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

In the following excerpt, Agnes Callard defines the unicontext and explains to Derek how it has evolved with technology.

Derek Thompson: All right. So you are here because a mutual acquaintance of ours saw a presentation of yours in Kyoto, of all places, and wrote me at some ungodly hour to say that you just scrambled her brain in the best possible way with a fresh theory of everything called the unicontext, u-n-i-context.

What is the unicontext?

Agnes Callard: So let’s start with what context is. A context is a normative situation. That is, it’s a set of circumstances that tell you how you should act, and for most of human history, contexts were local and multiple. So if you wanted to know how you should act, you would look around. “Wait, am I in a field? Am I inside my home? Am I in the church? Am I in a bar?” And you would immediately get guidance by looking both at your physical environment and at the people around you and how they were acting.

The unicontext is a scenario in which the ways in which you should act become the same across all different contexts. They’re just one set of norms that you should follow all the time, irrespective of context.

Thompson: And we’re going to spend the next hour breaking that thesis down.

One immediate question that jumps to mind is whether what you’re describing is a pure technological phenomenon, and I ask that because I just wrote an article about what America was like in 1926.

I read this 1,500-word social science survey called “Recent Social Trends,” which was published in 1933, and it’s incredible how they talk about the radio. They’re like, there’s this new thing, it’s called the radio, and it’s destroying individuality. Because it’s taking these people who used to live in houses or fields or churches or all the other rooms you were talking about—it takes people who used to be settled in rooms, and it explodes their brains to be present all over the world simultaneously. Radio is demolishing this idea of a local individual because, suddenly, we’re all becoming global citizens.

And then you add to that television. And then you add to that broadband. And you add to that internet and smartphone.

And I feel like one story you could tell here is that the last 150 years of telecommunications technology has taken the individual human, which used to be a local human who could look around a room and say, “I’m going to behave like this based on the local context of my room,” and made us these sort of global beings who are simultaneously in every room at the same time.

And so I wonder if what you’re calling the unicontext is fundamentally about technology. Is it just a technological phenomenon, or is it technology plus something else?

Callard: I think it’s technology plus something else.

So I think that what the tech determinism angle misses is, in a way, brought out by the thought, “Look, the radio did it. The radio achieved it.” And then you’ll get Meyrowitz writing his book: “Look, TV, TV did it. It made us all—”

Thompson: This is Joshua Meyrowitz, author of No Sense of Place, an amazing book from the 1980s. Yeah.

Callard: Amazing book. We’re both fans.

You could say trains, trains were really big for the unicontext in the early 20th century. The ability for people in little peasant villages to go to other places. Suddenly, they could do that where they couldn’t. There were not even roads, but you needed the trains to build the roads. So absolutely the flow of people and information is going to be relevant to the progress of the unicontext.

But the reason why I don’t adopt a pure tech determinism view is just the weirdness of being like, “Add to that.” Like, “What do you mean add? Why did we add it?” Or, well, there was the radio. Why was there the radio? Why did we come up with these things, and why did they take off? And why did people become absorbed in them?

So not every form of technology that people have ever invented has caught on in the way that these forms of technology have caught on. These forms of technology caught on, in large part, because of this unicontextual impulse that people have to live in a unicontext, so there’s something of a dialectical relationship.

Thompson: And I love that. Could you take that one step further? Without using the word “unicontext” or “unicontextual,” explain what that human desire is, like this desire that you’re putting your finger on that’s something like: We want to be bigger than ourselves. We want to not only know what’s going on everywhere, but, in a way, we want to be everywhere.

Maybe this is going too far, but I’m thinking about, I’ve been reading, I’m doing a lot of research for some forthcoming episodes on The Odyssey and thinking a lot about how going home is the universal story, but that’s not what The Odyssey is about. It’s not just about going home. It’s about being on an adventure that also leads you home. And there’s this interesting tension in human nature between wanting to be on that adventure and also wanting that adventure to end up at home.

And so maybe speak to this degree to which maybe the unicontext as you’re describing it flows out of this almost adventurousness in the human spirit to want to be everywhere and know everything. Is that a driver in this phenomenon you’re describing?

Callard: Right. So I think that there’s something like a kind of conversational relationship between these technologies and a certain human impulse that interacts with them. They facilitate the expression of an impulse, which if they didn’t do that, they would flop as technologies. That is, we need to explain why they were popular, why they were taken up, why they became the subject of obsessive use.

And my thought is that what they reveal, what their popularity reveals, is a kind of human impatience with being trapped in a small world that presents itself as all of reality but where you know it isn’t. So that could be your little peasant village, or it could be your native language.

And there is a kind of drive to be bigger than your local self. It’s a drive that leads people to adventure, but adventure just takes you to a different place.

The unicontext takes you to a different set of norms, which is a much more radical kind of change. And I think it is a kind of push to live in something like a fully open reality.

This excerpt has been edited and condensed.

Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Agnes Callard
Producer: Devon Baroldi
Additional Production Support: Ben Glicksman