A Philosopher’s One-Word Theory to Explain Why the World Feels So Weird

Once you learn what the "uni-context" is, you won't stop seeing it everywhere

Photo by Mike Hindle on Unsplash

Here are some questions that I consider self-evidently compelling about the modern world:

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

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

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

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

A week ago, I didn’t think these questions were related. I’m not sure I would have told you I had a good answer to most of them. And I certainly wouldn’t have made the audacious and borderline bonkers claim that one single theory could begin to explain all of them, at once.

But then I had the pleasure of speaking to Agnes Callard, the University of Chicago professor, about her new theory called “the uni-context.” It’s easily one of them most interesting conversations I’ve had all year. And once you’ve heard or read it, I think you might find it hard to think about anything else.

One way to prepare your mind for Callard’s theory of the uni-context is to think about the better-known concept of “context collapse.” If you post something to social media, it will be simultaneously visible to your boss, your parents, your ex, and total strangers. So, while your offline life might be distinct with each of these groups—you might be differential to your boss, childish with your parents, and bawdy with your friends—all of those distinctions are flattened on the internet. That’s context collapse, and you can think of it as the answer to a question: How do informational norms change when we’re all living in the same universal room?

Callard takes the idea significantly further. She asks: How do all other norms—our morals, our ethics, our sense of what is good for us and for others—change when we continually imagine ourselves to be living in a universal room with everybody else? The connections that Callard makes are consistently surprising, often quite funny, and ultimately mind-exploding.

Here is our conversation, edited for clarity, brevity, and simplicity’s sake.

The Uni-Context, Explained

Derek Thompson: What is the uni-context?

Agnes Callard: Let’s start with the word context. A context is a set of circumstances that tell you how you should act. For most of human history, contexts were local and multiple. If you wanted to know how you should act, you would look around. Am I in a field? Am I inside my home? Am I in the church? Am I in a bar? You would immediately get guidance by looking both at your physical environment and at the people around you and how they were acting.

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.

Thompson: Is the uni-context a purely technological phenomenon?

I just wrote an article about what America was like in 1926, based on a social science survey called Recent Social Trends, published in 1933. The authors claim that the radio was destroying individuality, because it took people who used to be settled in rooms and it exploded their brains to become present all over the world simultaneously. Radio was demolishing the idea of a local individual, because suddenly we all became global citizens.

So one story you could tell is that the last 150 years of telecommunications technology have taken “local” individuals, who occupy one room at a time, and made us into global beings who are simultaneously in every room, at once. Is the uni-context just technology or is it technology plus something else?

Callard: It’s technology plus something else. 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? Not every technology people have invented has caught on the way these forms have. They caught on in large part because of this impulse people have to live in a uni-context.

Thompson: Does the uni-context flow out of this adventurousness in the human spirit to become bigger than ourselves, to be everywhere, and to know everything?

Callard: Yeah, it absolutely does. There’s a conversational relationship between these technologies and a human impulse that interacts with them. They facilitate the expression of an impulse; if they didn’t, they would flop as technologies. We need to explain why they were popular; why they became the subject of obsessive use; and what their popularity reveals, as a humans’ impatience with being trapped in a small world that presents itself as all of reality but you know it isn’t.

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.

The Uni-Context Explains … Why Everyone Talks About How Everything Sucks All the Time

Thompson: I want to get into some implications of the uni-context. If I put on the goggles of the uni-context, what makes sense that previously did not? One of those things is the rise of negativity bias. When you go online, there’s so much emphasis on people posting about what is bad. Why would this theory explain a world in which people are more focused on bad things than good things?

Callard: In general, goodness is more context-dependent than badness. There isn’t really anything that’s good all the time for everyone independent of context. 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. There’s a set of evils that are close to universal: death, pain, illness, violence. Even if someone’s in very different circumstances from yours, if you see they’re being subjected to one of those, you can interpret it as suffering and understand it.

So we should predict that 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. Take two strangers on the internet trying to talk to each other. What are they going to coordinate on as a topic they can both care about? It’s likely going to be something bad.

Thompson: It’s almost like you’re saying the audience for the bad tends to be more global than the audience for the good.

Take food. If I think chicken enchiladas are really delicious, that might be interesting to my wife or my neighbor in the context of our home. But the fact that I think chicken enchiladas are delicious is incredibly boring for posting on Twitter, a place that cuts across contexts. It’s more interesting for me to say white Americans who eat chicken enchiladas are racist against Mexican culture, because the concept of racism clicks into a global norm of badness.

So when people go online, when it’s suddenly one to a million, there is an inclination to make those posts negative. Condemnation spreads further because it cuts across all these contexts. Is that a fair way of recapitulating how the uni-context would predict that modern communication would be more fixated on criticism and badness?

Callard: That seems right. Let me make one corrective and add a point. You might say your chicken enchilada thing just isn’t that important or good. But let’s say something really good happened. Someone in Iran wrote an amazing poem. Even then, well, they wrote it in a language a lot of us don’t speak, and we need time to evaluate and culturally assimilate it. So even pretty significant goods are going to be throttled in their ability to reach a substantial audience. From chicken enchiladas to great works of art, we’ve got the same problem.

Thompson: When we spoke on the phone about the uni-context, you told me a story about being a professor that seems like a great example of this principle. Can you tell that story?

Callard: One way I illustrate the norms that are distinctively uni-contextual, and contrast them with our older multi-contextual norms, is to think about ways I might correct a student. Suppose they come late to class, or interrupt another student, or raise their hand to say something that has nothing to do with what the previous person just said. Those are all ways I can correct a student in my capacity as teacher. The other students cannot make those corrections.

But now imagine that a student makes a sexist or racist comment. I can correct that too, but so can another student in the class. The other students are in a totally parallel position to me when it comes to the uni-contextual norms. Those are not role-dependent.

Let me add something about the idea that the audience is global. I want to distinguish between a situation in which a lot of people from a lot of cultures are accessing the same information and one in which people are accessing it from a lot of different contexts. Imagine it was just New Yorkers on the internet. Those New Yorkers would be accessing the internet from different places, in different moods, at different times of day. One might be at a bar, while another might be talking to their kids. Is there something good for all New Yorkers all the time, irrespective of their age, wherever they are, and at whatever time of day it is? No. The same point holds. They are going to focus on the negative as well.

The Uni-context Explains … Why Identity Has Become More Important Than Character

Thompson: Another implication is the way the uni-context makes identity more important than character. Can you explain how, and why?

Callard: First, let’s define what character is. The fact that I have to tell you is itself telling; that word is less familiar to us. Everyone knows what identity is, but we might not be sure what character is anymore. Character refers to a set of dispositions that shape how you navigate your emotional life across a variety of circumstances. A courageous person navigates their emotional life in relation to fear. You could be anger-prone, or generous. Your character is a set of dispositions that determine how you respond to a big variety of circumstances.

The thing about character is that it shows up differently in different circumstances. Say I’m irascible, easily provoked to anger. Even an irascible person isn’t angry all the time. There might be circumstances where everybody gets angry, and so you can’t see my irascibility, because even though I’m angry, so is everybody else. Grasping character requires a lot of context. To understand someone’s character, you need to know them well and to have experienced them in a variety of contexts before you can generalize.

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. There is no circumstance in which I stop being a woman. Identity is a hat you never take off. So identity is well suited to a uni-contextual world.

Thompson: This reminds me of political discourse on the left and the right, which tends to focus on identity rather than characters. You have these debates about identities are good, which identities are powerful and oppressive, which identities are powerless and oppressed, which have protection, which have too much protection. It’s not that those categories aren’t important. They are. But I’m reflecting now on the gap between how frequently we talk about identity and how infrequently we talk about character in the national discourse.

Callard: Yes, in two ways.

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. Our fundamental concern in relation to identity is that there are identities that might be excluded. Depending on where you are politically, you have your sights on different identity categories, but everybody’s worried about that. That’s a fundamental form of ethics of the uni-context, because the one thing the uni-context has to be is a space for everybody. It’s got to be inclusive in a way that earlier societies almost everywhere were not. That word, inclusion, wasn’t a thing people talked about. It comes along with the uni-context, and the way that ethics gets focused is through identity categories.

And then, there’s virtue. Think about Aristotle, because he’s my prime example of a virtue ethicist. By its nature, virtue is a concept that privileges the good side rather than the bad. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics tells you what it is to be courageous and wise and just and generous. There are corresponding discussions of how you might go wrong. But those are predicated on first understanding the positive value of certain kinds of behavior. So virtue ethics naturally has a positivity bias that is precisely the opposite of the bias we have now.

The Uni-Context Explains … Status Anxiety, Comparison, Moneyball, and the Marketization of Everything

Thompson: Tell me if this is a fair recapitulation of our conversation so far.

For most of human history, people judged norms based on local context. A home had its own rules, a cathedral its own rules, and a classroom or bar or funeral parlor had its own rules. But now it is almost like we are constantly living in universal rooms, and the universal room we occupy is assumed to have universal values and universal norms. That has specific implications. First, rather than talk about what is good, which is context-dependent, we tend to focus about universal truths, and it’s easier to talk about universal bads than goods, so people focus on negativity. Two, character is context-dependent, so we talk less about character and more about its universalist equivalent, which is identity.

There’s a third implication that we should discuss. If everyone is on the same comparable plane, the same evaluative field, then comparison itself becomes a more inextricable part of life.

Callard: Exactly.

Thompson: Tell me how the uni-context leads to a world of more comparison and competition.

Callard: Imagine two school districts with two high schools that do things slightly differently. If you’re in district A, you go to school A, and if you’re in district B, you go to school B. There might be a lot of information about what they do, but people treat it as: I’m in this district, so I go to this school. Then they change the rule: You can go to either school no matter where you live. Suddenly there is motivation to compare. You had the information before, but no motivation to compare, because the schools were not in the same space of choice, the same evaluative field.

Now they are, so you find ways to compare them: graduation rates, what colleges people get into, how many AP classes they teach. And that affects the schools. Suppose one gets less popular because it doesn’t teach many AP classes. They were offering an individualized curriculum, but now everyone’s going to the other school, so they say, “We’ve got to teach AP classes too.” The process homogenizes the two schools, so they can compete. That’s not the only possible result. They could specialize, with one becoming the school for freshman and sophomore years, the other becoming the school for junior and senior years. But if they don’t recreate a normative barrier, you get homogenization from comparison.

As more things enter the same evaluative field, you make comparisons you never used to be able to make.

Thompson: There are three pieces I’m trying to keep straight.

One, the upstream phenomenon of the uni-context. Two, the downstream phenomenon of more fields of comparison. Three, the further downstream phenomenon of homogenization.

This is where the theory really starts to sing for me, because I think about sports. As the analytics revolution came for baseball, you had all these teams in possession of the same statistics by which they could compare players. Previously, you had 30 teams using their own private scouts, so their analysis was more context-dependent. But when an easily calculable statistic like on-base percentage or WAR becomes the conventional way to evaluate whether a player is good, all the players become part of the same comparative set. You can rank them one-to-250 easily on a spreadsheet.

But analytics didn’t just lead to more math, or more comparison. It led to more homogenization of strategy. One of the great critiques of baseball has been that every team essentially does the exact same thing: it’s the same strategies for pitchers; the same strategies for hitters; the three true outcomes; all the batters swinging for the fences. So you have the uni-context creating a comparative field, in this case analytics, which leads to homogenization.

Callard: What you said reminded me that I have a theory of the inflection point for the uni-context. I don’t think it started five or ten years ago. The moment it really showed up was around 1910.

One century ago, there were a bunch of people looking around at the world, thinking: What the hell is happening? Did culture break? A lot of those people were novelists, and they wrote a new kind of novel called the modernist novel, which is a novel about how to live in a world in which the uni-context is just coming into existence. Theorists of the time—such as Georg Simmel, Max Weber, and Martin Heidegger—they noticed something weird was going on. They tended to describe it in terms that sound almost like the opposite of the uni-context. They described it as the fragmentation of everything. All of a sudden, they said, everything is breaking apart. That was my first clue.

The reason I thought of this is that you said everything is becoming homogenous, and I thought, “in a way, yes, but that’s a later effect.” 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 know how to compare these things, because you haven’t yet developed technologies of comparing them.

So, the early feeling of the uni-context was a feeling of the world being fragmented. If you were a medieval peasant doing art, you were in art’s normative world. If you were in the church, you were in the church’s normative world. But in the 20th century, around World War I, you start to think: How do we reconcile the schoolteacher turned murderer, the soldier? How do we think about the relationship between art and religion? We’re suddenly trying to compare all these different values inside a single context, and the world feels dis-unified. Eventually we get technologies of commensurability. What fragmentation really means—and that part was invisible to these writers—is that suddenly everything is part of the same evaluative field. That’s why you experience a multiplicity where you used to experience one thing at a time.

Thompson: I’m holding an essay by Georg Simmel you assigned me, The Metropolis and Mental Life. It was published in the early 1900s. Here’s a quote:

Money takes the place of all the manifoldness of things and expresses all qualitative distinctions between them in the distinction of how much. To the extent that money can become a common denominator of all values, it becomes the frightful leveler. All things rest on the same level and are distinguished only by their amounts.”

Simmel is putting his finger on the idea that 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. It’s one thing for there to be a market for carrots and eggs. But in the dating world now there’s a marketplace of single people. In sports, a marketplace of players who can be compared by specific analytics that homogenize and flatten strategy.

So there’s a way in which your theory of the uni-context is a way of saying the modern experience is the awareness that we are all participants in a global marketplace in which we previously were not. When I’m posting something on Twitter, I know a universe of people can see it, and I’m going to be voted up and down against other people posting in those marketplaces for attention. As we coexist in more marketplaces, it changes the way we think about ourselves and our values.

Is this market language pulling away from your theory?

Callard: There’s something intuitive about the way you’re putting it. But you have to bring in Simmel’s theory of money to understand that quote.

Simmel has a book called The Philosophy of Money in which he explains what money really is, and the answer isn’t markets. That book defines money probably a hundred times, but I’ll pick one: Money is abstraction in the space of value. Money is abstract value. Every other value concept is somehow tied concretely to objects. There’s a gradual move, as Simmel understands it, toward the capacity to think more and more abstractly about value, that moves in the direction of money. But it doesn’t just move in the direction of money, it changes money.

In ancient societies, if something is worth a lot of money, it has to be represented by a large object representing the money. Then you get fiat currency. There are all kinds of changes in money that correspond to this growth of the ability to abstract value.

What Simmel would say is that the fundamental change is the rise of abstraction. We live our lives so abstractly now. If you want to say we’re in a marketplace, that’s fine as a metaphor for the idea that we are engaged in abstract value calculations that allow everything to be compared to everything else. We tend to use money and markets as a metaphor for that activity, but over the past hundred years even what money and markets are has been transformed by this process of abstraction. The deeper thread is that we live very abstractly. We manage ourselves and our experiences in very top-down ways.

The Uni-context Explains … the Attention Crisis

Thompson: Let’s go deeper on this idea that we manage ourselves in top-down ways. You think the uni-context explains our relationship to attention and distraction. Explain.

Callard: The norm for human beings is a bottom-up management of attention. You pay attention to what’s salient in your environment, and the ability to be distracted from what you’re attending to is important in a creature that might at any moment face a snarling animal or a fire. So the default is that you pay attention to what demands your attention.

What the uni-context brings is a newfound top-down management of attention, where we constantly feel that we have to make decisions about how to manage our 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. We have products to help us fight against the very objects we purchase, like our phones. We’re in a war with ourselves. That war is the attempt to do top-down management on an aspect of our psychology that evolved to be more homeostatic, more responsive to an environment.

One illustration: There are a lot of 19th-century novels in which someone is reading a novel, like Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina. It’s always a woman. This woman has a turbulent emotional life, because her lover is being problematic, so she gets distracted from the novel and puts it down. But a thing that never happens is her saying to herself, “no, I need to get through another 20 pages.” That kind of attention management—thinking, “I’m reading this book and I need to focus on it!”—is just not a thing people did in the 19th century. That shows you how different a creature the human of today is.

Thompson: The uni-context puts us in a universal room, where we become aware of more ideas, more people, more things that we could be paying attention to but aren not. Our response to this is to develop a theory of attention that treats it as a resource to manage. We think, “I have to only focus on the perfect things!” And this makes us obsessed with, and fearful of, distraction in a way that is historically unique.

Callard: It is a mark of the top-down management of attention. The question, "what should I pay attention to?” is not a function of anything about my local environment. I can’t use cues in my local environment to tell me what to attend to, because in pretty much every environment these days, there’s a screen. It’s there no matter what. It allows me to choose. It puts me in this giant evaluative field as to what I could attend to, the sufferings of people far away if I chose. So I stand in this choice relation to my attention.

That was already starting to be true with radio and newspapers. The Austrian writer Robert Musil, one of the prophets of the uni-context, wrote:

The probability of learning something unusual from a newspaper … is far greater than that of experiencing it; in other words, it is in the realm of the abstract that the more important things happen in these times, and it is the unimportant that happens in real life

That’s him saying we are in some way divorced from our local context. It’s become irrelevant to us. We live in an abstract space that requires us to manage our attention.

Judging a World We Made

Thompson: Is the uni-context good or bad?

Callard: I don’t know. I recommended that Simmel essay for a specific reason, the way it ends, where he says the metropolitan mindset is a different mood of life than anything humans have known before, but we can’t judge it, because we are its products. It is us. The idea that we can separate ourselves and stand in some relation to it and say this is good or bad is a bit of an illusion. That’s one way of thinking about this, that it’s not obvious we’re in a position to judge it. My own thought is I don’t feel ready to judge it. What the uni-context is, as I understand it, is an answer to the question, where are we? For the past bunch of years I’ve been looking around and seeing, everything is going crazy, where am I such that all this crazy stuff is happening? The uni-context is a way of answering that. It makes sense that this would be happening if that’s where I am. I thought I was in Chicago, sitting at my desk at the university. No, the whole time I was in the uni-context. The first thing we need to do is get our bearings before we start judging, because the uni-context is a super judgey place. There’s a universal moralism applicable to every situation, and getting pulled into that takes you away from trying to understand where you are.

So What? (Or: The Abiding Hunger For ‘World Openness’)

Thompson: I want to know what we should do about this.

A simple answer might be: When you’re having dinner with your family, you can be present with your family, or you can be on your phone, which is a universal room that makes you everywhere at once. So put away the phone. But that feels like a cheap and predictable answer. Do you have something prescriptive that isn’t just “put away the phone at family dinner?”

Callard: The question of whether the uni-context is good or bad is loaded, because the uni-context struggles to see good things. It’s better at seeing bad things. Pretty much everyone who hears me talk about the uni-context immediately responds that it’s bad. I’ve never had anyone say, “The uni-context sounds great!”But the thing is that this supposedly bad thing is a thing we’re creating. We’re choosing it over and over again. Even me talking to you from far away about an abstract thing [is the uni-context.]

The uni-context is a space of unruliness. It’s a space in which a certain thing about humanity gets expressed, namely our deep aversion to “world closure.” For almost all of human history, we have lived in closed little worlds, and those worlds presented themselves as the only world. A series of contexts presented the person with direction—here’s what you should do. 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.