Alexa Hagerty | Substack

Anthropology of AI

Anthropologist and writer exploring how technology reshapes what it means to be human. Author of Still Life with Bones (Crown, 2023), a New York Times Editors’ Choice and New Yorker Best Books of the Year.

By Alexa Hagerty

· Launched 7 months ago

Fieldnotes from a writer and anthropologist on what it means to be human in the machine age. Author of Still Life with Bones, named a New York Times Editors' Choice and one of the New Yorker's Best Books of the Year. New book on the way.

Anthropology of AI

Posts

  1. Jun 18, 2026 once again, the critical lens of disability truly offers the most eloquent counter-logics to technosolutionism, technoutopianism, and technocracy

  2. Jun 18, 2026 Boston Review is my lighthouse in the storms of this current madness (sorry for nautical pun)

  3. Jun 18, 2026
    To find my home in one sentence, concise, as if hammered in metal. Not to enchant anybody. Not to earn a lasting name in posterity. An unnamed need for order, for rhythm, for form, which three words are opposed to chaos and nothingness. —Czeslaw Milosz, from THE COLLECTED POEMS, tr. with Robert Hass

  4. Jun 17, 2026 The moment we reach for machines to prove we're human, we've already conceded the thing we were trying to defend.

  5. Jun 16, 2026 One of the challenges of studying AI is that many of its harms unfold slowly. It's easier to point to a new product than a declining water table. It's easier to measure computing power than the gradual erosion of skills, livelihoods, or hopes for the future. Many of the consequences are diffuse, cumulative, and difficult to see. Photo by me: Trucks carrying chemicals for mining, Calama, Chile.

  6. Jun 10, 2026
    Did you know Claude is now running on a data center with a track record of serious environmental harm? Last month, Anthropic rented the full capacity of Colossus 1, the controversial Memphis data center owned by Elon Musk's SpaceXAI. The site has a record of illegal gas-turbine power generation, heavy water use, and air-pollution lawsuits, and sits two miles from a historically Black neighborhood that's fought industrial pollution for decades.

  7. Jun 7, 2026 the machine eats beauty and creativity The rest of the quote though … “There was a time when the machine ate in moderation from a plentiful larder and what it ate was replaced. Now the machine is eating faster.”

Anthropology of AI hit #76 Rising in Technology this week! I write here as much about being human as about technology. The ghosts in the machine, the old human questions wearing new clothes / code. About accounting in the Inca Empire, 19th century death masks and modern deepfakes. About digital doubles and the old dream of predicting the future.