Anthropology’s focus on small-scale societies often feels disconnected from the urban complexities I navigate daily, yet ethnographic methods like participant observation are creeping into user experience research and policy design. Digital ethnography now tracks online communities, but I wonder if we are losing the discipline’s core — deep, long-term immersion — when we trade fieldwork for data scraping. Can anthropology truly remain relevant in a world of big data and AI, or is it being diluted into just another consultancy toolkit? The tension between preserving tradition and adapting to modern problems seems more urgent than ever, and I lean toward saying it can adapt, but only if we let go of some romanticism about the field site.