Empathy under the Bus[iness]

Giving you the business, even though that's none of our business.

Summary

Beyond empathy held by the designer towards a subject, we will examine empathy as a function under the Business, and the designer’s empathy toward a subject under the Business. We delve back into Karen Barad’s agential cuts to understand other ways to understand the Business, designer, researcher, and customer. And, we hint at a fundamental tension rooted in assumptions that guide industry (UX/UI/Service Design) frameworks, which will be a matter for further inquiry.

Background

Fleeting are the days of the valorization of ascension, especially by those who have historically been barred from the climb and felt the most pressure from the mountain, for the pendulum swing that propelled them into these high positions now breeds a blooming anger.

We inhabited something of a delusion, but there were hues of delusion.

There was optimism for many, a feeling that we could hack it. We believed we could uncouple the matter of money from power, in a way that made the money clean and the power good. Some good may have come about from it, but it would never get us out of the trap.

Google says, “Don’t be evil.” (Courtesy of the Wayback Machine.)

More often than not, this pursuit came with sacrifice; it required acting like the people in power to get power. It seemed to bolster the system, making it fat. And for those with their newly “found” power, it wasn’t a restructuring of work but an overextension. It became a matter of ruling two domains, when one was already overflowing.

Within these flashes, there was a hobbled-together “third way.” Adding complexity and perhaps more nefarious, this hue was “softer,” pulling away from many of the values downstream of capitalism or covertly rejecting them. It was held together in the minutiae of relationships under the Business. Punctuated by articles about “quiet quitting” and “stealing time” and evidenced in language and conduct changes within the workplace, it could be debated that this objective was met with varying degrees of success. Employees are people, at the end of the day, and our concern extends beyond profit maximization, as inextricably tied as our motivations may be.

The past seventy years bred real material and physical improvements for those who gained entry to these places, even with how flimsy and skin-deep it all felt. The improvements are obvious and undeniable, but it also made something very wicked more palatable and pervasive. How often would the same Business activities be carried out under a different guise? There is obviously an incentive for the Business to feign empathy in the pursuit of profit maximization. And, how often before would we say “make sure you practice self care” to someone who had just lost a parent? Even our forms of care feel banal and disconnected, everyone filtering their concern through the same stock platitudes. Irony and absurdism blew off the steam, but apathy was our middle way.

Many aspects of life feel like a betrayal, but everything comes down to how much you decide to betray.

There is a fear that creeps up inside when you consider how hard people are fighting for a comfortable life, especially in light of market saturation. The life that seemed promised by tech. No pressure on the knees, mobility once only granted to artists and writers, paired with a salary reserved for the very successful—a true feast on the pleasures of life—picking your children up from school, and taking them to the park in between meetings. There was valor, the work felt creative, and the Executive’s grand visions fostered a sense of agency and instilled a feeling of “changing the world.” Underneath it all, there is a growing willingness to betray so much of ourselves, far beyond the dulling of ourselves into products, which is viewed as a given in this market. A smaller ask primes us for a larger ask.

There’s a perceptible turbulence in our publications, constant turns and returns from the self and how to be a good researcher and designer, toward the reality of being a researcher and designer.

There is a futility that permeates from it all. As good as the researcher or designer tries to be, there is always the matter of profit maximization for the Business and meeting material needs for the researcher and designer. Without it, there is no Researcher nor Designer.

Karen Barad’s Agential Realism

To circle back to the work of Karen Barad, we introduced the concept of agential realism and agential cuts. Since Barad’s work is very abstract and conceptually hard for us to wrap our minds around, we keep diluting it down to the following statement: agential realism is the idea that agents, who come about through their past, create meaning in the moment. Agential cuts are different from agents (i.e. those who act in a situation); they are not static or cleanly cut and separate, making them difficult to conceptualize.

While unusual at first, this perspective is not impossible to grasp. Think of a researcher’s reaction to a subject during an interview, for instance. In that moment, the researcher’s response may be triggered by an event from their childhood and how they have been taught to be socialized, but in the moment, it is also informed by who the subject is and what they are saying. For instance, if the subject is a child, we may soften our language and change our references to meet them where they are.

This is how Barad conceptualizes the world. There are no static agents, but meaning emerges through relationships and interactions, drawing upon our past and present. Agential cuts are the specific attributes that surface within those moments, and they inform how other agential cuts affect and are affected in that moment.

Agential Cuts through Business

Barad never specifically brings up the Business, but the theory of agential cuts could be read from this perspective. By destabilizing the idea of static agents, we can take an “agential cut” of the Business. The Business has a cogent set of values, history, exists within a context, makes decisions, influences, responds, and acts within relationships. An agential cut of the Business may be carried out by Executives (mediated through memos written by Comms.), but this is also upheld and carried out by employees in infinitely many ways. When a researcher or designer interacts with a subject, the response may be informed by the values they are supposed to espouse under the business and/or the values and experiences they hold as an individual.

To simplify yet ground what is happening, let’s suppose a Business institutes a rule that non-paying customers may not use the bathroom. An employee who strictly enforces the rule (not taking into account any other intentions or motivations for not wanting a non-paying customer to use the bathroom), at that moment, is an agential cut of the Business. They deny their individual experiences and values in favor of the values of the Business.

While a business is composed of individuals with varying degrees of fidelity to the outlined values, some are strict adherents, others hold the values at arm’s length, the Business only manifests through us.

This gives and takes power away from researchers and designers. They have the ability to act under the defined values of the Business, their own values, the values of users, or in some third space occupying a range of these values. With all of these cuts mediated by the environment or the context in which they exist, a researcher or designer may be less willing to act on their values if, say, their financial circumstances are more precarious.

These relationships do not just include customers. Agential cuts of the Business emerge in relation to other agential cuts, which could take the form of other employees, the environment, legislation, and stakeholders. This does not have to be senselessly abstract; quite literally, agential cuts of the Business may interact with agential cuts of the environment through the act of cutting down trees, for instance.

Through this, we see the dispersion of responsibility, yet the [inter]action is undeniable.

Absence: No Response as a Response

To summarize and simplify, the Business can be conceived of as two big types of cuts (in reality there are nearly infinite cuts), in the form of

1. an entity with shared values (i.e. profit maximization) and

2. the researchers and designers under a Business each with their own identities, experiences, backgrounds, and values that they may pull from and express in its relations. These relationships may include customers, employees, the environment, legislation, and stakeholders.

The gravity of Barad’s theory also lies in absence. To be clear, even no response within an interaction is a response. For example, to ignore someone begging on the street is still an individual acting on and reacting to the beggar. Not helping someone doesn’t circumvent the situation or interaction; it is a firm response to the situation. The action was inaction.

There is a deep interconnectedness of all parts of us with everything, all the time. Every possible step, every possible choice, even the simple act of not acting, is interaction. We can never escape or get outside of interacting with other things and beings.

Target internal memo shared by Liz Collin via X (Twitter) on January 24, 2025.

This, perhaps, even becomes more apparent through the lens of the Business. A customer’s decision not to service the Business anymore is still an interaction with the Business.

Third Way away from Apathy

Not unlike the “third way,” opportunities in the minutiae feel abound. Things that may go beyond just apathy, and for the Business, while it is often flimsy, it is also a reality.

Cultivating one existential locus makes an entity rather vulnerable to control and defeat, and although flimsy, the Business’s attachment to these values have real consequences, as well. DEI initiatives that are largely performative are also quite literally putting different types of people in power; it opens possibilities. This is not to further woke-wash the business but to display that there are intermediary steps.

Even among philosophers and archivists, there appears to be a dissociation from the incremental nature of change; there is an everydayness to it. It is not a rupture and fissure; it is not reducible to several large events. It is the minutiae that change the fabric of our lives. A much more complicated and messy everydayness that requires greater vigilance, stewardship, and autonomy than the broad strokes of apathy.

“Quiet quitting” was a phenomenon that threw its hands up perfectly across all sectors. “The system is bad,” “the system is not for me,” ”I refuse to be productive.” As a broad-stroke reaction, it reflected a rational resistance to a workplace culture defined by extraction and burnout. If we accept the premise that Business exists primarily to maximize profit, then quiet quitting is protest by attrition; it is inaction as action. Unlike the consumer, it slows the Business instead of halting it, and maybe more so, instead of reshaping it. This becomes a far greater task: at scale, how can we guide employees through the confusing sensemaking of standing up to or subverting practices instituted by the Business that they find unethical?

A researcher and designer ultimately has the power to dream up 10s to 100s of different solutions given user needs and pain points. There is leeway—an ability to wiggle out of certain things, when values are not so firmly impressed.

Barad gives agency to researchers and designers, while dispersing responsibility to all parties in an interaction. Moving beyond apathy, it is no longer a matter of trying to do less harm under the Business but determining whether and how it is possible to do good.

To be clear, we are the Business, and doing good is far more than responding to need. With industry frameworks built on maximizing and optimizing needs and experiences, they position us to continue to create designs in the same image.

Cite this publication

APA

MIdST LABS. (2025, May 20). Empathy under the Bus[iness]. MIdST LABS. https://midstlabs.substack.com/empathy-under-the-business

Chicago

MIdST LABS. "Empathy under the Bus[iness]." MIdST LABS, May 20, 2025. https://midstlabs.substack.com/empathy-under-the-business

MLA

MIdST LABS. "Empathy under the Bus[iness]." MIdST LABS, 20 May 2025. https://midstlabs.substack.com/empathy-under-the-business

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