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

0:04Derek Thompson: This episode is brought to you by JPMorgan Chase. In today's unpredictable world, geopolitics isn't just a backdrop. It's shaping markets, business strategy, and risk. The JPMorgan Chase Center for Geopolitics brings together former senior policymakers and seasoned practitioners to translate fast-moving global events into clear, decision-ready insights. From conflict and great power competition to energy and supply chain disruption, the center helps clients anticipate what comes next. Read the latest insights at jpmorganchase.com slash center for geopolitics. This episode is brought to you by JIRA by Atlassian.

0:46Derek Thompson: Your work is scattered. A thread here, a DM there, five different docs related to the same project. And now it's not just your team hunting for context. It's your AI agents too. Jira taps Atlassian's teamwork graph to bring that context together across Jira, Confluence, Slack, GitHub, and more. It makes it easy to share with the agents you already use, like Claude, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot. Assign them work directly or connect your agents through MCP. The result, less token waste, more accuracy, and more time moving work forward. Learn more at jira.com. That's J-I-R-A dot com. So two months ago, I woke up on a Saturday morning to an email from Kristen Soldis-Anderson, a political pollster who's been a guest on this show.

1:32Derek Thompson: Hi, Derek, she said. I'm at a conference in Kyoto and just heard a brief talk from a professor of philosophy from the University of Chicago that comes the closest to succinctly explaining the, quote, why everything feels divided and like it sucks constantly phenomenon, end quote. her name is Agnes Callard and her theory is that the root problem is what she calls the eunuch context boy would I do anything to hear you and her get into it on a podcast let me know if I need to make an introduction Kristen well I stared at the screen a theory of everything a theory of everything that explains why people feel like everything sucks these days from an eminent philosopher and it's one word long?

2:19Derek Thompson: You bet I said yes. The Unicontext, as you're about to hear, is fundamentally a theory of what happens when everybody on Earth is forced to live inside the same global room. It changes our experience of time, attention, and even moral norms. Agnes explains the surprising ways that the Unicontext helps us understand why the world feels so negative, why the internet sounds so moralistic and obsessed with badness, why ancients used to care about character, but moderns fixate more on identity. The Unicontext, according to her, even explains how and why we've become so obsessed with managing our attention in a world that we perceive to be overflowing with distraction.

3:09Derek Thompson: Today's guest is the University Steve Chicago philosopher Agnes Callard, and their subject, the Unicontext Theory of Everything. I'm Derek Thompson. This is Plain English.

3:44Derek Thompson: Agnes Callard, welcome to the show. Thank you. Agnes, what is your specialty in philosophy? What do you spend your time thinking about? I spend about half my time thinking about the ancient world. Plato and Aristotle, mostly Socrates. And then the other half thinking about the world that we live in. ethics, moral psychology, the theory of moral responsibility. My first book, Aspiration, was in that territory. All right, so you were 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-dash-context.

4:33Derek Thompson: What is the UNIContext? So, let's start with the context. 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, at the people around you and how they were acting. The unit context is a scenario in which the ways in which you should act become the same across all different contexts.

5:17There's just one set of norms that you should follow all the time, irrespective of context.

5:22Derek 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. And 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.

6:03Derek Thompson: 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 like global beings who are simultaneously in every room at the same time.

6:54Derek Thompson: And so I wonder if what you're calling the unit context is fundamentally about technology. Is it just a technological phenomenon or is it technology plus something else? 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 know, you'll get Meyerowitz writing his book, look, TV, TV did it. It made us all be easy. This is Joshua Meyerowitz, author of No Sense of Place, an amazing book from the 1980s. We're both fans. You could say trains, you know, trains were really big for the unit context in the early 20th century.

7:36The ability for people in little peasant villages to go to other places suddenly they could do that where they couldn't. There were there were not even roads. Right. 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 unit context 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 right or well there was the radio why was there the radio why did we come up with these things and why did they take on and why do people become absorbed in them, right?

8:17So, like, 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, right? So there's something of a dialectical relationship.

8:37Derek 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, like we want to be everywhere. There's this like, maybe this is going too far, but like I'm thinking about, I've been reading, doing a lot of research for some forthcoming episodes on the Odyssey and thinking a lot about how going home is like the universal story. But that's not what the Odyssey is about.

9:17Derek Thompson: 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 unit context you're describing it flows out of this like almost adventurousness and the human spirit to want to be everywhere and know everything? Is that a driver in this phenomenon you're describing? 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.

10:03They 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. Hmm. So that could be your little peasant village or it could be your native language.

10:49And there is a kind of drive to be bigger than your local self. It's a drive that leads people to adventure. But, you know, 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.

11:22Derek Thompson: it's funny this might be too cheeky but the way you were describing people's dissatisfaction with living in sort of the small room of reality and wanting this thing that wanting to see this thing that didn't exist what jumped to mind is the matrix and you know the idea that in that hero's journey you've got you know Neo living in this small world and wanting to believe that there was something bigger outside of him and you know And in a way, the unicontext is like a matrix that actually exists, right? It's the universal room that we've actually built for ourselves. We can all participate in where norms are global and we're all talking to each other.

12:01Derek Thompson: And that scrambles our mind and does some weird things to us. I want to compare this term, the unicontext, to another concept that I think people might be more familiar with, which is context collapse. So that is the idea that, you know, if you post something to Twitter or Instagram, that post is simultaneously visible to your boss and your mom and your college friends and your ex and some total strangers. So while your offline life might be different with each of these groups locally, right? You might be differential to your boss or childish with your parents or you tell body jokes with your friends and you're shy around strangers.

12:37Derek Thompson: No, all of that, all of those distinctions are collapsed on the internet. And that is called context collapse. And that's an idea that's been with us for, I think, about 15 years. How does your theory of the unicontext take context collapse further? So context collapse is a claim about informational contexts, and my claim is a claim about normative context. So context collapse says information that used to only be available to you under these circumstances is now available to you, say, in a larger set of circumstances. This is definitely relevant to the unicontext. The new context is going to tend to favor context collapse in the informational sense.

13:22But you can think about worlds where we effectively had context collapse without the normative element, and we did not have a world at all like our own. So, like, in a peasant village, people would know each other's business. Certainly family members would know each other's business. They might all sleep in the same room. Children might have, like, sexual information about their parents. Right. But the peasant world didn't have context collapse in our sense. Why? Because it was still true that there were different norms that applied to children versus their parents in the home versus out on the fields.

14:02In the in the winter, when when a lot of the village would gather in one house to keep warm and conserve light in different parts of the ritual calendar, there were all kinds of different normative domains. And really, informational context collapse only becomes so kind of important and transformative once you independently have the normative collapse.

14:33Derek Thompson: I love that we have a definition of the unicontext here. I want to really quickly get into some implications. It almost like the what I want to understand is like if I put on the goggles of the unicontext, what makes sense to me in the world that previously did not make sense? And one of those things, I think, is the rise of negativity bias in the world. The fact that when you go online, there's so much emphasis on people posting about what is bad, what is condemnable. So help me understand why this theory of the unicontext would explain a world in which people are more focused on bad things than good things.

15:18So, in general, goodness is more context-dependent than badness is. That is, there isn't really anything that's good all the time for everyone totally independent of context. You know, you could say happiness, but that's just a redefinition of, like, the human good. The question is, like, what is happiness? And what it is depends on your context and your circumstances and who you are. and there isn't anything that will always make a person happy. But there are some pretty reliable ways to make people unhappy. So there are a set of evils that are pretty close to universal. Death, pain, illness, violence.

16:03Even if someone's in really different circumstances from yours, even if you don't much understand who they are or how they live, if you see that they're being subjected to one of those experiences, then you can interpret that as suffering and you can understand it. So we should predict then that what we'll see on the internet, insofar as people are trying to be legible and intelligible to large groups of people, is that they are going to focus their attention on those things that will show up to everyone, that will in turn be legible, let's say, to their audience. and even just take two people.

16:42They might not be giant content creators, but they're just trying to talk to each other, two strangers on the internet. What are they going to coordinate on as a possible topic to both care about? It's likely going to be something bad, something like violence.

16:58Derek Thompson: So as you were talking, I was thinking, it's almost like you're saying the audience for bad tends to be more global than the audience for good. to take a subject like food, right? If I think that chicken enchiladas are really delicious, well, that might be something that's very interesting to my wife or to my neighbor if we're cooking dinner together in the context of our home. But the fact that I think chicken enchiladas are delicious is incredibly boring for posting on Twitter, which is to say posting in a place that's going to cut across context. It's way more interesting for me to say, I think white Americans who eat chicken enchiladas are racist against Mexican culture because the concept of racism clicks into a global norm of badness.

17:46Derek Thompson: Racism is bad is understood in this post to be a global norm. And so if you think like people independently, maybe within homes, like might be talking about how they like one recipe versus another, or they like one movie versus another. They're talking about what they like when they're one-on-one. But when they go online, when it's suddenly one to 1 ,000, or one to one million when you're posting broadcasts, there is, from this theory of unicontext, an inclination to make those postings negative because bad ideas and condemnation spreads further because it cuts across all of these contexts. Is that a fair way of recapitulating how the theory of the unicontext would predict or explain how when people go online, they should expect to be just deluged in negative ideas, negative posts, and condemnations of badness.

18:45So that seems right to me. Let me make one tiny corrective and then add a point. So one thing is you might just say, well, your chicken and gelata thing, that's just not super important or good. It's not even that good. It's just you like this food, right? But let's say that there's something really good that happened. You know, someone in Iran wrote an amazing poem that is like a giant contribution to world literature or something like that, right? That like an incredible aesthetic achievement. Even that, well, okay, they wrote it in a language a lot of us don't speak, right? And, you know, maybe we need some time to evaluate this poem and culturally assimilate it.

19:18And so you could see how even pretty significant goods are going to be, in some sense, throttled in terms of their ability to reach any kind of substantial audience. So about, you know, even if we go from chicken enchiladas to like great works of art, we've got kind of the same problem.

19:36Derek Thompson: I think a story that you told me that clicks into this when we were speaking on the phone is a story about you as a professor in a classroom. Can you tell that example? Because I think in a weird way, it connects to the chicken enchilada story. Yeah. So one way that I sometimes illustrate the norms that are distinctively unicontextual and contrast them with some of our old multicontextual norms that we've still got, they're just becoming less important, is to think about some ways that I might correct a student in my classroom. So, suppose they come late to class, or they interrupt another student, or this is a really common one that I correct all the time.

20:19They raise their hand to say something that has nothing to do with what the previous person just said, right? And I'm like, well, does one respond to their point? Okay. So, those are all ways that I can correct my student in my capacity as a teacher. The other students cannot make those corrections. They cannot criticize another student for coming late to class or any of those things. But now imagine that a student makes a sexist or a racist comment, right? I can correct that too. I can call that out. That's her name for that, right? But so can another student in the class. That is, the other students in the class are in a totally parallel position in relation to me when it comes to those norms, the unicontextual norms.

20:59Those are not role dependent. But let me add something just about the, you know, the way you were glossing the Internet and the idea that the audience is global. Because I actually do want to distinguish the question of, is it that a lot of people are, and people from a lot of different cultures are accessing the same information? That's relevant. That's one aspect of it. And is it a lot of different contexts where I think that's even more important? So you could imagine that it was just Americans on the Internet. In fact, you could imagine that it was just New Yorkers or something. But those New Yorkers would be accessing the Internet maybe from different places, in different moods.

21:41In fact, you know, at different times of day, right? Somebody might be on the Internet sitting in a bar. Another person might be on the Internet while talking to their kids. and it's in a way those contexts getting collapsed in addition to the global ones that I kind of primarily have my eye on. And the thought is, well, is there something that is good, even if we restrict ourselves to the set of New Yorkers, something that is good for all New Yorkers all the time, irrespective of their age, where they physically are, what time of day it is, et cetera, right? And I think the same point is going to hold it.

22:19It's going to be like, no, and they are going to get focused on the negative as well.

22:24Derek Thompson: There's another implication of the unicontext that connects to the classroom story, and that is the way that the unicontext makes identity more important than character in modern life. Can you explain how the unicontext makes identity more important than character and why that would be the case? Yeah. So first, let's just say what character is. In fact, the very fact that I kind of have to tell you what character is is telling, right? That word is less familiar to us. Everyone knows what identity is, right? But we don't, we're not even sure what character is anymore. So the word refers to a set of dispositions that relate to, like, how you navigate your emotional life in relation to a variety of circumstances.

23:12So let's say a courageous person, right, navigates their emotional life in relation to fear. And there's like a corresponding way you could be like anger prone, right? You could be generous or something like that. So your character is a set of dispositions to respond to a big variety of circumstances. Because your emotions are kind of how you respond to circumstances, right? That they are how you react. Um, okay. So the thing about character is, let's say my character is that I'm irascible, right? Let's say I'm easily provoked to anger. Well, how is that going to show up? It's going to show up differently in different circumstances.

23:55Even an irascible person is not angry all the time. And in fact, 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. So the thing about character is that grasping it, perceiving it, requires actually a lot of context. To understand someone's character, you need to know them pretty well and you need to have had experience of them in a variety of contexts to be able to generalize in that way. But identity, if we think of identity categories like woman, disabled, gay, Jewish, American, the striking thing about those categories is that you are them in every circumstance.

24:40There is no circumstance in which I stop being a woman. It's like a hat you never take off. And so it is very suited to a world where we need those sorts of categories in order to understand people.

24:56Derek Thompson: I remember when you told me this when we first had our phone conversation about the unit context and I thought that it's it's so reminded me of my experience of watching political discourse on the left and on the right that tends to be so focused on categories of identity which identities are good which identities are less good which identities are powerful which identities have less power which identities should be protected which identities have too much protection it's it's identity identity it's this it's this fixation on census categories. And it's not to say that those categories aren't important, but you think about the cavernous gap between how frequently we talk about identity and how infrequently we talk about character and which character traits are virtuous and which character traits are not virtuous.

25:45Derek Thompson: Is that gap that I'm describing between the frequency of the conversation about identity and the relative paucity of conversation about character, does that click into what you're describing as an outflow of the unit context? Yes, in two ways. So the first on identity and the second on character. Okay, so identity. so our fundamental concern in relation to identity is that there are identities that might be getting excluded and depending on where you are politically you're going to have your sights on different identity categories but that's actually kind of a universal that everybody's worried about that that's a fundamental rule of the unicontext I think a fundamental form of ethics of the unicontext

26:38because the one thing that the unit context has to be is a space for everybody. And so it's got to be inclusive in a way that, like, earlier societies, pretty much everywhere, that word inclusion, there was no such, like, value. That just wasn't a thing people talked about, the value of inclusion. So that's new. It comes along with the unit context, the ethics of it. And the way in which that ethics gets focused is through identity categories. Okay. So that's part of why identity is so big. And then the thing about virtue is, and, you know, I'm saying this as kind of focused through Aristotle because he's like my prime example of a virtue ethicist.

27:24Virtue is by its very nature a concept that actually privileges the good side rather than the bad. That is, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is a book that tells you what it is to be courageous and wise and just and generous. And yes, there are corresponding discussions of how you might go wrong.

27:47But those discussions are predicated on first understanding the positive value. So I think that actually virtue ethics is just very naturally has the positivity bias that is sort of precisely the opposite of the kind of bias we have now.

28:04Derek Thompson: So tell me if this is a fair recapitulation of where we've got to this far. For most of human history, people looked around and judged norms based on their local context. They were in a home and that home had its own rules. They were in a cathedral and that cathedral had its own rules. They were in a classroom or a bar or a funeral parlor. And those had the rules of a classroom bar and funeral parlor. But you say now it is almost like we are constantly living in universal rooms, right? And the universal room that we occupy has or is assumed to have universal values, which means that universal norms.

28:51Derek Thompson: And so we conduct ourselves and speak to others as if we are living in and expect them also to be living in these kind of universal rooms. And while that might sound somewhat vague or highly theoretical, it has some extremely specific implications. Implication number one that we discussed is that rather than talk about what is good all the time, well, good is incredibly context dependent, but we live in a universal room. So we should talk about universal truths, and it's easier to talk about universal bads than goods. And so what you have is more people focused on negativity and badness. Character is something that is also context-dependent.

29:33Derek Thompson: And so we talk less about character and talk more about what is the sort of universalist equivalent. Well, it's identity. We talk more about identity than character. There's one other implication of this that—well, there's a couple other implications that I want to make sure that we click off. And I think that one of the more interesting ones and one of the more profound implications is that if you live in a universal room, if everyone is existing on a sort of comparable plane, then comparison itself becomes a more universal and inextricable part of life. Right. When context collapse, then more things enter the same sort of, you know, evaluative field, I guess you could say.

30:19Derek Thompson: Take that idea a step further, because this might be one of the most important, I think, effects of this theory as you're laying it out. What is so important about the relationship between the unicontext and the rise of comparison? Yeah. And this is a great place to see the difference between informational context collapse and normative context collapse. So if you just think about, like, imagine that you have two school districts, right? And they have two different high schools, and they do things slightly differently in the two high schools. but you know if you're in district a you go to school a and if you're in district b you go to school b and there might be a lot of informational availability about what they do in the various schools but people just treat it as well i'm in this district so i go to this school but then they change the rule and they say no you can go to either school no matter where you live suddenly there is the motivation to compare these two schools remember you had the information earlier, right?

31:20But you just didn't have any motivation to compare it because they were not in the same space of choice. And so they were not in the same evaluative field. They were not in the same normative context before. Now they are. And so now you're like, you're going to try to find ways to compare them, right? So maybe you'll like look at like high school graduation rates or what kinds of colleges people get into or how many AP classes they teach. And notice that that's going to affect the schools, right? So suppose one school gets less popular because it doesn't teach a lot of AP classes, they were doing a different thing.

31:50They weren't doing AP classes. They were doing this sort of individualized curriculum. But now everyone's going to the other school. They're like, okay, we got to teach AP classes too. And so the process is going to homogenize the two schools. They're going to become more similar to one another in order to be able to compete. Maybe another example, I'll just throw in one more example, is like, because I think it's helpful to think about just very local context collapsing, a restaurant that starts serving breakfast all day, right? So it's like in the morning, you used to choose between pancakes and French toast.

32:22And in the afternoon, you chose between hamburger and fried chicken. But now you show up in the afternoon and you can choose French toast. And so now you have to ask yourself something like, well, you know, is it carbs valuable or is it more protein, right? So you're now comparing the French toast and the hamburger in terms of their nutritional content in ways that you never had reason to do before. And you might even imagine if this becomes widespread, we then develop widespread technologies for comparing foods in order to be able to perform these comparisons. So as you get more and more things entering the same evaluative fields, you start to be able to just make a bunch of comparisons you never used to be able to make.

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34:35Derek Thompson: Visit your Lincoln retailer today or learn more at lincoln.com. There's three pieces here that I think are really interesting that I'm trying to keep straight. One is the upstream phenomenon of the unit context. Two is the downstream phenomenon of more fields of comparison. And then three is the further downstream phenomenon of homogenization. And this is where I think the theory really, really starts to sing for me because I think about something like sports where as the data and analytics revolution comes for, let's say, baseball, you suddenly have all of these teams that are in possession of the same fundamental statistics by which they can compare all of these players.

35:19Derek Thompson: So previously you had 30 teams using their own private scouts to evaluate who's good and who's bad, right? That was more context dependent. But suddenly when a easily calculable statistic like on base percentage or on base plus slugging or something called war becomes the way that you evaluate whether a player is good or bad. Well, math is easily used to evaluate every single player in the league. So they all become part of the same comparative set. And you can just as simple as like, you know, organizing something on Excel, rank them from number one in the league to like 250th in the league. But what happened with the so-called moneyball revolution in baseball?

36:03Derek Thompson: It's not just that you have an analytics revolution that allows players to be compared. You also have homogenization of strategy. One of the great critiques of baseball in the last 10 to 15 years is that every baseball team essentially does the exact same thing. They have the same strategies for pitchers. They have the same strategies for hitters. Three true outcomes. Everyone should swing for the fences. And so you have, number one, the unit context, creating number two, a sort of comparative field, which in this case is analytics, which leads to homogenization. So what you just said reminded me that I have a theory of the inflection point when it comes to the unit context.

36:46That is, I don't think it started five years ago or 10 years ago. I think the moment when it really showed up was around 1910. and the reason I say it showed up then what I mean by that is that there were a bunch of people to whom it showed up that is there are a bunch of people who took a look at the world around them and they were like what the hell is happening what what is um did culture break like what's going on with the world I'm living in and a lot of those people were novelists and they wrote a new kind of novel that is called the modernist novel, which, as I understand it, is sort of a novel about how to live in this world in which the unicontext is just coming into existence.

37:33And my own kind of grasp of the unicontext came through these novels. I was reading a lot of modernist novels. I was reading people like Robert Musel's The Man Without Qualities. I would put that as number one. Hermann Bruch, The Sleepwalkers and Death of Virgil. Virginia Woolf, Fernando Pessoa, he's not exactly a novelist, but James Joyce. But also theorists of the time, like Eric Zimmel, Max Weber, Heidegger too, they were noticing like something weird was going on in their world. And they didn't always describe it. I mean, none of them described it as the unicontext. In fact, they actually tended to describe it in terms that sound almost like the opposite of a unicontext, they described it as, people like Bruch and Weber described it as like the fragmentation of everything.

38:24All of a sudden, everything is breaking apart. And that was my first clue. That eventually became a unicontext in my own head. And the reason why I just thought of this is because you said, oh, everything is becoming homogenous. And I was like, well, in a way, yes, but that's a later effect. So I think that 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. And 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.

39:07So the early feeling of the union context was in fact a feeling of the world being fragmented. If you, you know, were a medieval peasant and you were, you know, you were doing art or something, then you were just like, you were in art's normative world. Or if you were in the church, you were in the church's normative world. If you were on the field, you were in the field's normative world. But once you, in the 20th century, sort of in the time around World War I, before and after, you start to think, well, how do we reconcile the schoolteacher turned murderer, i .e. soldier, right? How do we think about the relationship between art and religion?

39:48We're suddenly in this world where we're trying to compare all these different values inside a single context, and the world feels very fragmented. It feels disunified. But eventually we're going to get all these technologies of commensurability. But so I think that that's really interesting that homogenization takes time. And but what fragmentation really means and that part, I think, was invisible to these writers. What fragmentation means is that suddenly everything is part of the same evaluative field. That's why you experience a multiplicity where you used to only experience one thing at a time.

40:22Derek Thompson: I have here, holding in my hands, an essay by Georg Zimmel that you assigned me called The Metropolis and Mental Life. And on, at least on the printout, page four of this essay, there's a quote. And I'm going to read that quote while sort of speeding through some ellipses. Zimmel, in describing the new psychology of the metropolis in the early 20th century, says something is going on. As you said, something weird is going on. It's changing the way that we conceive of ourselves and of time and of identity. And we need to put our finger on how the metropolis is changing our mental life. And he writes this, quote, Money takes the place of all the manifoldness of things and expresses all qualitative distinctions between them in the distinction of how much.

41:12Derek Thompson: 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, end quote. There's this idea here that Zimmel's putting his finger on, which is that in the modern world, values are falling away. Norms, local norms, are melting. And what is replacing them is the psychology of money, which I'm going to reframe as the psychology of markets. What are markets very good at doing it? They're very good at creating, to borrow, I think, your language, a single comparative field. That's how they coordinate prices.

42:02Derek Thompson: That's how they coordinate supply and demand. And it's one thing for there to be a market for carrots and apples and eggs. But what you see in the dating world now is that there's a marketplace of single people. What you see in sports is that there's a marketplace of players who can be compared now by a set of extremely specific analytics that not only allows their easy comparison by every single team, but also, I think, homogenizes and flattened strategy. And so there's a way in which, and tell me if I'm getting this wrong, there's a way in which your theory of the unit context is a way of saying that the modern experience is the awareness that we are all participants in a kind of global marketplace in which we previously were not.

42:52Derek Thompson: So that when, for example, I'm posting something on Reddit, on Twitter, I know that a universe of people can see those things and I'm going to be voted up and down based on or against other people that are posting in those marketplaces for attention. And that as we sort of enter or as we live in, coexist in more marketplaces, it really does change the way that we think about ourselves and our values and our just moment-to-moment thinking. How far am I with this market language? Am I pulling away from your initial theory of the unit context? So I think that there's something right and intuitive about the way that you're putting it, but you're also, there's a way in which you have to bring in Zimmel's theory of money to understand that quote.

43:46That is, Zimmel has this book called The Philosophy of Money. It's 6 ,000 pages in which he explains to you what money really is. And the answer isn't markets. The answer is, what is the answer? That book defines money probably a hundred times, but I'll pick one of them. Money is abstraction in the space of value. That is, it is abstract value. So we might have every other value concept is somehow tied concretely to objects. And there's a gradual move, as Zimmel understands it, of 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.

44:34It changes money, right? So there's money in ancient societies where, for instance, like if something is a very, a lot of money, it has to be like a large object representing the money, right? Or, you know, there's the point where you get fiat currency, right? So there's all kind of changes in money that correspond to this growth of the ability to abstract value. That is, the ability to perform the exercise of abstraction so that you understand it abstractly. And I think what Zimmel would say is that the fundamental change, the way Zimmel would point to the change, he wouldn't talk about the fragmentation.

45:10He's not a fragmentation guy. He would talk about the rise of abstraction. He would say, we live our lives so abstractly now. That is, even the description you gave earlier where you were like, instead of like looking to your local environment to figure out what to do, you think, what should you do in this room, right? In this room that everybody's in. The relevant difference between those two is that when you're in the local environment, you don't think the thought, okay, given that I'm in a bar and given that the bar is of such and such character, what should I do? You don't need to think any of that, right?

45:45You just respond to that local environment through sensory features of that environment. You respond immediately. What happens when you're in that weird room is that your response is mediated through abstraction. Okay. So now if you want to say we're in this marketplace, that's fine if marketplace is a metaphor. It's understood as a metaphor. Four, we are engaged in incredibly abstract value calculations in which now everything can be compared to everything else. I do think we tend to use money and markets as a metaphor for that activity, but it's worth us recognizing that over the course of the past hundred years, even what money and what markets are have been transformed, right, by this process of abstraction.

46:30And so, like, the kind of deeper thread is we live very abstractly. We are managing ourselves and our experience in very top-down ways.

46:40Derek Thompson: One of the interesting ways in which I think the unit context helps us see how strange and unique this moment of being alive is, is when you talk about how it changes our relationship to attention and distraction. Can you explain that? Yeah. So I think that the kind of standard or the norm for human beings is a bottom-up management of attention. That is, you pay attention to what's in your environment. And the ability to be distracted from what you're attending to is a pretty important value in a creature that might be faced at any moment with a snarling animal or a fire coming at them or whatever.

47:26So the default for us is that, again, you pay attention to what's salient, to what demands your attention. I think what the uni-context brings is a newfound top-down management of attention, where we find ourselves constantly feeling like we have to make decisions about how to manage our attention, about whether to allow ourselves to get distracted by one thing or another, feeling constantly like we're letting ourselves get too distracted. We are not managing our attention with an iron in a fist. We have all kinds of products to help us fight against the very objects that we purchase, like our phones, right?

48:04We're in this war with ourselves, and that war is really the attempt to do top-down management on an aspect of our psychologies that kind of evolved to be more homeostatic, to be more just responsive to an environment. And one illustration of that is that, like, there are a lot of 19th century novels in which someone is reading a novel. It might be like, you know, Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina. And it's always a woman. Okay, she's reading a novel. but she has a turbulent emotional life because her lover is being problematic and so she gets distracted from the novel and she has to put it down. This is like a common scene.

48:48Okay, so there was distraction, right? She was reading and she got distracted but like a thing that never happens in any time in this scene is her saying to herself, no, I need to get through another 20 pages. That's just not a thing people did in the 19th century. That is that kind of attention management of like, look, I'm reading this book and I need to focus on it. people didn't view reading that way. And that just shows you how different of a creature the human of today is.

49:16Derek Thompson: And just to connect the very last piece here, why is this obsession with distraction proof that we live in a unit context? Because it is a mark of the top-down management of attention, The thought that the question, what should I attend to, is not a function of anything about my local environment. I can't use cues in my local environment to tell me what I should attend to. The issue is that in pretty much every environment that I'm in, there's this screen, right? It's there no matter what. And that screen allows me to choose and puts me in this giant evaluative field as to what I could attend to the sufferings a little far away if I chose.

49:56So all of a sudden now, I stand in this choice relation to my attention. And, you know, that was already starting to be true with newspapers, right? A newspaper is already that, or books, but newspapers more specifically because they're going to change every day. Um, um, and, um, you know, Mussel, um, one of my, um, you know, heroic prophets of the Una context wrote, the probability of experiencing something unusual through the newspapers is much greater than that of experiencing it in person. In other words, the more important things take place today in the abstract and the more trivial ones in real life.

50:38So that's him saying we are in some way divorced from our local context. It's become irrelevant to us. And we somehow live in this abstract space that then requires us to manage our attentions.

50:52Derek Thompson: It's like if we're living in this universal room where we feel like everyone else is there, all the things we could potentially do are there, then opportunity cost feels more expensive. We're constantly aware of all the things that we're not doing. And in a world where we're constantly aware of all the things that we're not doing in this universal room, we feel like attention is this scarce resource to manage and optimize rather than this river that just flows through us, which seems more like the Madame Bovary or Anna Crittana experience of they're reading a book and then they have a thought about their lover and they put the book down and then they attend to the thought about their lover and then another thought happens.

51:32Derek Thompson: But there's no sort of metacognitive process of, oh, Anna, you're not managing your attention in an optimal way between book and lover. That's an interesting way of thinking about it. Is the unit context good or bad? I don't know. And, you know, I recommended that Zimmel essay to you for a specific reason, which is the way it ends, where he says, you know, the metropolitan mindset is such a different mood of life than anything human beings have known before. But the thing is that we can't judge it because we are its products. It is us. And the idea that we can separate ourselves and stand in some relation to it and then be like, this is good or bad, is a bit of an illusion.

52:27Okay, that's Zimmel. That's one way of thinking about this, is to say, it's not obvious that we're in a position to judge it. I think that, I guess my own thought is, I don't feel ready to judge it. Um, fundamentally what the unicontext is, as I understand it, is it's an answer to the question, where are we? That's how I think about it. Like, I, you know, for the past bunch of years have just been looking around me and seeing, wow, everything is going crazy. Where am I? Where am I? Such as all this crazy stuff is happening. And the unicontext is a way of answering that question like, oh, it makes sense that this would be happening if that's where I am.

53:16Like, I thought I was in Chicago. I thought I was sitting at my desk in the university. I thought I was on a plane wherever. No, but the whole time I was in the unicontext. And so that, like, maybe the first thing we need to do, as I see it, is, like, get our bearings for where we are and have a kind of understanding of where we are before we start judging. Because one of the things is the unicontext is a super judgy place. and it basically it there there's a universal moralism that's applicable to every situation so getting pulled into that um it takes you away from trying to like understand where you are

53:56Derek Thompson: i guess i want to know what we should do about it i mean there's a way in which i can imagine a kind of like simplistic like you know final chapter in the book entitled unicontext that's just like you know when you're having dinner with your family you can either be present with your family which is a rich contextual experience, or you can be on your phone, which is the universal room in which where you are everywhere at once. Every global problem is suddenly, you know, five alarm fire in your own living room. And being there is stressful. It's moralistic. It is negative. It's all of the things that are included in the unit context.

54:31Derek Thompson: And so put away the phone, right? But that almost feels like an almost cheap and predictable answer to the question of how to deal with the fact that the world has changed. And so I wonder if you have something that is prescriptive, that answers the question, what should we do, that isn't just put away the phone at family dinner. One thing is that the question, is it good or bad, asked about the the unicontext is a loaded question because the unicontext can't really see good. It can only see bads. Of course it's going to end up bad, right? Of course it's normally visible. And pretty much everyone who hears me talk about the unicontext immediately responds that it's bad.

55:11I've never had anyone be like, that sounds great. People think it's bad. What they see about it is the bads that it creates. That's what is visible in the unicontext. and so I guess you know the thing is that this this supposedly bad thing is a thing we're creating we're making this happen right we're just choosing it over and over again by going on our phones by you know me talking to you who's far away from me right about this very abstract thing the unicontext and I kind of want to understand where that comes from and so like I'm working now on a book that's partly about the unicontext. That's the objective side, the where are we side.

55:51And then it's partly about like the personal experience, like what is it to be in the unicontext and where is it coming from in us psychologically? And I think that there's something really interesting there that I haven't worked out yet about the way in which the unicontext is a space of sort of unruliness. That's my word for it. It's a space of in which a certain thing about us gets to get expressed, there's something about humanity gets to get expressed, namely our kind of deep aversion to world closure. That is, there's, you know, for most of, almost all of human history, almost all human beings have lived in these closed little worlds, like in like peasant villages.

56:33And those worlds have presented themselves as the only world. And then a series of contexts have presented the person with like, here's what you do, and here's what you do, and here's what you do. And there's no space for questions, not because they try to ask questions and then get shut down, but because nobody even asks the questions. And what we are moving towards is this kind of world openness that I think we kind of hunger after in some way where we're like, well, I'm not just going to do things in a certain way because that's how we do things or that's where I was born. I somehow am I'm like allergic to the lie that says that a contingent cultural convention is reality.

57:15We've become like kind of allergic to that lie. And I think that's part of the engine that's fueling the Unicontext. And so the question about human flourishing is like, that is, you know, whether the Unicontext is good or bad, is a question about how this motive, this kind of drive for world openness, finds a place in the UNICON text, whether it does or whether, in fact, it's really being quashed by it.

57:42Derek Thompson: Agnes Callard, thank you very much. Thank you.

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