Popular culture has become obsessed with peering into people’s bags. Disclosing the things we carry has become a national pastime. But what are we hiding? 
 
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 There was a time when the contents of people’s bags were, more or less, private. A woman’s purse was a mystery; a businessman’s briefcase an anonymous mess of ink and paper. 
 
 Today, the practice of opening up one’s bag for display has become something of a national pastime. For years, celebrity magazines like Us Weekly and InStyle have made a show of asking stars what they carry in their handbags. The resulting annotated photo features, heavy on product endorsements and pricing information for cosmetics, are classic totems of faux intimacy between celebrities and readers. But more recently, the “what’s in your bag” feature has begun to migrate beyond gossip magazines. 
 
 These days The Wall Street Journal routinely itemizes the personal belongings found in the bags of successful executives—from international battery chargers to the peppermint Altoids that calm one fashion designer’s “paranoia about ‘bad breath.’” The Chronicle of Higher Education’s ProfHacker blog details what academics pack on trips, putting an emphasis on less-is-more, on-the-go productivity. 
 
 Foreign Policy’s “The Things They Carried” feature gives us a peek into the bag of a Tahrir Square protester (notebook, pamphlets, warm clothes); a Congolese rebel (computer with war-simulator games; Israeli pistol; Bible); and conventional wonks, like the Swedish foreign minister whose black Tumi carry-on, judging by its contents, could pass for that of a Silicon Valley programmer—save for his diplomatic passport. 
 
 This very public game of show-and-tell has come to include ordinary people too. Self-submitted YouTube videos lay bare the contents of purses and carry-ons. Entire Flickr groups are dedicated to displaying what members keep in their clutches, backpacks, and messenger bags. These user-generated forums are anything but a free-for-all. Stern, almost clinical guidelines sketch out the ideal “what’s in your bag” photo. For consistency, one Flickr group with more than 27,000 members bans photos of shopping bags, makeup bags, photographer’s kits, and “any pet or a person sitting in a bag.” 
 
 Perhaps the purest expression of the phenomenon is found in The Verge, a tech-focused online magazine founded in 2011, which unveils the bags of media and tech workers. Color images, usually taken from above, show items arranged around the bag in an orderly fashion. The photographs almost always show a laptop and/or tablet with its accompanying cables; then there might be a book, a pair of sunglasses, a couple of pens, and maybe a protein bar or some chewing gum. As with InStyle, annotations in The Verge tend toward enthused product endorsements, with Revlon and Maybelline replaced by Apple and Moleskine. The bags’ owners often emphasize their efforts to keep their cargo sparse, bashfully admitting to having removed stray snacks and receipts prior to the photo shoot. 
 
 What’s striking is the lack of variation in these shots. Another bottle of hand sanitizer, another MacBook Air—there’s rarely anything new to see. The images are clearly staged; the voyeuristic pleasures pretty minimal. Yet the content of the bags is still “anthropologically meaningful,” says Dominique Boullier, a French sociologist who has studied these photos with a team of researchers at Sciences Po. While the images might not tell us too much about an individual (save whether she favors Macs or PCs), “they do re!ect the environment he or she inhabits.” 
 
 If Kim Kardashian’s on-the-go kit embodies a certain standard of round-the-clock female beauty, these new bags we see convey different, but equally pervasive, norms: productivity, transparency, a blurring divide between work and life, and a willingness to engage in unplanned, spontaneous labor. 
 
 Predictably, marketers have jumped on the bag-wagon: the bag maker Timbuk2 has filled its website WhatsInYourBag.com with customer-submitted pictures to show how well its products can accommodate its clientele’s busy, mobile lifestyles. 
 
 Bag-sharing has also emerged against the backdrop of large-scale online data collection and public surveillance, Boullier notes: “The bag traditionally is designed to hide your personal activities—but now you display it because you know that no matter what you do, everyone will know who you are, what you’re doing, where you live.” When you’re used to arranging your tiny shampoo bottles in a clear Ziploc, having your bag searched on your morning commute, or putting your vacation photos up on Facebook, it’s no big deal to spread these objects out for the world to see—especially if you can pick and choose what to include. 
 
 Real bags are messier and more revelatory than what typically shows up online. The Hairpin, an impish blog run by young women, has reacted to the “what’s in your bag” boom by running a “What’s Actually in Your Handbag Right Now” column. The pictures show a mess of pens, tampons, candy, and assorted junk; they lack the pretense of the aspirational, clutter-free collections that so many people try to reproduce. 
 
 Ellie Brown, a fine-art photographer, spent almost two years shooting the strikingly diverse contents of bags carried by ranchers, schoolchildren, grandmothers, and other people not likely to appear in The Verge or Us Weekly. Weary of people’s impulse to self-censor, Brown gave her subjects clear instructions not to remove anything from their bags. “When I took the photos, especially with women, there was a lot of self-shaming, saying, ‘I’m such a mess, I’m sorry,’” Brown says. “People feel like they have to present their best selves in the pictures.” 
 
 The Hairpin’s column mocks the artifice of staged images and the pseudo-Zen idea that fitting all your necessary, well-chosen items into a small space amounts to a kind of minimalist enlightenment. And Brown’s “real” bags reveal a certain hierarchy in who gets to travel light (young city dwellers whose essentials take up little space) and who must bear the burden of their tools, like livestock inspectors and energy linesmen. 
 
 The “what’s in your bag” phenomenon helps us situate ourselves—and others—within this hierarchy. “It helps us understand our place in society,” Boullier says. When the lines between what’s public and what’s private and between work and play are more blurred than ever, the safest move is to observe, to compare—and to conform. 
 
 This post originally appeared in the January/February 2014 issue of Pacific Standard as “Baggage Claims.” For more, consider subscribing to our bimonthly print magazine. ||||| In their attachment to their smartphones, the students at Mercy High in Burlingame, California are typical teenagers. But when they enter Mr. Offield's English class, the phones get locked into little bags, which can't be opened until class is over. 
 
 "By separating something that's primarily for their social life, I'm hoping that it brings them more in the moment," Offield said. 
 
 Graham Dugoni is the founder of the startup company, Yondr, that makes the bags. He's attempting to break cellphone addiction and "help people engage with each other in a real way." 
 
 "What it symbolizes is a movement, and the bag is just the tool," Dugoni said. 
 
 The Yondr pouch locks much like a security tag in a clothing store. If someone needs to access their phone, they can choose to leave the phone-free zone, reports CBS News correspondent John Blackstone. 
 
 Dugoni first introduced the bags at nightclubs in tech-centric San Francisco. "Sometimes you see someone come in and their shoulders are uptight, they're clutching their phone like it's a baby," Dugoni said. "You can read it on their face - they're saying, 'don't take my phone away.'" 
 
 It's a new movement challenging the pervasive habit of viewing the world through the screen of a smartphone. 
 
 The Yondr bags are now mandatory for everyone attending a performance by comedian Dave Chappelle. 
 
 "We've had a strict 'no cellphone' rule for years. Obviously, if you look on YouTube, you'll see very few people adhere to it," Chapelle said. 
 
 Before the bags, Chappelle often found himself telling jokes to people distracted by their devices. 
 
 "It would be very hard for you to talk to anybody if he was doing this the whole time you're talking," he said, pulling a phone out of his pocket. 
 
 Dugoni hopes to see the bags used in arenas that seat as many as 20,000. 
 
 "After the first five minutes, there's twitchy hands and looking for their phones, then they seem to forget about it and slip into that natural mode of interaction. And that's kind of the golden moment," Dugoni said. 
 
 Back at Mercy High, administrator Summer Dittmer admits to having phone separation anxiety. 
 
 "I walked into a club, they asked for my phone, I said no. They said, 'you need to put your phone in here or you're not going to see anything happening in the venue.' So they gave me the thing, put my phone in, put it in my purse," Dittmer recalled. "It was almost like being separated from your own limb, but in the end, I remembered more than I typically do at a concert." 
 
 Drivers blame "addiction" for phone use while driving 
 
 That experience prompted her to lease the bags for her school. For senior Ally Ick, locking her phone up was a mental adjustment. 
 
 "Maybe if there's something going on on social media, I could be really tempted to want to check my phone every second, but then with the Yonder pouches, it takes away that feeling and you don't have to worry about it so much," Ick said. 
 
 Junior Daniela Clinton had to bag her phone for three days on a school retreat. 
 
 "I could hear it vibrating, but I couldn't grab it and use it. I hated it so much," Clinton said. But she adjusted. "It was a break from reality. I completely forgot about everything - even school - and that was nice." 
 
 But not everyone is ready to let go of their electronic addictions. One Dave Chappelle audience member was caught red-handed. 
 
 "Just to be clear, you're no longer welcome in the venue while Dave's performing here," security told him. 
 
 "I understand why everybody uses their phones and why people are addicted to this technology. I'm not any different from them," Chappelle said. "But people actually watch the show, they're in the moment and they're vastly more fun to speak to." ||||| I don’t remember the first time I did it, but I remember the first time I got caught. I was a freshman at U.C. Santa Cruz, the store was called Zanotto’s, the item was Neosporin. I took it out of its packaging, bent down as if to scratch my ankle, and then wedged the tube of triple-antibiotic ointment into my white ankle sock. When the guard grabbed my arm, I was so scared I peed on the floor. As we waited for the police to come, I had to watch a janitor clean up my pee with a mop. I was taken down to the station and formally arrested: fingerprints, mug shot—they really wanted to teach this nineteen-year-old, transparent-dress-wearing punk a lesson. The lesson I learned was that I was now legally an adult, so I didn’t have to worry that my parents would be called. I was free—even my crimes belonged to me alone. 
 
 In time, I improved. I discovered that stealing required a loose, casual energy, a sort of oneness with the environment, like surfing or horse-whispering. And once I knew I could do it I felt strangely obliged to. I remember feeling guilty for not stealing, as though I were wasting money. After I dropped out of college and moved to Portland, Oregon, it became part of my livelihood. I stared at my shopping list like a stressed housewife, deliberating over which items to steal and which to buy with food stamps. My preferred purse was gigantic and discreetly rigid, like a suitcase. I packed it with blocks of cheese, loaves of bread, and lots of soy products, because I was a vegetarian. 
 
 But it wasn’t just about the supermarket—the whole world was one giant heist. It goes without saying that I used magnets to reset the Kinko’s copy counters to zero, and carried scissors to cut alarm tags out of clothes. Everyone I knew did these things. I say this not to excuse myself but just so you can visualize a legion of energetic, intelligent young lady criminals. Anytime anyone we knew flew into Portland, we urged her to buy luggage insurance and allow us to steal her bag from the baggage carrousel. The visiting friend then had to perform the role of the frantic claims reporter and was given a cut of the insurance money. Some friends were up for this; others thought it was an inhospitable thing to ask. 
 
 My first employer in Portland was Goodwill, which, yes, is a charitable organization, and, no, I did not have any qualms about slipping books and clothes and knickknacks into my bag. Because what is money, anyway? It’s just a concept some asshole made up. I also put red “Sold” tags on large appliances and entire living-room sets, and felt magnanimous as my friends gleefully loaded up their vans. One day, a co-worker was admiring a pink blouse that had just come in. I encouraged her to take it, and when she wouldn’t I put the blouse in a Goodwill bag and ran out of the store calling, “Sir! Sir! You forgot your bag!” Then I stuffed it in the bushes. At closing time, I fished it out with a halfhearted “What’s this?” and handed it to my prim co-worker. Prim and ungrateful, as it turned out. I was called into the boss’s office the next morning; the pink shirt was on her desk. “The good news is we’re not going to press charges,” she said. I wept as I walked over the river to the place where my girlfriend worked as a dog groomer. I’d never been fired before. It was a lot like dropping out of school or being arrested. All of these institutions, in their crude, clumsy way, seemed to be saying, You don’t need us, we’ll never understand you, and it’s important for you not to want us to. 
 
 I took the message to heart. I labored obsessively over creative pursuits they would never recognize, hurtling through systems and hierarchies as if nothing that already existed were relevant to me. I performed at colleges and scanned the room for what I could take. Even a box of chalk slipped into my pocket reassured me that I still had my freedom—the freedom to steal, to self-destruct, to ruin everything. 
 
 There was an exact moment when I decided to quit. I was sitting on a man’s lap and we had just determined that I was “his girl.” As we kissed, I thought, Well, I guess I have to stop stealing now. As if the idea of having a boyfriend, of being straight, required straightening out in other ways. I may have been looking for an excuse; I may have realized that I didn’t need to be a criminal to be an artist. Art itself could be the crime—could be scary and dangerous enough to shoulder my rebellion. After a while, I also stopped getting into physical fights, working in peepshows, bleaching my hair white, and wearing my tights over my shoes. Still, for a long time I thought my biggest heist was fooling everyone into believing that I was an upstanding citizen, a sweet girl. Then, just a few years ago, I realized that everyone feels secretly fraudulent. It’s the feeling of being an adult. ♦
– Remember when your purse's contents were private? Then gossip magazines started asking celebs to show off what was inside their bags. Now, Atossa Araxia Abrahamian writes at the Pacific Standard, it's become a phenomenon: From education periodicals to tech blogs to newspapers, everyone wants to know what's in your bag. For Foreign Policy, it's a war reporter's bag that's of interest; the Verge is more fascinated by the contents of a Silicon Valley worker's handbag; the Wall Street Journal reveals what executives carry. Why the obsession? For one thing, we're more prepared to publicize our lives these days, whether it's online or at the airport. "The bag traditionally is designed to hide your personal activities—but now you display it because you know that no matter what you do, everyone will know who you are, what you’re doing, where you live," says a sociologist. And when the contents are authentic, the bags "reveal a certain hierarchy in who gets to travel light (young city dwellers whose essentials take up little space) and who must bear the burden of their tools," Abrahamian notes. "The 'what’s in your bag' phenomenon helps us situate ourselves—and others—within this hierarchy."