I love it when cul­tur­al essay­ists redis­cov­er a core Quak­er obser­va­tion about plain­ness and human nature and give it a new name. Remem­ber a few that’s ago when “norm­core” became a thing?

Now we have “uni-context,” the idea that our online social lives bleed into all of our dif­fer­ent net­works (think: friends, work col­leagues, roman­tic inter­ests) so much that the net­works have been flat­tened; the “con­text” has “col­lapsed” (there’s a whole Wikipedia post on this). The refine­ment of this idea into “uni-context” comes from Agnes Callard, a UChica­go prof. Where once we could show dif­fer­ent faces to dif­fer­ent audi­ences, now every­one sees all.

First off, I’m not sure I real­ly buy it from a cul­tur­al tech per­spec­tive. The orig­i­nal Face­book ide­al of wide social graphs and pub­lic accounts feels like a dinosaur. I picked up this arti­cle from Jason Kot­tke, who notes that “blogs have glob­al con­text.” Twen­ty years ago, yes, many of us were liv­ing very pub­lic online lives — or at least made an image of our­selves that was very acces­si­ble on blogs and in net­works like the OG image-sharing net­work Flickr, which default­ed to pub­lic access. 

I don’t think that’s the case any­more. Gen Z is most­ly absent from pub­lic spaces like Face­book and usu­al­ly keeps pret­ty locked-down accounts. The app that has come to define the 2020s is Tik­Tok (and its clones), which is a high­ly per­for­ma­tive space where most of us con­sume, not cre­ate. I had a great after-meeting talk with two younger Quak­ers this week­end about out­reach. Most of their dis­cus­sions hap­pen on var­i­ous Dis­cords, net­works so pri­vate you gen­er­al­ly can’t even find out about par­tic­u­lar “serv­er” except through word of mouth. When I asked them how inter­est­ed seek­ers were sup­posed to find local Friends if every­thing was locked down on pri­vate net­works, one of them sug­gest­ed there should be an email list. I’m glad I was­n’t drink­ing any cof­fee at that moment because I would have had a real-life spit take. My first Quak­er orga­niz­ing thir­ty years ago was putting togeth­er an email con­tact list first for YAFs in my area and then world­wide because I did­n’t see any­one else doing it. Back then local YAF net­works were invis­i­ble to out­siders because the web as we know it bare­ly exist­ed. One could argue that GenZ has rein­vent­ed the pri­va­cy but also invis­i­bil­i­ty of the 1990s.

But grant­i­ng the “uni-context” con­ceit for argu­ment, this is a big post of Quak­er plain­ness. Yes there were most­ly unwrit­ten rules but if you open up an old copy of one of the *Books of Dis­ci­pline* and turn to the plain­ness sec­tion, you’ll find that it focus­es on inten­tion. My favorite query asks if you dress in a way “cal­cu­lat­ed to please a vain and wan­ton mind.”

It is the Quak­er con­cept of *intregri­ty* at play. Going back to root mean­ings, some­thing that is inte­gral can­not be bro­ken into pieces with­out los­ing its iden­ti­ty. We should act and present our­selves in the same way in all con­text. Who we are should be who we are, whether at work, play, church, etc. Sim­i­lar­ly our *yeas* should be *yeas* and our *nays* *nays* in all con­text so that we don’t need a spe­cial incan­ta­tion of swear­ing to tell the absolute truth. 

Of course our lives are com­plex. I’m a run­ner and I put on run­ning gear when I go out, espe­cial­ly in the August heat. But I’m not doing that for a cal­cu­lat­ed rea­son but a prac­ti­cal one. And I often have a pre-run run­ning shirt on when I log into a work Zoom call. 

Any­way it’s sort of sad that so many Friends have con­signed old Quak­er prac­tices to the dust heap. The ethics, if not the details, might be some­thing philoso­phers are seek­ing today. 

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

Once you learn what the “uni-context” is, you won’t stop see­ing it everywhere

www​.derek​thomp​son​.org