Soft Machines, Glass Logic and The Seductive Search for Culture form a slow drift through the machinery of modern research, from the ways we listen, to the ways we count, to what is left to listen to or count at all. Each piece traces the systems we built to understand the world and the silence that grows inside them. Together they are a study of disappearance, of craft, of meaning, of connection. Yet in their quietness lies the possibility of change, a reminder that even in sleep, the industry can still dream itself awake.
Industry Lullabies Part 1: Soft Machines
If the real threat to qualitative research isn’t AI, is it cultural illiteracy?
Or do they go hand in hand?
The industry loves a bedtime story. We tell ourselves that qualitative research is dying, that machines are coming for the empathic parts, that soon algorithms will “understand” humans better than humans do.
It’s a soothing narrative because it gives the illusion of inevitability. It shifts the blame from us to the system.
But what if the real problem isn’t automation at all? What if the very tools we’re celebrating are quietly flattening how we see, listen and interpret?
AI doesn’t create cultural illiteracy (or does it?). But it amplifies it with ease, learning from what we feed it and reflecting back the most visible, most repeated, most machine-readable parts of culture. The strange, the local, the contradictory quietly disappear in the process.
For decades, researchers have been translators of meaning, decoding gestures, metaphors and emotion long before algorithms could dream of it.
Yet somewhere along the way, the conversation drifted. We started talking about data, not discourse. About training models, not retraining curiosity.
People express meaning now through aesthetics, humour, fragments, collective references and invisible codes that move faster than any transcript can capture. Our task isn’t to abandon what came before, but to tune back into where expression now lives.
The craft was never just about words. It was about tuning into the quiet parts of meaning.
Industry Lullabies Part 2: Glass Logic
If the real threat to quantitative research isn’t bias (let’s leave fraud out of this for now), is it boredom?
We look to the survey for order. A sense of control. The warm and fuzzy. The industry tells itself that quant will endure, that automation will protect it, that synthetic data will extend its reach. Maybe that’s true. But what happens when efficiency begins to sound like repetition?
AI now writes questions, selects samples, even predicts results before the fieldwork starts. Each advance promises precision. Yet what becomes of the creative act (usually trying to avoid grids), the craft of phrasing (speaking to the audience in their language), the instinct to test an assumption, the discipline of asking a question that truly cuts through?
Surveys were once acts of composition. Each question held intent, cadence, and care. Each dataset reflected the mind that shaped it. Can that same texture survive automation, or will our precision become glasslike, clear, flawless, and fragile?
Perhaps the future of quant lies not in resisting change, but in remembering what made it an art in the first place: curiosity, discernment, and the quiet creativity hidden inside the structure.
Because the craft was never just about counting. It was about designing questions worth answering.
Industry Lullabies Part 3: The Seductive Search for Culture
If the real question isn’t how to study culture, is it whether culture still wants to be found?
There was a time when culture assembled itself. In flat-shares, in zines (yeah, the paper ones), in noise, in our heads, and in argument / resistance. It had sediment, locality, defiance. It made us feel truly alive. Now it feels distilled, filtered through systems that show us only what someone has paid to be visible. This wasn’t what the internet promised us.
We scroll through a virtual world without walls. Every exhibit sponsored. Every gesture indexed. Meaning thinned into metrics, heritage turned into feed. Our brains trigger us to like things when we don’t because we want to be seen. We want to attach ourselves to everything. We want to be party of the army of strong ties, not the weak ones.
Has the internet made culture smaller, or simply quieter? Blander? Is this the reverse of what it once was, not a space of invention but of replication? Is every down swipe an edit, a removal of life and a journey towards monoculture? Not a mirror of who we are, but a projection of what is profitable? So many questions.
Culture once moved with uncertainty. It thrived in contradiction, in the awkward and the unapproved. Now it loops. It performs itself. It waits for engagement. Click click click. Repost. Like. Love. Follow. Numerics.
So can culture survive being gathered, or does the counting erase it?
We talk about trends as though they were movements, about audiences as though they were communities. But the language feels wrong, second hand, borrowed from another age.
Maybe culture has retreated to the margins again. Into small rooms, quiet signals, unsearchable corners. Into things that cannot be optimised. In a world where everything is for sale, truth is hiding even deeper to save itself from itself.
So this leads us to the final musing. Is what we call culture today just the echo left when attention drifts? Or is it dead just before that finger clicks?
