Callard's Uni-Context
Agnes Callard just dropped a new conceptual tool for understanding we moderns:
The uni-context is a scenario in which the ways you should act become the same across all different contexts. There’s just one set of norms you should follow all times, irrespective of context.… There is a drive to be bigger than yourself. It leads people to adventure, but adventure just takes you to a different place. The uni-context takes you to a different set of norms, a much more radical change, a push to live in something like a fully open reality.…
Happiness depends on your context and who you are. There isn’t anything that will always make a person happy. But there are reliable ways to make people unhappy. … what we see on the internet, insofar as people are trying to be legible to large groups, is that they focus their attention on things that show up to everyone. … It’s likely going to be something bad. … Condemnation spreads further because it cuts across all these contexts …
The thing about character is that it shows up differently in different circumstances. … With identity categories like woman, disabled, gay, Jewish, or American, the striking thing is that you are a member of those categories in every circumstance … What goes along with the identity logic of the uni-context is a specific form of ethics that dictates how we talk about identity, and it covers who’s powerful and who needs protecting, namely the ethics of inclusion. …
If everyone is on the same comparable plane, the same evaluative field, then comparison itself becomes a more inextricable part of life. … As more things enter the same evaluative field, you make comparisons you never used to be able to make. …
One century ago, there were a bunch of people looking around at the world, thinking: What the hell is happening? Did culture break? … They described it as the fragmentation of everything. All of a sudden, they said, everything is breaking apart. … The first thing that happens when a bunch of stuff is unified in a single evaluative field is that you feel overwhelmed by your choices. It feels like stuff is fragmented, because you don’t [yet] know how to compare these things …
in the modern world, local norms are melting, and what replaces them is the psychology of money, which I’ll reframe as the psychology of markets. What are markets very good at? Creating a single comparative field. That’s how they coordinate prices, supply and demand … Money is abstract value. Every other value concept is somehow tied concretely to objects. … the fundamental change is the rise of abstraction. We live our lives so abstractly now. … We manage ourselves and our experiences in very top-down ways. …
The norm for human beings is a bottom-up management of attention. You pay attention to what’s salient in your environment, … What the uni-context brings is a newfound top-down management of attention, … We feel constantly like we’re letting ourselves get distracted, which is another way of saying we are failing to manage our attention with an iron enough fist. …
The uni-context is a space of unruliness. … For almost all of human history, we have lived in closed little worlds, and those worlds presented themselves as the only world. … What we are moving toward is a “world openness” that we hunger after, where I’m not just going to do things a certain way because that’s how we do things or where I was born. (more)
Callard has an interesting explanation for the homogenization of culture. Instead of thinking of it as a Darwinian outcome of rival cultures colliding, the explanation is more individual: People (enabled by technology) have an innate desire to expand their frames of awareness onto a global stage, and this visibility invites cross-culture comparison which leads to homogeneity.
It's a good reminder that culture evolution is a subtle business. Genes are bound up in packets called "organisms" and most gene-gene competition happens via those proxies. But culture can evolve one meme at a time for the most part.
The impulse behind the uni-context isn't new - it's gossip, which is ancient. People have always wanted to know about others while keeping their own internals hidden. What Hanson's market mechanism explains is the supply side: money abstracts all value into a single comparative field, and once that field exists, the gossip impulse has effectively infinite reach. What's changed isn't the desire; it's the scale.
The participation data suggests the underlying asymmetry is intact. Pew finds that the top 10% of Twitter users generate 80% of content, and of that "posting," roughly 75% is replies and retweets - not original self-disclosure. Stack that with the ~90% who lurk entirely, and the people actually putting themselves into the universal evaluative field are a very small fraction.
Famous people have always lived in the uni-context. Everything visible about them was subject to universal scrutiny; they guarded their private lives jealously because that was the only space where they could be role-specific people rather than universal moral subjects. What's happening now isn't that everyone is living like a celebrity - it's that everyone is structurally positioned the way a celebrity's audience has always been: watching, commenting, largely invisible themselves.
The uni-context feels like mass self-exposure because the reach of the few who do self-expose has expanded enormously - which is exactly what the market-abstraction engine would predict. But the gossip asymmetry - know others, stay hidden yourself - looks remarkably intact. Markets may have industrialized and universalized that impulse without fundamentally changing it.