by Haley Bliss  

The computer has been telling me, with the gentle insistence of a bureaucrat who has learned to smile, that it is time to move on. Windows 10, it says, is old. Not dead yet, but tired. Unsafe. Vulnerable. Windows 11, meanwhile, is presented as a brighter, safer future, full of rounded corners and moral clarity. I do not recall asking for this advice. The computer offers it anyway, the way institutions do when they are confident you have no real choice.

I am bad at being told what to do by objects. This is not a personality quirk so much as a social position. When a machine mandates, it does so with the authority of inevitability. There is no argument to be had, only compliance or delay. Still, I hesitated. So I did what people in institutions do when confronted with a small technical anxiety that might grow teeth: I outsourced it. I asked the university’s technical team. Yes, the university has one. Yes, this is my personal computer. No, no one seems particularly invested in maintaining the distinction. The border between “work device” and “personal device” is treated as porous, perhaps because if it were examined too closely, it would reveal that the university depends on that porosity to function at all.

The response from the technical team was brisk and ritualized. Check your RAM, they said. This instruction landed with the full force of a foreign language. RAM is one of those technological concepts that lives in a category anthropologists might call “functionally sacred”: everyone agrees it matters, few can explain why, and most interactions with it are mediated by experts. I did not know how to check my RAM. I was instructed on how to check my RAM. I checked my RAM. I reported the number. The answer came back swiftly, without cruelty, without irony. With that amount of RAM, you should stay on Windows 10.

And there it was. The feeling. Familiar. Immediate. The feeling of being poor.

This is not, strictly speaking, accurate. I have a job. I have a computer. The computer works. It does not catch fire. It connects to the internet with reasonable enthusiasm. It has opinions about fonts. By most historical standards, this is abundance. Yet the exchange left me with the distinct impression that I was inhabiting the wrong temporal tier. My hardware had betrayed me as someone from the past. Not a romantic past. A slightly embarrassing one.

Technology has become remarkably good at producing this sensation. It does not need to deprive us of function. It merely needs to narrate our tools as obsolete. The anthropology of this feeling is not about poverty as material lack, but poverty as temporal misalignment. You are poor not because you cannot do things, but because you cannot do them in the present tense the system prefers.

The computer’s warning was not urgent in any practical sense. Windows 10 will continue to run. The machine will still turn on. The word processor will still process words. But the language of the notification was calibrated to produce unease. Outdated. Unsupported. Risk. These are not neutral descriptors. They are moral terms. To be outdated is to have failed to keep up. To be unsupported is to be abandoned. Risk is no longer something one takes; it is something one irresponsibly allows to exist.

This is where technology begins to resemble other modern institutions, particularly finance and healthcare, in its capacity to transform structural conditions into personal shortcomings. You do not have enough RAM. You did not anticipate the future properly. You did not invest in yourself.

An Anthropology of Scarcity

Anthropologists have long noted that scarcity is as much a cultural production as an economic one. In some societies, scarcity is seasonal, expected, even ritually integrated. In ours, scarcity is individualized and moralized. It appears not as famine but as notification. Not as hunger but as incompatibility. The system does not say you lack resources. It says you are not ready.

What makes this especially effective is that the technology is often, in a narrow sense, correct. New operating systems do require more memory. Security patches do pile up. The world does change. But correctness is not the same as inevitability. The shift from “this is newer” to “this is necessary” happens quietly, through defaults, through end-of-support dates, through the gentle pressure of a progress bar that implies you are falling behind even as it spins.

The university technical team was not wrong to advise me to stay on Windows 10. They were performing a form of care, protecting me from a sluggish machine and potential frustration. Yet their advice also placed me definitively on the wrong side of a technological threshold. Windows 11 was not for people like me. Or rather, it was for people like me only if people like me upgraded themselves.

This is how technology teaches class without naming it. There is no explicit hierarchy, only requirements. The requirements are framed as neutral. Hardware specifications do not care who you are. They care only about numbers. But numbers, as any anthropologist will tell you, are social objects. They encode assumptions about who the user is supposed to be: someone who replaces devices regularly, someone whose income can absorb incremental upgrades, someone whose relationship to their tools is transactional rather than intimate.

The feeling of poverty emerges not from deprivation but from comparison to an implied norm. The computer does not say you are poor. It says you are incompatible. Incompatibility is a deeply social diagnosis. It suggests not just difference, but misfit. You are the wrong shape for the socket.

Even if my technology were not, in any meaningful sense, poor, the feeling would persist. This is because the sensation is not produced by the machine’s actual capabilities, but by the temporality imposed upon them. Technological time is fast, linear, and punitive. There is always a next version, and the current version is always already insufficient. Owning something functional is not enough. You must own something current.

Built to Last (Briefly)

This is a relatively recent historical arrangement. Tools used to age with their users. A hammer did not become less safe because a newer hammer existed. A book did not stop working because a revised edition was published. Software, by contrast, is designed to expire. Not immediately, but decisively. Support ends. Compatibility breaks. The thing you have is rendered precarious not by wear, but by policy.

The paradigms of peremptoriness at work here are subtle but relentless. The system does not argue. It announces. It sets deadlines. It frames delay as danger. You can choose not to upgrade, but only in the way one can choose to ignore a storm warning. Responsibility is displaced onto the user. If something goes wrong, it will not be because the system forced change too quickly, but because you failed to adapt.

This produces a particular kind of anxiety that is difficult to articulate because it masquerades as pragmatism. Of course security matters. Of course newer systems have advantages. The critique is not that progress is fake, but that its cadence is socially selective. Those who can afford to update glide forward, rarely noticing the churn. Those who cannot are left managing a growing archive of warnings, reminders, and eventual exclusions.

The result is a low-grade humiliation that rarely rises to the level of outrage. You are not angry at your computer. You are mildly ashamed of it. You apologize for it. You preemptively explain its limitations. It becomes an object that reflects your position in a system that pretends not to have positions.

There is also, tucked inside this dynamic, a strange inversion of expertise. I am an academic. I spend my days analyzing complex social systems, reading theory, producing arguments. None of this helps me check my RAM. Knowledge here is radically compartmentalized. The machine knows more about its future than I do. The institution mediates that knowledge and hands it back to me as instruction. I comply, not because I understand, but because the cost of not understanding feels higher.

This is perhaps the deepest anthropological point. Technology does not just make us feel poor. It makes us feel dependent. Dependent on updates, on experts, on invisible processes we cannot inspect. Dependency is not inherently bad. But when it is paired with narratives of individual responsibility, it becomes a moral trap. You are dependent, but you are also to blame.

So I stay with Windows 10. I do so knowingly, responsibly, even defiantly. My computer continues to function. The world does not end. The notifications will grow more insistent with time. Eventually, support will truly end. A line will be crossed. I will have to decide whether to upgrade the machine, the system, or my expectations.

In the meantime, the feeling lingers. Not acute, not paralyzing. Just there. A quiet reminder that in a world where progress arrives as a mandate, adequacy is always provisional. Poverty, in this sense, is not the absence of resources but the presence of constant evaluation. You are always being measured against a future you did not design.

And yet, there is a small consolation in recognizing this for what it is. The feeling does not originate in personal failure. It is produced. Engineered. Distributed evenly, but absorbed unevenly. Seeing that does not make the upgrade prompts disappear. It does, however, reframe them. The computer may think it knows what is best for me. It may even be right. But for now, it will have to live with my outdated, unsupported, insufficient self. And strangely enough, everything still works.