Agnes Callard’s theory of the uni-context

https://www.derekthompson.org/p/a-philosophers-one-word-theory-to

by FinnLobsien • 8 days ago

99 102 8 days ago

est• 8 days ago

If you post something to social media, it will be simultaneously visible to your boss, your parents, your ex, and total strangers

Isn't that what G Wave/ G+ trying to solve?

I think a better option would be: don't tie your IRL identity for online communications.

shipman053• 8 days ago

I think many social sites have tried to solve it, but in a world where anything is easily saved or screenshotted, it's still effectively a "universal room". Not to mention that properly implementing a form of role-based access control is a big ask for a lot users.

Not tying your IRL identity to online communications only solves one side of the problem. You can't use your anon accounts to communicate as yourself to family, friends, and colleagues and maintain your anonymity.

Not having accounts tied to IRL identity also allows AI bots to operate as equals to human users, which dilutes the quality of conversation in those spaces.

We've built an incredibly effective communications apparatus. It's a shame its only users are money-obsessed primates and the robots we've built in our image.

cwmoore• 8 days ago

Don’t forget the agents of corporate persons have their “voice” too.

inigyou15• 8 days ago

In Europe the operator of a website that is not purely personal is required to write their full name and address on the website. This is also bad in the opposite direction.

amarant2• 8 days ago

Google had a platform called circles once that had a really neat solution to this.

If course it being Google, it got cancelled before it had a chance to catch on.

dredmorbius7• 8 days ago

The platform was called "Google+". The feature was called "Circles".

listenallyall• 8 days ago

"differential" should be "deferential"

shipman053• 8 days ago

Took me a few reads, too.

inigyou15• 8 days ago

Nightclubs that put stickers on your phone camera are attempting (largely succeeding) to keep the uni-context out.

shipman053• 8 days ago

That's a cool idea. I'm no longer the right age for such things, but I'm glad people are trying to create unsurveilled spaces.

It feels doomed, though. Smart glasses wearers are being shamed today, but the tech will only get more inconspicuous. And HD cameras are so small and cheap that phone cameras are only one of many potential sources of surveillance.

With ubiquitous tiny cameras, quality networks (even in remote areas thanks to Starlink), cheap storage, and increased analysis capabilities thanks to AI, it feels like planet panopticon is here.

ggambetta• 8 days ago

So it's not a one-word theory, it's a theory with a one-word name... shocking. What a clickbait title!

dang• 8 days ago

We've replaced the title above with a representative phrase from the article.

jubilanti• 8 days ago

They cite "context collapse" and say this "uni-context" is deeper, but I still don't see how this "uni-context" is all that different than "context collapse", extensively studied since the 2000s. And which Goffman in the 1960s was writing about in the context of big mixed social gatherings like weddings, that bring together people who know you in quite different contexts.

cortesoft• 8 days ago

Yeah, the context collapsed into a uni-context

sosodev• 8 days ago

I think the difference is asking what happens if all contexts collapse. In the 2000s or 1960s context collapse was something that would happen occasionally when opted into. These days everybody is hyper connected and living in a collapsed context every day. That's the uni-context and the implications of it feel very different than that of a wedding or old-school forum. A wedding wouldn't push people to permanently change who they are or how they perceive themselves for more favor in the collapsed context. They would only do it momentarily.

Also, the wedding or forum had very limited scope. As mentioned in the interview, the uni-context is about context collapse on a global scale.

joshdick• 8 days ago

This is answered in the interview:

"Context collapse is a claim about informational contexts, and my claim is a claim about normative context."

pphysch• 8 days ago

This is an interesting perspective on the concept of "atomization of the individual", which the interview interestingly does not refer to. Both atomization and the "uni-context" arise from the destruction of an individual's local contexts, like family and community, leaving them an individual in a global, maximally-large pool of individuals, the so-called uni-context.

Atomization has clear motivations: increasing the individual consumer base (no, you shouldn't share your car or lawnmower with your block, you need your own), suppressing democracy, and generally making a population more predictable and easy to manage.

ashu1461• 8 days ago

It also helps companies to exploit people easily. Example if you have are a fit person, then you should have an apple watch and now perhaps and oura ring as well.

Large companies and organisations are able to tap into our core emotions and needs of the human body and able to shape our day to day in a way we feel that we have the freedom to choose but in reality we are acting within hidden boundaries.

inigyou15• 8 days ago

You made me wonder what would happen if I put a sign out front advertising people can borrow my lawnmower for free.

Worst I'd have to lose is a lawnmower.

I don't have a lawnmower or a lawn. But if I did... interesting experiment.

derektank• 8 days ago

Atomization of the individual seems much more driven by a cultural valorization of liberalism and personal freedom than market dynamics per se. If the individual is free to act on their own, without obligation to their family or higher social structures, such as by marrying whoever they choose or by refusing to share their personal wealth with other members, or by following a different religion, then these higher level structures will eventually wither away. Community can only exist as a real force if the individual has obligations to it and can be bound to it. This has tradeoffs for sure, but I would much rather live in a world with more personal freedom than one where I am bound to a social contract I had no hand in creating and limited ability to change.

uwagar• 8 days ago

basically, u gotta unplug and go offline and live by moving about in the world and interacting with everything with your own senses.

DaveZale4• 8 days ago

Yup. Get outside. Screens are increasingly addictive by design. I am going outside now. Enjoy your days. Use the internet and your phone as tools, not separate realities.

sorokod• 8 days ago

"How do informational norms change when we’re all living in the same universal room?"

I different interesting question: why would we want to inhabit this universal room in the first place? The post mentions the idea of being "bigger than yourself" but to me the context collapse achieves the opposite - a sort of carboard caricature of oneself.

bensyverson4• 8 days ago

From what I’ve observed, people are increasingly checking out of social media (or turning their profiles private), because it’s just unappealing unless you’re actively promoting something.

jsisto• 8 days ago

This is the reason I am not on any socials. It is purely promotional

taeric• 8 days ago

The numbers just don't support this, though? Social media remains at an all time high in engagement numbers. And climbing.

What is also growing is the number of people signaling that they are out of it.

This is extra pernicious because the people that are staying in control of these environments are maintaining a large amount of leverage over everyone.

DaveZale4• 8 days ago

I've been watching both the corporate media, and social media, rot completely over the past 30 years.

A large part of that was that early adopters tended to be more educated, played nicely, and were not involved in attention-seeking, sychophancy, and often, escapism.

Another factor is the bright colors, moving videos and other eye candy, and psychological hacks like the emojis for "liking" and gaining "followers" which produce addictive feedback loops.

Of course, this interview touches on valid points, but is not the whole picture. "Bad news travels fast" and gets more clicks. That helps explain the rot of the news media.

Maybe I am oversimplifying too, however. Factors like sophisticated persuasion campaigns by various organizations, for example, cannot be discarded. Likewise with the advertisers.

dredmorbius7• 8 days ago

Agree strongly with your first factor. Early adopters often (though not always) self-select for higher-level interaction. This has been true of media dating back to cuneiform.

A third factor addressing 21st century media rot is the absolute dependence on advertising, and the demonitisation of earlier ad-supported formats (print newspapers, print magazines, radio, television, and increasingly non-social-media online platforms) as ads transferred first to "new media" (itself an old story, though dating somewhat more recently to the origins of mass-advertising in the mid-19th century), and ultimately to "adtech", with highly-personalised, highly-targeted advertising.

That latter both led advertisers to abandon non-targetable media (including generic online banner ads), and the increasing pandering of online media (especially Search and Social) to advertiser interests. This both killed ads-as-financial-foundation of other online media, and increasingly turned Search and Social into ad-delivery rather than information-delivery / community-connection platforms.

It's the odd standouts which have independent funding which are still relatively immune to this. HN is one of those, some sites such as Metafilter and the Metaverse are others online. Public media would be another notable exception, though of course it is being increasingly targeted as well, largely for political reasons, notably in the US (NPR, PBS, and the late CPB), and UK (BBC). It's healthier elsewhere, notably in my experience, Germany.

DaveZale4• 8 days ago

Sure, Germany has excellent journalism. I visit dw.com often. derspiegel has very in-depth quality journalism too. And many others surely exist, I just don't know about them.

100% agree about the personalization of news topics and stories. When I look at my spouse's newsfeed in the evening (she uses yahoo) I remark to her "that's clickbait" and get a relatively violent reaction. "Relatively" because normally she is very pleasant. But tailoring the media to past viewing history is potentially very dangerous. In the wrong hands, the news feed could be tweaked just a little bit, day by day, week by week, to enable or worsen certain biases. And surely, we see some of this daily already. Why else would billionaires purchase large US media companies?

The best guidance I've seen to have a well balanced view of world news, is to use several independent sources globally. Do not rely upon "newsfeeds" (doesn't it suggest that we are cattle in a way?), don't spend too much time in any one place, use a variety of search engines to confirm or disprove questionable conclusions, and try to read print books by reputable authors on topics that really fascinate us.

Nassim Talib offered some good advice in his books on the so-called "news" - if you really want to see the value in the news, try to go to the library for a print newspaper, and look at the news from a week ago. Is it really as important to you as the "news" today? Very often, it will seem completely meaningless, ancient history. If that is the case, we are getting something from the information other than the information itself. It's something that has to be tried to learn the lesson.

Advertising? I see very little, using linux with brave browser and various plug ins. When I use google chrome, the results are horrifying. I've used google for 30 years now, but have been de-googling for over a year now. It's been a healthy experience. I don't know what is happening with them. Maybe they abandoned the "don't be evil" prematurely?

inigyou15• 8 days ago

Metaverse is immune to ad capture because it never got popular enough to have ad interest?

dredmorbius7• 8 days ago

Gah! Fediverse, not Metaverse.

thomashobohm• 8 days ago

If Agnes Callard tried to read Heidegger, her head would explode.

transitorykris• 8 days ago

She absolutely would have read Heidegger

doshilabs• 8 days ago

She literally mentions Heidegger in the interview.

kruffalon2• 8 days ago

I'm having immense problems digesting this interview to understand the concept of the uni-context.

It does sound very interesting and right up my alley.

I also don't seem to be able to use internet search anymore (probably a user error) so if anyone has a link to a document, soundfile or video of Agnes Callard explaining the concept without the interuptions from a interviewer that is more interested in contributing than to let her explain the concept I would very much appreciate it.

xnorswap2• 8 days ago

I also don't seem to be able to use internet search anymore

A bit off topic, but you're not the only one. I've grown up with the internet and yet I'm now completely unable to find things on demand.

I sometimes resort to claude, not because I want to, but because it's so difficult to search the real internet now. Asking claude, then asking claude for sources, can uncover hidden gems. ( It can also reveal claude talking out of its arse. )

inigyou15• 8 days ago

I believe this is often because things fall off the internet. Back in the early days, things were added more frequently than they were removed, because there wasn't much to remove. Now, it's reached equilibrium - things are also frequently removed.

billbrown• 8 days ago

I wish philosophers—everyone, really—would provide a definition of their neologisms. I'd prefer a succinct, Aristotlian one but I'll settle for anything approximating it.

This is probably the best source, but it's completely unavailable online:

https://www.reed.edu/events/?trumbaEmbed=view%3Devent%26even...

kruffalon2• 6 days ago

What a great link, thanks.

Hopefully there will be some artifacts from this that will be available to the greater public.

jdthedisciple• 8 days ago

The theory felt a bit oversold in the introduction, imho.

alexwebb2• 8 days ago

This actually fits quite nicely with the idea that the graph network of humanity has meaningful emergent properties/challenges/phenomena at various densities or subnetwork connectedness thresholds.

It's the same fundamental network problem: the infrastructure that allows unprecedented levels of commerce and ideas and travel will also allow disinformation, plagues, and homogeneity. The double-edged sword of graph density.

resters3• 8 days ago

There are some of us (late generation-X / early millennial) who saw this coming and still maintain a variety of separate identities across many domains.

I don't know why someone would want to have the same identity in the workplace as on internet forums, for example.

Social media appears to have given many people the idea that they ought to cultivate their public identity from an early age as preparation for internet fame / personal branding.

thomastjeffery4• 8 days ago

Unfortunately that isn't a solution. When you keep separate identities, the only thing that can exist across platforms is your own participation. Everything you say and do is isolated to whichever identity and platform you are using in that moment. You still don't have the opportunity to exist completely, because your self has been fragmented. Even if you did manage to create a cross-platform identity, the product of your participation is fragmented, and every story you tell is objective to that platform's context. Even if you tell a story that links across platforms, you are still isolated to that specific cross-platform context.

dontwannahearit2• 8 days ago

I think this misses the point. As the article points out, people could and would act differently in different contexts: Home, the Church, the Bar. They weren't lacking opportunity to "exist completely".

The whole point of the omni-context is that you are putting yourself in a space where you have to act in a way that is appropriate to all of those places.

I would say things in the Bar that I would not want the reverend, my grandmother or my children to hear - but in the uni-context I have to mediate my speech to what is appropriate to all of those audiences or risk judgement for it.

The uni-context discourages expression. It's like a dystopia where everything you say and do is recorded and can be recalled for judgement at any time. And yet people sign up for it.

Trying to maintain separate context, different identities across platforms is an attempt to fight against that and to limit the risk that something I say on one plaform is not going to destroy my social credit in every other platform where I participate.

astrobe_2• 8 days ago

your self has been fragmented

Unless you are more after acknowledgement than sharing/helping others (and be on the receiving end sometimes), this is non-problem.

giraffe_lady• 8 days ago

If you keep them distinct unification is a weapon to be used against you. You're writing your own blackmail someone just has to call you on it.

With prose fingerprinting, sophisticated tracking, now your identities are only separate by rapidly eroding social convention. Intentionally merging them allows you to have control over the process, and helps you maintain discipline about what you reveal where. If you don't do it it will be done to you.

xyzzy_plugh• 8 days ago

Prose fingerprinting is indeed worrisome, but it's a solvable problem once you are aware it exists. For example, if you contribute here anonymously, but don't contribute elsewhere, there is no corpus that can produce an accurate match.

Many people communicate differently in different contexts. It's common to try and match the style of the community in which you participate.

I am not convinced that having your identities merged for you is inevitable.

resters3• 5 days ago

How is merging identities the solution?

The goal is not "how can I do blackmail-worthy activities without being blackmailed?" the goal is "how can I participate in a narrow way without, for example, having those reading my content biased by my LinkedIn profile or my corporate affiliation?"

We don't walk around wearing little badges that identify every organization we affiliate with, every group, etc. Why would anyone want their online participation burdened by all that extra (usually irrelevant) information?

In my case, I don't write content I would worry about some determined prose fingerprinter finding, and if I did I would sanitize the prose first :)

ekabod• 8 days ago

The article explains the distinction between identity and character. You are talking about character.

Supermancho• 8 days ago

I think that distinction is fuzzier. My ssh key is one identity. My Social Security number is another.

pluralmonad• 8 days ago

I think this is one reason online anonymity is so important for some of us. It is the thing that let's us tamp down the great unification, at least a little.

MithrilTuxedo• 8 days ago

I'm not a neurotypical xenial, but I wasn't any good at compartmentalizing, or when I tried maintaining different identities it didn't feel honest, like I was pretending. I didn't like the thought of anyone ever seeing sides of me that were inconsistent with each other.

astrobe_2• 8 days ago

Even earlier than that. "Pseudonymity" (not using your real name online) were adopted very early on Internet. Facebook is the big exception.

This first claim seems weak to me, and the arguments made in TFA are generally weak IMO. It feels that this theory tries to "eat more than it can chew"; they try to explain a lot of things with a single hypothesis, which in the end yields unconvincing explanations.

For instance, let me answer the 4 opening questions:

Why is the news media so interested in telling you how much the world sucks all the time?

Because fear sells; but that aside, one can also say that we are a species who loves solving problems, and pointing them is generally the first step to a solution.

Why are so many of us obsessed with distraction and managing our attention?

Because something is aggressively trying to steal attention - that is, actually, time - from us. It's self-defence at this point.

Why is it so hard to stop comparing ourselves to others?

Because of the atavistic instinct of reproduction, in which mating partners are selected mainly based on social status. It takes training to go against this instinct, and it is even more difficult when your time is being stolen.

And why does everything in art and design seem the same these days?

That's something a boomer could say... Mainstream designs can, maybe, look similar because when you target a large market you design for the average taste. Non-mainstream designs are just more expensive, harder to find, and less visible.

readthenotes1• 8 days ago

Orson Scott Card saw this coming last century and wrote of a character who maintained 2 online personas who became the thought leaders of opposing groups.

Some of the late gen-x/millennials who saw this coming may have been inspired to read Endor's Game after seeing the movie

inigyou15• 8 days ago

His name was Ender - deliberately, as in Finisher, Destroyer, Finaliser - not Endor

maheshbansod• 4 days ago

in Ender's Game, the two leaders of the opposing groups are actually separate characters (the siblings of the main character).

jt2190• 8 days ago

… internet fame / personal branding.

Also known as “social proof”/“social credibility”, and it’s a common mistake to assume it has no value whatsoever.

resters3• 7 days ago

Does it really matter that a review was written by "Ronald B Smith" vs "BrewersFan4000"?

I'd argue that it only matters when the goal is to convert "real name" accounts into something that is effectively merged with an Experian soft credit score, Google supercookie-powered profile, etc.

tedggh• 8 days ago

I’m in month 5 of not having access to any social network, and although the first weeks I felt tempted to reinstall X and Reddit, I’m at a point where I don’t think I’m ever coming back. There are still great spaces like HN where you can consume content and participate in debates. I do miss some of the fun stuff, but it wasn’t worth being exposed to all the other crap for a few laughs a day.

extr0pian• 8 days ago

Is HN not a social network?

inigyou15• 8 days ago

HN is social media. Social networks connect you with your friends.

arjie2• 8 days ago

Like most of these things, one can bemoan it and say “oh it’s terrible that this is how it is” but I think it’s pretty easy to self-test this to see it’s adaptive for a reason.

Brendan Eich was fired from Mozilla as CTO because of a small donation in favour of Prop 8. Fine?

I think most people here would say yes. In fact people did say that.

I think many people would say they don’t want to have a plumber who opposes (say) trans rights. Or read an author who is anti-gay. Pick some view heretical to your world-view and see if you can stand to encounter people who hold it.

If you require all purity you probably prefer the uni-context.

dontwannahearit2• 8 days ago

But people can never be "pure" enough and what is acceptable in the uni-context will change over time. If you documented your life within it you will find you will be branded a heretic sooner or later.

inigyou15• 8 days ago

It also works both ways. Yes a plumber can be more easily outed as anti-gay and fired, but the same uni-context makes the plumber more likely to be anti-gay and more strongly anti-gay in the first place. Being exposed to anti-gay propaganda all the time will do that. Otherwise you just have people who are like, their church told them it was bad to be gay, but they don't really care about it.

arjie2• 8 days ago

That’s a good point. We can truly create social change much more effectively through the uni-context and much of it is for good.

NostraDavid2• 8 days ago

Yes a plumber can be more easily outed as anti-gay and fired

Why would I care if I don't notice? I'm paying them to fix my literal plumbing, not to proverbially suck my dick. If they do the job I pay them for, and they're not giving me shit for who I am, why would I want to get them fired?

This uni-context feels like a very silly idea in practice.

thomastjeffery4• 8 days ago

It's a shame the title doesn't just include the word: "uni-context". It's a really useful and interesting perspective.

The other relevant word is "objectivity". There so many systems in our society whose context we surround ourselves with, it starts to feel like every subject is objective. The reality is that every subject is subjective.

I think one of the big drivers for this dynamic is that our social systems are facilitated with software, and we always make software as a uni-context. An application is a fixed context.

If we can figure out how to introduce subjectivity into software, that would be extremely useful for both computing and society.

warshinder2• 8 days ago

I think much of this might apply to Callard: her high public visibility in social media, the attention grabbing colorful attire, her as I recall public advocacy and openness about her own polyamorous lifestyle. I don’t think that’s typical. Certainly it’s not for me. I’d rather be Zelig. But I think most people code shift, and present different personas in private life compared to work. Probably much less so for the average substack author, so it surprises me little the idea might resonate with Derek Thompson, the blog’s author.

philipallstar• 8 days ago

What the techno-determinism angle misses is: Why did these technologies catch on in the first place? Why was radio popular? Why did we come up with new things—television, smartphones—and why did they catch on, too?

This read as AI, which is odd.

NostraDavid2• 8 days ago

This doesn't seem very compatible with societies that have a Germanic majority as population. _Maybe_ the USA can be the pluriformity that adopts this, but I don't see this as an attractive idea for my society (Netherlands) at large. "Act normal, and you're already acting crazy enough", and all that.

I want to be able to discuss taboo ideas in private, without getting globally cancelled for something I that might be discussed out of my mind. No thanks to the uni-context.

context-bound > uni-context, for at least the Germanic-speaking world.

xhevahir2• 8 days ago

What about "Germanic" society are you saying is incompatible with this? (English is a Germanic language, by the way.)

crossthestreams• 8 days ago

I would recommend her article on travel in the New Yorker, The Case Against Travel. I absolutely hated it and disagree with it so much, and I think she's up to similar stuff here. But you will get a sense of her from the article, and it's worth a read either way.

msteffen• 8 days ago

Interesting to read this right after reading about the pseudpocalypse (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48908886)

That article proposes that, soon, it will be possible to connect any online identity to its owner's other identities by analyzing stylistic details in their writing. So even niche online communities will have these problems.

xhevahir2• 8 days ago

As far as I can tell neither Callard nor anyone else talk about this concept anywhere outside this interview. Odd.

erelong• 8 days ago

meh it seems more like there's more of a multi-context more than ever rather than a uni-context

GMoromisato• 8 days ago

If someone were to ask me, which I notice they're not, I'd say uni-context is just another word for "globalization". Specifically, the globalization caused by technological change, including the internet, but also standard container shipping.

Social networks are globalized. Being captain of your high school football team used to be special, but now it's nothing, when people are comparing themselves against Nobel-prize winning teenagers.

Almost all professional jobs are globalized. Software companies sell globally; financial companies sell globally; drug companies sell globally. That means the most talented professional can charge whatever they want because they can generate profits from a massive market.

But non-college-educated workers are left out. They can only get local jobs, which (a) don't pay as well, and (b) get competition from immigrants. This is exactly how Trump got in the White House and how so many right-wing parties rose across Europe. It's why Brexit happened.

Globalization is even the cause of enshittification. When your market is local, the opinion of your customers is important, and a good reputation allows you to expand to new regions. But when your market is global, you can only grow by extracting more value from existing customers.

Agnes Callard’s theory of the uni-context

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