Derek Thompson had a fascinating conversation with a University of Chicago Professor on “Uni-context.” Here’s a summary:
“One of my favorite conversations on Plain English in the last few months was my talk with the University of Chicago philosopher Agnes Callard about her grand theory of the uni-context. For the purposes of the following paragraphs, I would define the uni-context as the ethical and value-based consequences of telecommunications technology making everybody feel as though they live in the same universal room together. Callard predicts that the uni-context nudges people to focus on negativity over positivity and identity over character, because in both cases, the former is more context-independent. (That is, I am a white guy in every context, but I am only jealous or patient in certain contexts, so my identity as a man is more context-independent than my character.)
I was particularly struck my Callard’s observations about comparison and envy. She asks us to imagine two schools in separate school districts. One day, the districts are redrawn, and the schools are in put in the same district. Suddenly, they are in competition. Parents now compare the schools as if they exist in one evaluative field. Over time, the schools might become more similar, or they might specialize to become more different. Either way, they change as they become part of the same evaluative field.
It is such a simple story. And I think it’s a stunning metaphor for life online. On TikTok, Instagram, and X, we see people just like us. They are happier or sadder, richer or poorer, funnier or crazier. They are small faces on a screen, just as we are. Life online seems to place us in the same evaluative field as thousands of strangers who are often more successful than us along some dimension, which makes it impossible to avoid comparing ourselves to them, or feeling a bit jealous of their success, or feeling quite righteous when we learn of their downfall. Jealousy and schadenfreude are more ancient than broadband technology. But there really is something about living in a universal room with everybody that makes it harder to live without that infamous thief of joy known as comparison.
More of life feels like a competition, because the uni-context encourages strangers to imagine themselves in competition, even if they will never meet.”
I haven’t stopped thinking about this since I read it.
A friend recently pointed out something curious. The big technologies of the eighties, nineties, and two-thousands, the personal computer, the internet, the mobile phone, all arrived on a wave of excitement. AI has arrived on a wave of anxiety. People worry it will take their jobs. The people building it worry about its impact, and about their own jobs too. There’s a lot of anxiety to go around.
I suspect uni-context is part of why. When everyone shares one room, the comparisons sharpen. You can see it in how people talk about the job market in technology. It is easy to walk away with the feeling that, unless you’re working at four or five “AI-native” companies, you’re left wondering what you’re even doing, and whether anything else is worth doing at all.
That’s uni-context at play, flattening a wide world of good paths into one narrow scoreboard.
Maybe it’s fitting that anxiety is the emotion of this era. We hold technology so wondrous that not long ago we’d have sworn it was magic, and still, inside the universal room, the loudest feeling is the worry that we won’t measure up.
A Learning a Day 