The Uni-Context Is Not New
It's the concept of privacy that's pretty new.
The uni-context neatly explains a few different things: the attention economy, why everything is so flat and ugly, why all architecture looks the same, why we’re so anxious about all the horrible stuff we see online.
I like the uni-context framework. I like most of philosopher Agnes Callard’s conclusions about it, too. As far as I can tell, though, she does a couple of historical inversions that, if we look at it a little more closely, might better show us what we could do about the “problem” of the uni-context.
The first is that she says the ancient tribal world was not uni-context — that how you behaved in the home or the church or the town square would change depending on the context of that place. This I think conflates two different things: reputation and the context of place. Your behavior across all those places was still constantly being evaluated and stored in your reputation. You had only one reputation. In fact, there was a scrutiny of reputation through time that we moderns would find unbearable.
The difference is that it was confined to the local tribe. But for them, there was nothing outside the tribe. The tribe was the universe. They hardly had a sense of a private inner world away from it. Other tribespeople were dangerous unknowns, not conceptualized as human beings in the same way their kinsmen were. Their world was smaller, and that made adherence to the shared norms easier in some ways, but the uni-context was still utterly pervasive as far as they were concerned.
The distinction between context of place and reputation matters, because what Callard is pointing out is that we are now being evaluated morally by the distant gossip of a much larger tribe, which is basically now the entire planet. The various contexts of place, though, still remains just as it was in the tribal world. If you post something on Substack or Threads or Truth Social, it’s evaluated differently on each. If you post a video from your room, or from church, or from the town square, your behavior is evaluated in that context insofar as the context is disclosed. We still pretty much know how to do context of place. What we’re really re-submerging into is a sense of universal reputation through time, very much like the ancient one, in which everyone is always trying to evaluate how you behave across all contexts.
And with that, we come to one of the central confusions: the concept of privacy is really the new thing, not the uni-context.
She herself says that in the early 1900s, thinkers like Heidegger said the modern world was fragmenting the individual. She thinks this was a misreading. She says they were unifying all these incompatible ideas under one framework. Really, they were unifying under a central idea, but the emerging central idea was that there was no central idea. This is the loss of uni-context from the tribal world. They were largely experiencing the fragmentation of the individual in the wake of print. It’s the same fragmentation we’ve grown so accustomed to, with hard-to-beat benefits like experts and privacy, that makes re-tribalization via global communication technology now feel strange, painful, and maladapted.
Callard says the “techno-determinists” miss why we are drawn to these re-tribalizing technologies in the first place. I think who she means by techno-determinists is the group of thinkers that conglomerated around Marshall McLuhan and his idea that the medium is the message; Walter Ong and several others. Her own answer is that re-tribalizing technologies caught on because of the human hunger for “world openness.” The “techno-determinist” thinkers certainly did understand that and had a lot to say about it. For example, the reason we are so hungry for “world openness” is because we crave tribalization. We want the uni-context. Fundamentally, the evaluation of our reputation by others, as oppressive as that sometimes is, keeps us sane. Privacy is just the freedom to be insane.
The experiment of the modern world toward radical individuality drove us insane in very particular ways, culminating presently. The uni-context is the attempted correction for that, but we are suffering now for lack of a universal moral framework of the good, so in our media we tend to focus on the negative, the flat, the geometric and therefore seemingly universal.
Her other claim is that we don’t have a good way of naming a universal good in the same way we can name universal bad; or maybe more strongly, that there is no universal good. Callard herself later references Aristotle, saying that virtue ethics “naturally has a positivity bias that is precisely the opposite of the bias we have now.” In other words, we actually do have thousands of years of attempts at naming universal goods. In fact, the modern project of radical individualism threw most of that out in favor of freedom of the will. Again, refusal of that inheritance is a purely modern phenomenon.
The new uni-context feels painful because we are still deeply hung over from this project of radical individualism. As she says, we don’t remember the meaning of the word “character.” We’re more obsessed with “identity.” That is specifically because the very project of radical individualism puts all value on the authenticity of one’s identity.
A century or so before Heidegger, Ralph Waldo Emerson took the European philosophies of the liberated individual from a few centuries before him and codified it all into a sort of American religion, which is now worldwide. Emerson writes this shocking poetry about total personal authenticity, even going so far as to say even if what you desire is evil, you should pursue that desire with your whole heart, because the highest good is freedom of the will. “If I am the Devil’s child, I will live then from the Devil.”
Emerson is still powerful because his is the direction America decided to go. The idea was that there was no one true moral framework, and so the radically liberated individual seeks the objective framework of science or else his own definition of happiness. Then there was a correction to that via postmodernism, which said, still from the perspective of the radical individual: actually, there are infinite numbers of objective frameworks you could take, and therefore none of them are ultimately true. And now, as we enter the culmination of this American religion, we’re looking for a way beyond. What I’m seeing emerge as an answer is the forgotten counterpart to Emerson: the mostly forgotten American pragmatists like Charles Peirce and William James, who said you can evaluate which values, which kinds of character, work through time, by seeing if the people who live by them become people worth becoming, by their own definition.
We are drawn to a pragmatic reunification into uni-context, Callard’s “world openness,” and yet terrified by the idea of the end of total privacy. So we engage in new sorts of media in the interim. Podcasts are the most symbolic media of our twilight age. They are long oral conversations. Tribalizing. We get to see how these supposed experts respond to questioning of their ideas in real time — if they can play, if they’re cool. We get to see what they look like, what they sound like, and ultimately if they are people we want to imitate. As individuals, we can’t evaluate all possible frameworks anymore. There’s too many and most of them are too negative to bear. But we can watch people act, judged by their entire reputation, and decide over time whether they are people we would want to become.
You still have to deal with the fact that we have a massive group of people still in the expert class of the modernist age: their many contexts, fragmented personalities, and privacy of acting one way in one situation and another way in another. Against them, you have this new and younger cohort of people who are less interested in the supposed facts, and more interested in talking about the good, character, and how those qualities manifest not only facts, but good humor and a good life. The current disharmony is that the short-form expert class continues to play their old game on the new system. They pull clips out of context, report them on the TV news, and mock the people on these podcasts as misinformation or pseudoscience, without understanding that the larger project is to put all ideas on the table, watch them play out, and see which ones are attractive when embodied.
These are growing pains. One of the things holding us back is that the massively successful podcaster of 2026 has to do this trick of performative credulity: every time he has a new guest, he erases the slate, goes back to zero, and talks to the person as if he doesn’t know anything at all. A fine sort of semi-scientific approach, in theory. The problem is, if you’re the podcaster and you’ve talked to hundreds of people and you’re still not forming your own opinions about what ideas you admire based on how the results are playing out in their lives, you’re lying to yourself.
At any rate, yes, we are entering a new uni-context, and it’s painful and awkward, but it’s not totally unique. It is a resurgence of shared morality from the aberration that was modernity. There is no going back to modernity and there is certainly no going back to local tribalism, at least without the total destruction of our society.
What the uni-context is demanding of us now, I think, is to redevelop our conceptions of a universal good. We are shoved into this by the anxiety about our constantly shared concepts of universal bad: the fact that everything you see online is mostly horrible. Universal evil, after all, suggests the existence of its opposite. As we start dipping back out of the modern anomaly of privacy and freedom of the will, what first emerges as a universal is the pain of badness. This is completely logical. It’s easy to discredit good, because good is a positive order that takes effort to maintain, while bad just happens when you do nothing in particular.
By the end, Callard says she doesn’t know if the uni-context is good or bad. I think she’s having an intuition that it could lead to something good. She says, at least, we keep choosing it over and over. I agree with that intuition. You don’t keep choosing something you know is bad. By experiencing a universal recognition of what is bad, with no real way to stop it, we have to redevelop and rediscover a universal conception of what is good, or continue to suffer whatever the consequences are of our continued stupidity. I’m sure we will do both.
It is a confusing and transformative time. If we look back, every transformation in human thought was, before it arose, totally incomprehensible to the people evaluating it from within their age. Keeping that incomprehensibility in mind, we can feel our way into this new synthesis, using clues of history as a guide. We may slowly get over our fevered obsession with personal identity, develop character again, and slowly build a positive vision of the good.
If we do a good job of that, with all of this in mind to prevent us being saccharine and naive, it will be just as viral and interesting as the current obsession with negativity. A global tribe just means the call to good character is more strenuous than ever — everyone on earth is watching you.