What if our skills aren't our jobs?

I live in two professional worlds: the world of my academic research (specifically archaeology), and the world of content strategy and design. Both are going through similar conversations right now, about the future of the discipline at a time of precarity that doesn't look like it will end any time soon. There's a lot of worry, a lot of truly valid anxiety, and a lot of reasonable expression of struggle and frustration. It's really expensive to be alive right now, and we're absolutely justified to be angry and scared about that.

But what if all of this frustration can help us see that our expertise, our skills, our strengths, are sets of methods and practices that exist whether or not institutions value them? What if these complaints and pains are an exciting starting point for something better? Why is there a picture of a taco up there?

Feminist scholar Sara Ahmed talks about

Complaint as feminist pedagogy: to make a complaint within an institution is to learn about how institutions work...?To tell the story of a complaint made within an institution can be to tell another story about an institution.

She's written a whole book about complaint, but we're all busy people so at the very least, I recommend the transcript of her lecture on the topic, which grew into the book. It's about academia, but it's true of corporate institutions, too. What we complain about helps us form and affirm an alternative narrative of these places. The doors that are closed to us, she says, tell us about the structure. It's important to know about the structures we're in so we can find the limits of our power, and then decide what to do about it.

That's where we are right now in content, and it's also where we are in archaeology. If it's happening in those two places, then I suspect that many, many disciplines are going through similar existential crises. How many dozens, or hundreds of disciplines are asking: We love this work, and we're doing it in institutions that don't love us. What do we do now?

Sara Wachter-Boettcher wrote about this in her most recent newsletter, saying that "everywhere is a little bit shitty," not as a statement of despair, but one of hope. Because acknowledging shitty realities is the first step to constructing a more hopeful vision for ourselves. To finding our power, and finding out where that ends, so we can see where dashing ourselves on the rocks won't serve us.

And I'm also really hopeful, so here's a story about it.

I was at a conference in Belfast 2 weeks ago. I spotted someone who, in 2004, in response to my stated (and observable) despair that academia was hostile to my existence, said, "Jane, you should just be yourself for a living and get people to pay you." I said, "Audrey, that's not a thing!" I think I was a bit upset at her for saying that because what I really wanted was to be an academia. That was supposed to be my path.

So I spent 2 more years battling an institution that didn't want me. When they wouldn't read my work, I presented at international conferences. When they didn't want to have important conversations about our ethical responsibilities or colonizing past, I wrote articles or did items in the national media about those things. When they denied me teaching opportunities, I built community workshops for underserved kids.

I didn't teach kids that they should become archaeologists because it's not actually a very lucrative profession, I made them explicitly political. I told them how archaeology is a lens on the world, it's a way that you can interpret the material things around you and tell stories of people, including yourself. I wanted these young people, who were constantly told how the world was, in ways that let them know their place in it was always going to be proscribed by their class position, to know their stories about the world had worth. I wanted to show them that the skills they already had for observing material detail could also be a secret superpower called "archaeological interpretation."

My colleague and I ran a small, 6-week project for primary school kids. We deliberately took them to a site they'd be able to walk to on their own. We built a project that required no special tools, so they could do it without adult supervision if they wanted to. We focused, not on showing them how to "play at" being an archaeologist, but on using methods and practices in archaeology to show them that we, as adults, believe them to be legitimate thinkers, doers, and agents in the world.

We also chose a place that a lot of teenagers go and drink at night because we thought it would be fun if they had another story about this place, and we didn't want to diminish the contemporary social meaning and function this place would someday hold for them.

I don't know if any of them became archaeologists professionally. I don't care if they did. I hope they're making better money than archaeology pays. But what I hope is that, even for just that short time, they felt they had a right to interpret the world around them, and that they had the right to validate and affirm those narratives. Mostly, I hoped they had fun. That was my KPI: did they have fun? Great. We won. They're kids and kids deserve to spend some time with unrelated adults who are invested in their right to have fun.

Taking things out of the institution is fun. And fun can sometimes be enough.

That's the stuff I did. I took archaeology outside the institution that didn't want me, and I made it my own because I saw a chance and a need. It required different practices, methods, and metrics, but that's what broke it free from its limits. It was fun, and satisfying, and I found someone to fund the project, but I never found anyone who would pay me a living wage to do it full time.

So I found satisfying work in worlds that did, but that work has always informed it, and it's also a thing I'm still really proud of. But I still saw it as failure because I failed to convince the institution to love me.

When I came back to academia in 2019, I had a hard talk with myself: was I coming back for the work, or was a harboring a secret (even to myself) desire to "try again" to fit into an institution, even knowing that institutions are generally hostile to neurodivergent women with spicy personalities and a strong urge to kick down doors and yell "Hey, everyone! You have value!" from the rooftops, to my personal and professional detriment?

Thankfully, it was the former, and not the latter. I can say with 100% confidence that I am doing my PhD because I want to go deep on a topic that's weird and messy, and the PhD credential will help me do more projects later if I want to. Having an academic affiliation opens doors to me, and doing it part-time means I can have that without having to submit myself fully to an institution. If finishing the PhD is literally the last thing I do relating to my research, I will actually be OK with it. I will be sad if sea cable research goes on without me in it, but I'll have a piece of work that's mine, and that I hope will have added something useful to the world, and that's why I'm doing it.

At the conference I was also able to have an exciting and affirming conversation with Catherine Frieman, author of An Archaeology of Innovation, a book you should read immediately, especially if you enjoyed The Dawn of Everything, and which helped this final piece fall into place for me, about how to frame my research, about what I do in content, about my career and my life. I work on how people use things in the service of relationships and change. That's what I do. That's what's fun. I don't have to do it in a specific place. I'm good at making something happen in the place I'm standing.

We talked about how there's archaeology the discipline, and there's archaeology as a set of methods and practices that help us do something that a lot of other disciplines don't do. I complained (sorry, STS folks) about STS and media studies people who often don't own boots and don't go and stand in places feeling inept, which is how I got started studying sea cables: standing on a shoreline where I knew a cable came on shore, having literally no other knowledge to go on. Just standing there feeling embarrassed and silly for longer than I'd care to admit. I stood there for like two hours looking at things that turned out to be unrelated to sea cables and wondering if they had something to do with sea cables.

She said, "Archaeologists are unique because we touch grass." And that made it click. Everything I know that's worth anything comes from pulling my boots on and touching grass. It's never been about the institutions. It's about touching grass and going from there.

Now I actually do know some stuff about cables. Because my scrappiness, the same scrappiness that built my content career on the back of a failed academic one, is the thing that has served me, not just well, but as a superpower. I say yes to the skydive* and then frantically google "how do I open a parachute" all the way down. That's my way. (I'll bet it's your way, too, if you'd only value it more.) Sometimes I still go splat, but sometimes I don't.

I also made the choice in 2019 to go freelance on purpose, rather than as a stopgap to a "real" job, which is how Character was born. I had built my career around the margins that I was pushed to, so what if I made the margins into a cozy home? It wasn't just a nice brand to stick on top of my work, it was an intentional move to let myself do this with purpose, to stop trying to fit into institutions, and do the thing I do best, which is form relationships with people in and around institutions, often in spite of those institutions. My favorite way to work with people is to help them feel safe and comfortable to show me what a mess things are internally, so we know what we can and can't do.

Everywhere is a mess because mess is always a byproduct of people trying to use processes and technology to tame human weirdness.

And that organizational mess is a beautiful slag heap and I'm an archaeologist, so I'm as interested in the slag heap as I am in the ores and metals. (And by the way, I'm working on a new collaborative brand, which you'll hear more about soon because we're doing this with great intention.) I'm as interested in what wasn't supposed to happen as I am in what you're trying to do. That's the point of design, isn't it? To meet people at their messy reality, not bludgeon them with the hammers of ideal conditions.

If you need to complain about it? That's OK, too. That's a way to learn. If everyone has the same complaint, that's also something worth noting because it tells us that coordinating our efforts might just mean something.

As Ahmed writes

From complaint we learn how the house is built. ??In my book What’s the Use? I use this image as an image of queer use, how things can be used in ways that were not intended or by those for whom they were not intended.

Anyway, so back to this conference. In the session where I spoke, the organizer opened with a line from Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism, that "it's easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism," which is variously attributed. I gave my talk about how the archaeology of critical infrastructure is the study of mess, and is best viewed at a human scale. It was fun to speak in person and realize that I actually have something to say that's new to people. To share knowledge I've learned by being an intellectual raccoon and see it land, right there in the room.

But the discussion ended up focused on labor conditions in professional archaeology. It was incredibly edifying, and also resonated with the conversations we're having in the content world. What happens now? What happens when there are too many people and not enough jobs? What happens when entire fields are decimated by technology designed, not to aid work, but to decimate the human labor force? What happens if AI lowers the standards and expectations so much that our own skills no longer matter? It sounds grim, but it was actually pretty empowering because you found out that a good chunk of that room was scared and insecure and precarious, and it wasn't because their work wasn't good—their work was great.

When I walked out of the session, who was standing there? You guessed it, my old pal and role model, Audrey. If you'd written this into a silly movie, you'd have to take it out because it would be too silly.

We both shrieked and I threw my arms around her and she asked how I ended up back in academia. I had been (half) jokingly telling people that it's pure spite (a valid motivator, if you ask me, and also partly true), but I said, "Almost 20 years ago, you told me I should just be myself for a living and get people to pay me. And I carried it around like an unwanted fruitcake because I didn't know what to do with it, and then I realized I was doing it. So then it was safe to come back."

I got a little weepy because it's been a pretty big deal for me to come back into this space that did so much harm to me, and draw my own boundaries and set my own terms in a place that insists on doing the term setting.

Wherever I am now, complaint helped me get here.

It would have helped me get here sooner if I'd honored it better, but it still got me here, to a pretty good place. Complaint helped me see the doors that were closed to me, but in the process of that, I'd been spending years stealing pies off the windowsills anyway. Once I realized that my complaints were valid, I could see that I'd actually come pretty far. I was so focused on convincing people that the doors in front of me were really closed, and only half-believing the lie that my good work alone could open them, that I didn't notice that I had managed to become, not just a raccoon, but a pie-stealing intellectual and professional raccoon.

Here's why I'm hopeful.

Both archaeologists and content people have two strengths that maybe aren't unique to us, but are pretty special. One, we have a set of practices and methods that are hard to define because they can be used and applied almost everywhere. And two, we touch grass. Content people zoom in and out of the details and the big picture. We can't do our jobs without asking, "How did this thing get this way and who was responsible?"

And that means that we have a chance to have a discussion about what it looks like if we take those methods and practices and break them free from institutions. I have no idea what it looks like for everyone else. For me, personally, it means co-building a small agency with offerings that are based around the things that can be done to solve the problems people bring. (I love doing that, and while this article isn't supposed to be thought leadership or content marketing, you can absolutely bring me a big messy problem and I will roll up my sleeves, put my boots on, and get stuck in.)

I'm wary of and frustrated by the constant use of the word "we," as if we are a monolith, as if the way content is practiced in big US software companies is the way it should be practiced in, say, companies especially in global majority countries, where they might have one person doing all the content, or where most people might be freelance. These conversations leave a lot of people feeling invalidated and less-than, when, in fact, these very people are often working in healthy, sustainable ways that we should recognize and appreciate.

But I also think that it can be valuable to create spaces to have conversations about what it would look like, what it could look like to break our skills and talents free of the institutions. What if, as Cate Frieman so perfectly articulated for me about archaeology, we were better able to describe the distinction between content work as a constellation of formal disciplines, and content work as a set of practices and methods?

In fact, that's kind of how tacos became the official food of content design.

It came from when Mario Ferrer worked at a company that often sent him to Stockholm. We would usually have tacos in the only place in Stockholm that makes good tacos. But sometimes we would have burgers because the burger place allowed dogs. Even when we were having burgers, we talked about how tacos are "units of joy" and they were medicinal: our ailment was institutions.

But we also talked about how tacos, like content roles, can contain a whole bunch of completely different ingredients and still be called tacos. What would it be like to go back a few years, when we were still fighting to be called UX writers, and re-imagine a discipline that's a lot more like a taco?

What conversations could we have? What ways of working would we see already happening around us, if we stopped narrowing our focus to the world of software companies working in very specific ways on a small subset of product types? What would it be like if we could acknowledge that a lot of people are already working in ways that solve problems through a content lens, whether or not they know that's what they're doing? To paraphrase Mark Fisher's variously attributed quote, why are we finding it so much easier to imagine the end of our job title than the end of the institutions that tell us who we are, in spite of who we actually are?

Yes, I know that we come back to the problem of just how expensive it is to be alive, and while content is needed everywhere, the jobs doing it outside of software companies and institutions won't just magic themselves up. We still need improved labor conditions. We still need steady work that pays enough to live. We still need to make enough money that "dying prematurely" doesn't have to be our retirement plan.

But we can have those conversations about what can be next.

And we need complaint to do it.

When we're doing user research, if our users don't tell us what's wrong with their experience, we can't learn anything. The same goes for our work. If we don't have complaint, we can't understand the disciplinary geography that keeps our own practices and talents locked up with someone else's key.

Some of those complaints are things that sound familiar to us, even old and tired. But everyone is on a different journey. If we dismiss those complaints because we've personally moved past them. regardless of the fact that our intention is to help others look forward, it can be experienced as gatekeeping. People need to be able to look forward from where they are, and if what they see in front of them is a closed door, we can't wag our fingers at them for describing that.

If we make room for complaint, not just among our content peers, but everyone who is constrained by institutions that were built to establish profit-making behaviors, I think we'll find a better understanding of where "we" are, as a constellation of communities, from multiscalar perspectives. I hope we can start having these conversations about possibility and still walk with people down those long, familiar corridors of complaint that they need to go down.

I realize that not everyone is as stubborn and scrappy as I am, and it shouldn't take this level of hard-headedness to survive. I wish I'd stopped trying to contort myself for institutions a lot sooner. I didn't listen 20 years ago when someone I admired, who wanted the best for me, told me I could actually do the thing I wanted to do, that I could stop pretending I wanted the institution to love me back.

I know that if someone told me any of this 10 years ago, I still wouldn't have listened.

I was still too busy dashing myself on the rocks and banging on doors that were closed to me, breaking myself for institutions that didn't want me.

So if you're still doing that, I see you. I hope you know you are allowed to stop, but if you complain, some of us will listen. And if you break, we've got you.

Because, as Mario reminded me recently, "Tacos can fall apart and we still love them."

*I will literally never skydive, not a freaking chance