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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
It's a panopticon, where we self-censor because we fear unknown future reprisals. Did we really sign up for it? Or has Our (collective our) ability to reason and push back against it been curtailed by financial incentives to build it?
"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.
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.
This is social media unless you change your nick often, but even then people run stylometric analysis all over this site. Nobody is truly anonymous on the internet.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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. )
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
The article explains the distinction between identity and character. You are talking about character.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
It's a panopticon, where we self-censor because we fear unknown future reprisals. Did we really sign up for it? Or has Our (collective our) ability to reason and push back against it been curtailed by financial incentives to build it?
"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.
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.
This is the reason I am not on any socials. It is purely promotional
This is social media unless you change your nick often, but even then people run stylometric analysis all over this site. Nobody is truly anonymous on the internet.
This is why I just use my name… it also helps me dial in my tone when I know I’m putting my name behind a comment.
The "dialing in your tone" you're talking about is precisely context collapse.
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.
Yeah, the context collapsed into a uni-context
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.
Is HN not a social network?
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.
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.
> 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. )
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nightclubs that put stickers on your phone camera are attempting (largely succeeding) to keep the uni-context out.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
In Germany only.
Don’t forget the agents of corporate persons have their “voice” too.
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.
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.
The theory felt a bit oversold in the introduction, imho.
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.
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.
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.
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.
basically, u gotta unplug and go offline and live by moving about in the world and interacting with everything with your own senses.
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.
"differential" should be "deferential"
Took me a few reads, too.
So it's not a one-word theory, it's a theory with a one-word name... shocking. What a clickbait title!
We've replaced the title above with a representative phrase from the article.
If Agnes Callard tried to read Heidegger, her head would explode.
She absolutely would have read Heidegger
> 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.