Nick Seaver

I study how people use technology to make sense of cultural things. I teach in the Department of Anthropology at Tufts University, where I also direct the program in Science, Technology & Society.

My first book is about the people who make music recommender systems and how they think about music, listening, and listeners. It’s called Computing Taste, and it was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2022.

I’m working on a fragmentary ethnography about the many meanings of attention today, from neural networks to the new tech humanism. Its working title is Attention Fragments, and it’s under contract with the University of Chicago Press.

I’ve got a handful of pieces in the publication pipeline: an essay on ideologies of heroic attention in ethnographic fieldwork, a piece on the media theory of mouse jigglers, and a commentary on the use of clues in identifying AI-generated writing.

I am also spinning up a new project on the anthropology of contraptions, which understands technical complexity as a social, aesthetic problem. I convened a panel on contraptions at the American Anthropological Association meetings in New Orleans last year, and I’m soliciting participants for an open panel on the topic at the 2026 Social Studies of Science conference in Toronto.

I am currently a faculty affiliate with the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard and a Canadian Institute for Advanced Research fellow, in their Future Flourishing Program.

March 2026