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.
Our brain’s like heuristics bc they are energy efficient. I wonder if the uni-context is a heuristic to the flood of information that the modern world has provided. Internet, llms, world news etc. As a heuristic, the uni-context makes mental processing more energy efficient?
I'm confused, don't most people not already do this once they get out of high school? I can't imagine I'm that big an outlier lol. I'm the exact same person already in every context including online, never seen the point to being a poser.
> 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
For every one of those categories, there are people who have changed whether they identify as it or not. One could argue that they were incorrect to do so either before or after in some cases, but they weren't "in every circumstance".
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.
Our brain’s like heuristics bc they are energy efficient. I wonder if the uni-context is a heuristic to the flood of information that the modern world has provided. Internet, llms, world news etc. As a heuristic, the uni-context makes mental processing more energy efficient?
I'm confused, don't most people not already do this once they get out of high school? I can't imagine I'm that big an outlier lol. I'm the exact same person already in every context including online, never seen the point to being a poser.
> 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
For every one of those categories, there are people who have changed whether they identify as it or not. One could argue that they were incorrect to do so either before or after in some cases, but they weren't "in every circumstance".
In post-1933 Germany it didn't depend on whether one identified or didn't identify. Outside attribution was more than enough.