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

Derek Thompson

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A Philosopher’s One-Word Theory to Explain Why the World Feels So Weird<br>Once you learn what the "uni-context" is, you won't stop seeing it everywhere

Derek Thompson<br>Jul 14, 2026

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Photo by Mike Hindle on Unsplash<br>Here are some questions that I consider self-evidently compelling about the modern world:<br>Why is the news media so interested in telling you how much the world sucks all the time?

Why are so many of us obsessed with distraction and managing our attention?

Why is it so hard to stop comparing ourselves to others?

And why does everything in art and design seem the same these days?

A week ago, I didn’t think these questions were related. I’m not sure I would have told you I had a good answer to most of them. And I certainly wouldn’t have made the audacious and borderline bonkers claim that one single theory could begin to explain all of them, at once.<br>This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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But then I had the pleasure of speaking to Agnes Callard, the University of Chicago professor, about her new theory called “the uni-context.” It’s easily one of them most interesting conversations I’ve had all year. And once you’ve heard or read it, I think you might find it hard to think about anything else.<br>One way to prepare your mind for Callard’s theory of the uni-context is to think about the better-known concept of “context collapse.” If you post something to social media, it will be simultaneously visible to your boss, your parents, your ex, and total strangers. So, while your offline life might be distinct with each of these groups—you might be differential to your boss, childish with your parents, and bawdy with your friends—all of those distinctions are flattened on the internet. That’s context collapse, and you can think of it as the answer to a question: How do informational norms change when we’re all living in the same universal room?<br>Callard takes the idea significantly further. She asks: How do all other norms—our morals, our ethics, our sense of what is good for us and for others—change when we continually imagine ourselves to be living in a universal room with everybody else? The connections that Callard makes are consistently surprising, often quite funny, and ultimately mind-exploding.<br>Here is our conversation, edited for clarity, brevity, and simplicity’s sake.

The Uni-Context, Explained

Derek Thompson: What is the uni-context?<br>Agnes Callard: Let’s start with the word context. A context is a set of circumstances that tell you how you should act. For most of human history, contexts were local and multiple. If you wanted to know how you should act, you would look around. Am I in a field? Am I inside my home? Am I in the church? Am I in a bar? You would immediately get guidance by looking both at your physical environment and at the people around you and how they were acting.<br>The uni-context is a scenario in which the ways you should act become the same across all different contexts. There’s just one set of norms you should follow all times, irrespective of context.<br>Thompson: Is the uni-context a purely technological phenomenon?<br>I just wrote an article about what America was like in 1926, based on a social science survey called Recent Social Trends, published in 1933. The authors claim that the radio was destroying individuality, because it took people who used to be settled in rooms and it exploded their brains to become present all over the world simultaneously. Radio was demolishing the idea of a local individual, because suddenly we all became global citizens.<br>So one story you could tell is that the last 150 years of telecommunications technology have taken “local” individuals, who occupy one room at a time, and made us into global beings who are simultaneously in every room, at once. Is the uni-context just technology or is it technology plus something else?<br>Callard: It’s technology plus something else. What the techno-determinism angle misses is: Why did these technologies catch on in the first place? Why was radio popular? Why did we come up with new things—television, smartphones—and why did they catch on, too? Not every technology people have invented has caught on the way these forms have. They caught on in large part because of this impulse people have to live in a uni-context.<br>Thompson: Does the uni-context flow out of this adventurousness in the human spirit to become bigger than ourselves, to be everywhere, and to know everything?<br>Callard: Yeah, it absolutely does. There’s a conversational relationship between these technologies and a human impulse that interacts with them. They facilitate the expression of an impulse; if they didn’t, they would flop as technologies. We need to explain why they were popular; why they became the subject of obsessive use; and what...