A Field Note from Silicon Valley

Katelyn Zeser is a third-year PhD student in the Department of Cultural Anthropology. Katelyn is one of our 2026 Human Rights Summer Research Grant winners and a featured guest blogger. Grant winners will be sharing an inside look into their experiences on the Duke Human Rights Blog this summer and fall as part of our Student Stories: Summer Research Series. 

My research seeks to better understand the ways artificial intelligence and other media technologies have reshaped the Christian Zionist media landscape in the United States since 2023, the start of the Israel-Hamas War. As an anthropologist, some of my research takes place online, where I scrape data from social media platforms and archive images, comments, and other qualitative data. This summer, however, marked the beginning of in-person ethnography, a data collection method involving interviews and participant observation. Like most anthropologists, I follow what people actually do in their lives. I quickly realized Christian Zionism isn’t something that naturally comes up in everyday conversation often, so I found myself a bit stuck. 

I decided to focus less on Zionism itself and more on the Christian engagement with technology, venturing to Silicon Valley to interview Christian developers, startup founders, and AI aficionados. I still haven’t quite figured out how to isolate Christian Zionism from the broader landscape of belief and technological progress I have encountered here, where Christian theology, everyday faith practices, and the tech industry collide in interesting and unexpected ways. I have learned so much about the ways these developers understand their work as making the world a better place in God’s name, but any mention of the Middle East was met with blank stares and little interest. In fact, most of the people I have encountered do not seem particularly concerned with the future of the region at all, despite my preliminary research suggesting that many Christians support Israel primarily for religious reasons. 

An essential part of anthropological research involves collecting field notes or keeping a record of daily activities and interactions. But rather than locating Christian Zionism in the Bay Area, I found my attention drawn to something quite different as I took notes: the constant presence of robot cars. I had never encountered a self-driving vehicle, colloquially called a Waymo, before this summer. In fact, the first time a Waymo braked as I passed by on a crosswalk, I waved at a driver who didn’t exist—my polite Midwestern sensibilities at work. This awkward interaction marked the beginning of an odd, unexpected fascination with the robot cars of Silicon Valley. 

My fixation was born partly out of necessity. Because I was a pedestrian, a self-driving car’s ability to detect my presence and stop was literally a matter of life and death. But something else about these machines interested me. As I walked to church events, interview appointments, and Christian tech mixers, the Waymo was omnipresent. I noticed myself moving through the street differently; I began to traverse the city with a good sense of when the Waymo would stop, how much time to give it to do so, and even when I could get away with jaywalking on occasion. 

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I realized at this point that I was missing the forest for the trees. The way technology is rapidly changing before us—and changing us—warrants our attention. Whether walking down the street or scrolling on social media, we share more and more of our world with machines, which may not be “sentient” but do make choices. The ways we understand both mundane life, like walking down the street, and spectacularly horrific events, like the Israel-Hamas War, are increasingly shaped by machines. These systems make decisions based on training data and technical processes that most of us don’t fully understand. What are the implications of this transition for our ethics and the pursuit of our flourishing more broadly? 

Early in my research, I used to think the misinformation and AI slop about the Israel-Hamas War I saw everywhere were a part of some kind of coordinated campaign. I realize now something much weirder is happening. Most of the pressing human rights concerns that led me to apply for this grant, including the troubling, increasing presence of antisemitism and Islamophobia online, don't stem from a premeditated, coherent political narrative. As the makers of these machines train them and deploy them into the world, their effects, uses, and ideological reproductions occur mostly beyond our detection at a rate too fast for any of us to follow or control. 

Now, our ideas and beliefs about human rights, the stakes of a conflict, and the future of an entire region have become deeply entangled in a chain of machine learning, human adaptation, and the messy collisions occurring between the two. Rather than, in anthropology-speak, consistent systems of signs and symbols (once thought to be the very foundation of culture), the oddities emerging here are unpredictable and often paradoxical. 

These realizations have opened up deeper questions for my research, which I offer in the hope that you’ll consider them, too. We are no longer the sole creators of the images that have come to define our current political and social moment, just like we are no longer the sole drivers of the cars on our streets. Of course, a tech hub like Silicon Valley does not reflect the experience of the rest of the country (at least not yet, anyway). As we each encounter our first proverbial Waymos, we have a unique opportunity to observe how new media and technology become normal parts of our daily lives. How are the technologies emerging in places like Silicon Valley changing us? And what commitments should we make to protecting those most vulnerable to these changes, whether Palestinian, Israeli, American, or otherwise? 

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