"Our technological infrastructure alienates us from each other. No need to form a workplace community, everybody there will be out in a year or two, and so will you, looking for a better place"
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Douglas is doing something more unsettling than blaming “technology” for loneliness. She’s pointing to infrastructure as a quiet architect of morality: the material systems that make certain kinds of relationships feel irrational. In her framing, alienation isn’t a mood, it’s a design feature. When workplaces are built for churn - short tenures, constant hiring cycles, always-on job markets lubricated by tech - community stops being a virtue and starts looking like a bad investment.
The knife twist is her example: “No need to form a workplace community.” That’s not laziness, it’s adaptation. If everyone expects to be gone in a year, solidarity becomes sentimental, even risky. You withhold your full self, you network instead of befriending, you treat colleagues as temporary nodes. The subtext is that “better place” is the cultural placebo that keeps the system humming: mobility sold as freedom, while it quietly erodes the conditions that make collective life possible.
Contextually, Douglas’s anthropology is all over this: she studied how institutions shape what people consider normal, clean, safe, or proper. Here, technological infrastructure is an institution in disguise - not just tools, but the logistical reality (and ideology) of replaceability. The line lands because it refuses the comforting story that alienation is an individual failing. It’s structural, and it flatters you with choice while training you to expect disposability from everyone, including yourself.
The knife twist is her example: “No need to form a workplace community.” That’s not laziness, it’s adaptation. If everyone expects to be gone in a year, solidarity becomes sentimental, even risky. You withhold your full self, you network instead of befriending, you treat colleagues as temporary nodes. The subtext is that “better place” is the cultural placebo that keeps the system humming: mobility sold as freedom, while it quietly erodes the conditions that make collective life possible.
Contextually, Douglas’s anthropology is all over this: she studied how institutions shape what people consider normal, clean, safe, or proper. Here, technological infrastructure is an institution in disguise - not just tools, but the logistical reality (and ideology) of replaceability. The line lands because it refuses the comforting story that alienation is an individual failing. It’s structural, and it flatters you with choice while training you to expect disposability from everyone, including yourself.
Quote Details
| Topic | Technology |
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