Philosopher Agnes Callard posits that modern technology and culture have merged separate local contexts into one universal room with a single set of shared norms … which has flattened everything AND forces us to compare ourselves with the rest of … the uni-context. It forecasts a future of unruliness.
"For almost all of human history, we have lived in closed little worlds, and those worlds presented themselves as the only world. A series of contexts presented the person with direction—here’s what you should do. What we are moving toward is a “world openness” that we hunger after, where I’m not just going to do things a certain way because that’s how we do things or where I was born."
This feels bad? What do y'all think…
https://www.derekthompson.org/p/a-philosophers-one-word-theory-to
2 Comments
*Rewrite Marxist theory of alienation without using the jargon Challenge*
It’s quite the opposite actually. We’ve moved from a mass culture industry with at least a semblance of a shared narrative at the national level, to a total collapse of shared meaning. People are walling themselves off in their own media bubbles, they have more in common, more shared experiences, with someone they’ll never meet than their neighbors, family or friends. It’s not a world of openness, it’s a world inundated with information. It doesn’t matter if it’s true or false, it’s too much to sift through, and we just pick and choose our own hyperreality now (or maybe the algos picks for us).