ON UNI-CONTEXT

OR...a marketplace in which memes compete to masquerade as universal truths.

The philosopher, Agnes Callard is the one developing the idea of uni-context, and it seems to have caught fire after an interview with Derek Thompson.

The basic idea is actually quite elegant.
For most of human history we didn’t inhabit one social world. We inhabited dozens.You behaved differently, with your family, in church, in the pub, at work, with old friends, with strangers and so on. Each setting came with its own norms. Philosophers and sociologists would simply call these different contexts.

Callard argues that modern communications technology - and especially the internet - has begun collapsing these into a single imagined audience. She calls this the uni-context: a world in which you increasingly feel there is only one correct way to think and behave regardless of where you are.

That’s a stronger claim than the familiar idea of context collapse (where one social media post is seen by your boss, mother, ex-partner and strangers simultaneously etc). Callard’s point is that it’s not just audiences that collapse - it is norms. The internet encourages us to seek principles that make sense everywhere, for everyone, all at once.

She uses this to explain several modern phenomena, but one of her most interesting observations concerns negativity.

Good things are highly context-dependent. A joke, a local tradition or a ritual might work in one group and mean nothing to another.

Bad things, however - death, violence, illness, injustice - are much closer to universal. If you’re trying to communicate across every imaginable audience, those become the safest common currency. That helps explain why outrage spreads so effectively online.

Where I think Callard adds something new is that she frames this not simply as an internet problem but as a new ecology of norms.

The one place I’d probably push back is her assumption that people are moving toward one universal set of norms. That’s only half the story.

Humans remain intensely tribal. Rather than one uni-context, we may actually have many competing pseudo-universal contexts. Every online tribe behaves as though its norms are universal, even though they’re radically incompatible with the norms of rival tribes. What looks like one global morality may instead be thousands of local moralities, each claiming to speak for ‘humanity’.

That feels more Darwinian - not convergence, but competition between signalling systems. In those terms, the internet isn’t producing one giant culture - it has become a ‘marketplace’ in which memes compete to masquerade as universal truths.

Back in the 50s, in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Erving Goffman argued that we all perform different roles depending on the audience. There is no contradiction in being one kind of person with your children, another with your colleagues, and another in the pub. That’s how social life works. Callard’s uni-context is basically the claim that those front stages are collapsing into one.

But is that really happening?

If you’re looking at Twitter/X or LinkedIn, absolutely. Those platforms flatten audiences. As she rightly says, our joke can be read by your boss, your aunt, a journalist in New York and a stranger in Seoul. That’s context collapse.

The leap is to suggest that this has become the organising principle of society.

I’m not convinced.

Most people still inhabit multiple worlds every day, just like Goffman said.

If anything, digital life has created more contexts, not fewer.

What has changed is that some contexts have become unusually permeable. A post can leak. A video can go viral. Someone can screenshot something meant for a small audience. That changes the incentives. People do become more cautious, more self-conscious, more likely to imagine a universal observer looking over their shoulder.

That, to me, is a bit more interesting - not that there is literally one context, but that people increasingly behave as if any context could suddenly become every context.

Humans evolved for nested social environments - family, kin, village, allies, rivals. The internet hasn’t abolished that architecture. It’s just layered a massive reputational network on top of it.

So rather than a uni-context, I’d be tempted to call it something more like ‘ambient observability’. The possibility of being seen by everyone alters behaviour even when almost nobody is actually watching.