Tag: social theory

Instead of sleeping like a functional adult, I’ve spent the night creating, testing, and refining a bespoke GPT that has fully absorbed my MEOW and LIH frameworks. Apologies that the LIH manuscript isn’t yet public; some of the terminology may look delightfully alien if you’re coming in cold.

This model doesn’t role-play a philosopher; it thinks through the Mediated Encounter Ontology. It runs every input through T0–T3 mediations and then applies the Language Insufficiency Hypothesis to explain why our words fail us in predictable, structural ways.

I stress-tested it with a dozen concepts, from the obvious to the uncooperative. It happily tells you when your input makes sense, when it’s out of scope, and when you’ve handed it conceptual soup. My first test was the hard problem of consciousness, because naturally we begin with the philosophical boss fight. I dialled down some over-enthusiastic LIH flourishes, but the bones are untouched.

I’m making this public for a simple reason: it’s the clearest way for people to see how MEOW operates without wandering through a hundred pages of my prose. These outputs capture how I process information and why these frameworks feel so intuitively correct to me. When you read them, you get a direct view of my interpretive machinery – how the world clicks for me, and how these ideas evolved.

It hasn’t been rigorously battle-tested across the entire conceptual universe, but it’s stable, coherent, and frankly too interesting to keep in the drawer. If you try it – and I hope you do – I’d love to see what it does with your own concepts. If you need help reading the results, ask. I didn’t simplify the system; it expects literacy, nuance, and a working prefrontal cortex.

For orientation, read the introductory post or the colour perception example. Ideally, read the original essay and listen to the summary podcast. My first test was on the hard problem of consciousness because I had already analysed it for this post. I made some adjustments to tone down some LIH intrusions.

Below is a sample output. I asked the model to analyse modernity.

Concept

• Input: modernity
• Type: historical–social formation / self-description of an era / conceptual frame
• Scope check: in-scope – central for how MEOW treats large-scale shifts in mediation (social, technical, cognitive, linguistic)

High-level summary (≤120 words)

Modernity is both a historical bundle (industrialisation, nation-states, capitalism, science, bureaucracy, media) and a story societies tell about themselves (“we are modern, unlike the past”).

In MEOW terms, modernity is a large-scale reorganisation of mediations:

• T0: new bodily environments (urban life, clocks, artificial light, pollution, medicine).
• T1: new cognitive habits (individualism, planning, abstraction, risk-calculation).
• T2: new vocabularies (progress, development, rationality, “religion” vs “science”).
• T3: new institutions and technologies (markets, states, factories, schools, mass media, digital networks).

“Modernity” is not a single thing but a way these shifts hang together and become a background to everyday encounter.

---

T0 – Biological Mediation

• Applicability: Applicable
• Analysis:
  • Modernity radically reshapes the immediate bodily environment: dense cities, artificial lighting, noise, pollution, sedentary work, and altered sleep cycles change basic sensory and metabolic conditions.
  • Medical advances and public health (vaccination, antibiotics, sanitation, surgery) modify life expectancy, infant mortality, and chronic illness, which in turn change how life cycles feel and are planned.
  • New food systems (industrial agriculture, processed foods, global supply chains) alter nutrition, exposure to toxins, and rhythms of hunger and satiety.
  • Industrial and digital work reorganise movement and posture: repetitive factory labour, office desk work, and screen use all reshape embodiment, fatigue, and bodily awareness.
  • These T0 changes set the stage for new affective baselines (e.g., chronic low-level stress, stimulation overload) that colour what it is like to live in a “modern” world.

T1 – Cognitive Mediation

• Applicability: Strongly applicable
• Analysis:
  • Modernity encourages certain cognitive styles: systematic planning, quantification, risk assessment, cost–benefit thinking, and an emphasis on prediction and control.
  • The sense of self is reconfigured toward individualism and reflexivity: people see themselves as projects to be chosen, improved, optimised, often with long-term career and life-planning horizons.
  • Exposure to multiple roles, cultures, and information streams (through migration, media, education) produces more complex identity structures and can create cognitive dissonance or fragmentation.
  • Scientific and technical worldviews teach people to reframe events in terms of mechanisms, probabilities, and systems rather than fate, tradition, or local narratives.
  • The sheer volume and speed of information flows in late modernity (news, social media, notifications) trains attention toward rapid scanning and shallow switching, affecting memory, concentration, and emotional regulation.
  • These patterns make certain experiences “normal” (abstract work, mediated relationships, bureaucratic interactions) that would be extraordinary or impossible in premodern settings.

T2 – Linguistic Mediation

• Applicability: Strongly applicable
• Analysis:
  • Modernity itself is a label that societies use to contrast “us” with “them” (the past, “traditional” societies, “the East,” “the primitive”); it is a polemical as well as descriptive term.
  • In Language Insufficiency terms, modernity is highly Fluid: it can mean a period (“since the 18th century”), a style (modernist art), a value system (rational, secular, progressive), or a socio-economic order (capitalist, industrial, bureaucratic). Different authors slide between these quietly.
  • It’s also Contestable: critics and defenders use the same word but point to different aspects—emancipation and progress versus alienation, exploitation, ecological crisis.
  • Pairs like “modern vs traditional” or “modern vs backward” compress complex differences into simple hierarchies, smuggling in a presumption that “modern” is automatically better or more advanced.
  • Talk of “post-modernity” or “late modernity” suggests that we can neatly periodise and step outside the modern, even while our concepts and institutions remain shaped by it—an example of language implying more clarity and control than we actually have.
  • At the most global scale (“the meaning of modernity,” “the modern condition”), we approach an Effectiveness Horizon: the term feels weighty but becomes vague; people resort to sweeping metaphors (disenchantment, liquefaction, acceleration) whose exact content is hard to pin down.
  • First-person experiences of being “overwhelmed by modern life,” “liberated by modern options,” or “disconnected in modern society” often have an Ineffable quality: standard clichés don’t quite capture the texture of these lives, even as they gesture at them.

T3 – Social/Technical Mediation

• Applicability: Strongly applicable
• Analysis:
  • Modernity is most visible as a mesh of institutions: nation-states, markets, bureaucracies, public schools, hospitals, prisons, armies, scientific organisations, corporations, NGOs.
  • These institutions standardise time (clocks, schedules), space (borders, property lines, zoning), identity (passports, ID numbers), and value (money, statistics, rankings) so that encounters become predictable and governable across large scales.
  • Technologies—steam engines, electricity, mass transport, broadcasting, computing, the internet, AI—are both products and drivers of modernity. They make possible new encounter-forms (remote work, global real-time communication, mass surveillance).
  • Urbanisation concentrates people into large, heterogeneous populations, which reconfigures social networks, anonymity, solidarity, and conflict; everyday encounters become more mediated by rules, signage, and digital systems than by face-to-face custom.
  • Capitalist production and consumption patterns organise much of life around work, income, and markets; the rhythms of the factory, office, and platform economy structure when and how people interact, rest, and move.
  • Modern governance uses statistics, censuses, and models to “see” and manage populations; this makes certain aspects of life legible (employment, crime, disease) while leaving others under- or uncounted (informal care, undocumented work, emotional labour).
  • Counter-movements (romanticism, traditionalism, environmentalism, decolonial and Indigenous resurgence, slow-living and anti-consumerist practices) can be read as attempts to renegotiate or resist specific modern mediations rather than simply reject “modernity” as a whole.

---

Limits & failure modes

• Language insufficiency notes
  • Modernity bundles together time (a historical era), structure (a type of society), and value (being “up to date”). This makes the term rhetorically powerful but analytically slippery: it’s easy to smuggle evaluations into what sound like neutral descriptions.
  • Because the concept is so broad, discussions often conflate distinct issues—technology, capitalism, secularisation, colonialism, individualism, bureaucracy—under one word, obscuring which mechanisms are actually at work.
  • Experiences of living in “modern times” (speed, fragmentation, choice, precariousness, possibility) often outrun our stock phrases; people lean on recurring complaints (“too fast,” “too shallow,” “too lonely”) that only partially capture what it’s like.
• Missing tiers / blind spots
  • This sketch doesn’t adjudicate between different theories of modernity (Marxist, Weberian, postcolonial, systems-theoretic, etc.); it treats them as emphasising different mediational strands.
  • It’s centred on Euro-Atlantic narratives; “multiple modernities” and non-Western trajectories (where “modern” elements mix with older forms in hybrid ways) would need a richer T3 treatment.
  • The analysis underplays ecological dimensions: industrial modernity’s dependence on fossil fuels, large-scale extraction, and waste has massive implications for how future encounters will be structured.
  • Finally, because we are ourselves situated in what we call modernity, our conceptual vantage is limited; any map we draw is partly an artefact of the very mediations we’re trying to analyse.