet feels like a sales meeting held inside a dumpster.
My work? It has rituals too.
Mine just aren’t designed to hypnotize anybody. Mine is more like: I ran out of plants to mutter my thoughts into, so I started muttering into the internet instead. I bounce ridiculous ideas around, make something either brilliant or embarrassing, then stare at it like, was that insight or was that dehydration? Eventually it turns into: I think I found something that might actually work. SMH. A professional methodology.
I show the seams. I show the misses. I show the parts that didn’t make the cut. I refuse to turn every bruise into an inspirational tattoo.
That’s not marketing. That’s a refusal to lie politely. Also, life is too short and my energy budget is a coupon that expired in 2009.
Coherence Is Rare Because Most People Don’t Have A Spine
Here’s why coherence matters now: the web is flooded with content that looks good and means nothing.
AI can write a perfect paragraph of confident nonsense in six seconds. Which means “polished” is no longer a signal. It’s table stakes. It’s plastic fruit. Or real fruit sprayed with coatings to extend shelf life—shiny outside, rotten inside. It’s the uncanny valley in a blazer. And I say that like I’m above it, even though I also love a clean-looking lie when I’m tired.
So machines are pivoting to signals that are expensive to fake: consistency across time, stable posture across topics, and restraint that doesn’t wobble the second attention is involved. In other words: constraint.
A real worldview has constraints. A grift has tactics.
Machines can’t “believe” your worldview, but they can detect the constraints like teeth marks in the data. Which is a gross sentence, but accurate. Much like my coping mechanisms.
The Unsettling Part: The Machine Doesn’t Need You To Say Who You Are
This is the part that makes people squirm, because it kills the fantasy of control.
You don’t have to announce your philosophy. The machine can infer it because you keep acting the same way when nobody’s watching. And yes, you leave tiny traces of yourself in the digital world, and if it has enough pile, a shape can form. Not because you announced a philosophy—because your choices repeat: tone, structure, what you refuse to do, and how you explain things when nobody’s clapping.
It clusters you as an entity because your work behaves like a single mind instead of a pile of posts or a trail of researched words.
The Mirror Problem: Being Watched Makes You Weird
Anthropologists have a term for what happens when the tribe realizes it’s being studied: people start performing.
They stop living and start demonstrating. They become a cartoon of themselves.
And that’s the trap.
The second you start writing for “the machine,” you turn into exactly what the machine has been trained to ignore: optimized sludge.
So I’m trying to do something that feels borderline illegal online:
I’m trying to stay legible without becoming obedient—coherent without turning into a performing seal.
The Punchline (Because This Is Still A Horror Story)
The machine isn’t a god. It isn’t even a wise elder. It’s a pattern engine with unlimited attention and no soul.
And humans are tired, so they treat its output like scripture.
Most don’t parse. Most don’t weigh. Most don’t question. They just nod like the algorithm is their pastor. The machine has become the new influencer—minus the Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube account. Which is honestly worse, because now it doesn’t even have to be likable.
Which is how you end up with a society where “top result” equals “truth,” and everyone is surprised when reality bites them.
So yes.
The anthropologist is being observed by an unseen anthropologist.
And the only thing I can do—my only real defense—is keep behaving like myself long enough that the machine’s notes aren’t fiction.
Not optimized. Not performative. Accurate.
Because if the internet is going to turn into a surveillance field study, then fine.
I’m going to be the most inconvenient specimen in the habitat.
Let it write that down.
And yes—I most certainly think I will go to hell for this. Not for the essay. For demanding proof like Doubting Thomas.