Chapter One: Simpl(if)ication

Abstract

Nothing is wrong with simplifying an event if (on the condition that) you and I know to be engaging in a simplification. Even this condition, the ‘if’, can be temporarily dropped to facilitate communication and technology. That is simplification. However, once the condition can no longer be retrieved, the simplication becomes a simplex. Globalization has exacerbated the tendency to simplicate for complexity-reduction.

This chapter illustrates the process in various social domains that resulted in the proliferation of simplexes. The domains range from the spheres of politics, the streets and the classroom, to the informational binary of ICT hardware and software. A new context of depleted mediation and lost agency has arisen for stereotyping, scapegoating, racism and slimmed civil rights. The simplex, a unidimensional signal, addictively combines locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary forces. It conflates age-old premises to generate convenient convictions such as the one that technology liberates and that those with better technology duly paid for it. The chapter revisits Luhmann’s subsystems through Gluckman’s multiplex.

Reality is complex. We simplify reality by relating impressions in a certain frame of experience. If not, our brain will not let us see anything.¹ The frame is the condition—the ‘if’—for there being a reality (see Fig. 1). That condition we cannot keep in mind as we perceive the world. So we simplicate reality, which is to drop the ‘if’ in our simplification. The condition for simplifying things, namely to be applying one frame at the expense of other frames, disappears from view. We temporarily forget to be simplifying. Simplification.

Fig. 1

Framing

It is perfectly normal to omit the perspective taken since we cannot go around minding our daily business while constantly having to consider the condition of our reality. The gamer will get into the game on the condition of focusing on what happens on the screen and ignoring what lies outside of it. That is ‘reality’ at that moment, a meaningful event. The trouble starts when we fail to retrieve the frame or perspective thanks to which the event made sense.

Framing is to simplicate, that is, to simplify without going into the details of the complicated translation and selection. We do it all the time. Communication would be impossible without it.² That I frame cannot be held against me. A politician cannot be blamed for defending an ideology. The sphere of politics simplicates reality so that the policy proposals can be discussed in terms of pros and contras, with their ideological roots. The simplex emerges though when a politician pretends to just convey the ‘facts’. The reductive framing by an ideology permitted the political view on reality in the first place.

The simplex is a special case of simplication. It manifests itself as a unit of (one-way) information escaping (two-way) communication. Simplication conveniently speeds up the flow of information. The simplex however drops the frame to avoid discussions that might lead to retractions. The finger is pointed at a particular group as the cause of a social problem, without this seeming an attempt, desperate and probably wrong, at simplifying things in the face of complexity. In the speech resorted to about members of a discriminated group (e.g., a label), in the procedure applied to them (e.g., a selective renting policy) or in the technology invented as prevention (e.g., profiled surveillance), direct action is made possible without burdensome mediation.

‘Europe has colonized Africa’: the student makes the statement on a condition, namely that the statement is open to discussion. The listeners are free to nuance and point to omissions. Many Europeans have not been involved in colonization and much of Africa has never been colonized. Nothing is wrong with simplifying an event if you and I know to be engaging in a simpl(if)ication. But a reminder about the frame to the student (‘Are you talking of an innate European characteristic?’) or to the gamer (‘Food is ready!’) should suffice to get back to reality. To another ‘reality’ that is. Otherwise, the gamer treats life as a continuation of the game. Something similar the student would do when dropping the condition in the aforementioned statement and concluding ‘The European is a colonizer’. Simplications are necessary but they run the risk of ossifying into simplexes. An indication of their ossifying is emotional fixity. Even if the student knows ‘The European’ to be many things, the negative connotation is difficult to get rid of. A sense of guilt lingers on. The connotation will be there in the student’s chain of actions. True, the immediate, visceral quality of guilt is helpful in the academic sphere. It keeps the writer self-critical by facing the caveat (‘Are my assumptions not too Western?’) and then letting go of the connotation (‘I will formulate more inclusively’).

‘The concept is everything’ says a glossy periodical named Scandinavian Living. How could editors go on filling the magazine every month and get readers to waste precious time and money on believing the images and stories? Flipping through the pages, one sees a white couch in a white living room with a view on a lake, wooden furniture, wellness items, shiny kitchen utensils, a recipe of a cake and an elegantly designed chair, none of which could prove that they come from Sweden, Denmark, Iceland or Norway. But admittedly, they have ‘Scandinavia’ written all over, if one allows oneself to get into the image the authors want to sell. The image works because we enjoy to be carried away by it.

Is the image a simplex? No, like any conceptualization, the Scandinavian image simplicates reality to stir the imagination and some positive emotions. Baudrillard’s term of simulation might be applicable. But not the simplex. The reaction aimed at is not predictable, as in one signal, beep, blip, byte. Nor is it affect-laden so that the editor inventing it would balk at me for retrieving the hidden frame. Someone reads the magazine, grins at the pictures, revels in the intelligent framing, congratulates the editor and subscribes. I mentioned gaming and repeat it about movies. Watching a film, like reveling in a concept, requires alienation from surroundings and from production (camera, mic, ketchup for blood). The alienation is intentional and self-imposed, not a simplex that has poisoned the viewer.³ The crucial difference is the role of frames and their shifts. Viewers shift to film mode. Even switching between the frame ‘story’ and the frame ‘camera’ during the movie can be enjoyable (although my co-audience has a hard time believing it). The viewer has no structural reasons to stick to one or the other frame because the activity partakes of the sphere of leisure. An entirely different affect emanates from spreading a simplex signal. The boost of energy to react comes at the price of lost agency. The experience disconnects from the environment.

Unidimensional Language and Scapegoating

As an adjective, simplex means unidimensional. The dictionary defines the noun, in the field of linguistics, as ‘a simple or uncompounded word’. In the digital field, a communication system is simplex if it only allows transmission of signals in one direction at a time.⁴ The one-way signal of the simplex refers to a single-layered idea, seemingly unrelated to anything else. A simplex reduces layers of meaning to one, given that the complexity of reality can be expressed as a relation between layers of meaning, each a plexus (a plaited formation, derived from the Latin plectere, to plait). Simplication reduces the complexity of reality through a complicated intervention integrating and thus concealing layers of reality that were initially part of the users’ agency and decision-making.

Recognizing one dimension only, a simplex such as a fixed identity recasts reality as a lateral field of actants colliding like atoms. The original simplication of the identity divided reality into opposites such as good or bad, in or out, belonging or not, ‘animists’ versus ‘us’. In the simplex more is at play than neurologically rewarding binarity.⁵ By mentioning just one of a binarity’s poles, the (dis)empowering intervention vanishes from view and so we have no qualms about the negative energy felt about the labeled group or object of indignation. We grant the emotion (e.g., about Europeans being colonizers at heart) extra weight. The gut feeling is imagined to have a wisdom of its own. Stereotypes are built this way, tacitly messaging about themselves. By designating a (e.g., neighboring) population in some way, say as ‘greedy’, one assumes the opposite quality to be good and claims that for oneself (‘we are generous’). Being widely held and fixed, stereotypes are easy to use in globalized settings. Yet, being recognizable as oversimplified images, their energizing potential and persuasiveness are lower than fresh simplexes that just completed simplication. EU public opinion will more readily react against antisemitism than against anti-Islamic sentiments injected with associations of crime and terrorism. Throughout the chapters we will draw schemes (tensors) to deconstruct simplexes, showing how they conflate meanings (the columns in the schemes). The following is a limit case when there is very little semantic stuff to go by.

‘Those people!’ can be a simplex. Semantically, the phrase is almost void. The indexical ‘those’ says little. However, its intrinsic meaning, dubbed ‘locution’ in linguistics, is paired with illocution: the phrase effects the intended action.⁶ ‘Those people’ installs at its very enunciation among listeners a division between us and them. Any outsider overhearing the utterance by chance will have a foreboding about a group he or she did not know of before. A variant is the phrase ‘That guy? Well, you will discover by yourself.’ The absence of explicit prescription for a reaction contributes to the prescriptive power of the simplex. In linguistic terms, the speech act has perlocutionary force. It convinces, persuades or intensifies the disposition to certain behavior, in casu suspicion.⁷ A simplex extraordinarily combines locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary forces, to apply Austin’s three aspects of speech acts. Its hence forceful speech raises the chance of overlooking the blatant framing taking place of that person or category. It is a simplex for conveniently skipping the burdensome search for a common sphere to communicate the different frames.

Simplication deals with complexity by reducing it. When does the reduction take simplex form? In group dynamics the scapegoat, blamed out of expediency, is a simplex for incarnating a binary division that conceals the multidimensional relations between the scapegoat and other group members. Scapegoating, of marginal groups or outliers instead of the symbolic animal, has far from disappeared in contemporary society despite education and democracy. On the internet, influencers succeed in making simplexes acceptable. Terms such as ‘foreigner’, ‘boomer’ or ‘millennial’ no longer mean many things at once. The fixed connotation affords immediate response, such as exclusion from one’s sphere. For the over-informed morally burdened actor, labeling makes life easier in complex times.

Globalization is an instance of complexification. Globalization has exacerbated the tendency to simplicate. That might explain populism in voting behavior. How could racist labels return on the political stage after they vanished since the civil rights movement? Together with economic globalization came the information society connecting all communities, urban and rural, into a social network. The technology that drives the information society transmits a particular value: we want information. Context hampers the flow. Information that can travel without context ensures speed of communication. If ‘sharing’ is presumed in communication, the social network values information, ‘informing’ as in influencing, by influencers. Europe’s social network expanded faster this century than some communities could handle. Nobody had the chance of culturally innovating their community in adaptation to the transforming wider network. Labeling newcomers is a way to exempt oneself from building up meaningful rapport in a globalized context.

Indicative of the role of complexity-reduction is the origin of the racial category in US history. Drawing the color line gained salience after, and not before, the legislative act of abolishing slavery.⁸ Freed men and women that formerly lived out of sight on plantations now complicated the social structure of ranks and classes, generating uncertainty about social relations. Racism grew in the wake of public settings becoming more heterogeneous. Those in power worried about their hegemonic control. Ensued the simplex ‘black’. After a while, nobody wondered anymore about the arbitrary choice of complexion for human categorization. A simplex intends no connection with reality.

Reductionism aims at predictable reaction. An utterance as much as a technological intervention, such as a computer program or robotized weapon, can be simplex for limiting the user’s options, or for completely replacing agency. The effect of stereotypes, slurs, certain slogans and symbolic acts vary. But no simplex is harmless. Its violence minimally consists in violating perception. A social construct such as ‘black’ and ‘white’ narrows down the dimensions of human difference and omits other human traits. The purpose may be to speed up or manipulate communication. Also objects, mass events and procedures can be simplex for transmitting an idea that is unidimensional, causing ready reactions. A wall may be built to communicate who belongs and who does not. The materialized or performed idea aims to be contagious, inciting mimicry, for providing what listeners want to hear and will be triggered by.

Simplexes die hard in densely intertwined networks. The stereotype that would dissipate in face-to-face communication, tends to be sustained in situations of mass communication, when many messages compete to arrive. A simplex effectively discriminating will transform the social construct into social reality. As a case in point, policy-makers have no choice but to employ the racial category to undo discrimination. Civil rights movements in the US stress that ‘the Corona pandemic affects more blacks’, which attests to the category’s disadvantaged conditions of life.⁹ The framing itself of victims as black seems unavoidable. The challenge is to take control over how humans are framed, which brings us to spheres of exchange and eventually to the source of production. Meaning is use, to reiterate the self-criticism of Wittgenstein about his earlier period as a logical atomist.¹⁰ What he called language games, we name frames, applied in a sphere of exchange.

To make it in this world, your idea must go viral. Bestselling ideas differ in letter, they are alike in spirit: to reduce the complexity of reality for a wide audience and get away with it. The reason why going viral means reduction of complexity has to do with accessibility of the seller’s idea. Access improves through freely flowing information, exemplified by the market of buyers and sellers. The moment that population density and social complexity increase in a community to the point of multiplex relationships hindering the flow of communication, something happens to the conditions of communication. To facilitate the flow, people cocoon, which is to partition the spheres of communication and exchange. Or they ignore the frames. Burgeoning are media that restrict form and content of conversation. They speed up the spread of a certain affect known as hype. Simplexes include contagious expressions (‘OK boomer’) and shocking images for a good cause such as the blood-stained baby seal in a snow landscape and the starving thin toddler in the savanna. Like the virus in a cell, a simplex exists in situations. Statements, actions or technical procedures reproduce it. Should individuals be reproached for its reproduction? The simplex seeks to be used and to be rewarding to spread. Its reduction of complexity aims at predictable reaction. The reaction going viral is the main criterion of success.

Loss of Agency and Mediation

A button on/off for an effect of ‘warm ambience’ in the living room replaces my combining of several controls of light and temperature. I appreciate the comfort and ease of use, but must admit to be consuming more electricity than I would otherwise. A bit of my agency has disappeared.

Music lovers from generation X may recognize the issue of agency in the analogy with the polished sound of Korg synthesizers in the 1980s. The keyboard’s buttons for predetermined effects (e.g., trumpet, violin) precluded the wide range of distortion and noise achieved by the sliders on Moog (and to less extent Roland Juno) synthesizers. It meant ease of use for the composer, but as indicated by the rediscovery of that spectrum by bands like Boards of Canada, for a while something went missing that could have become irretrievable. The sophisticated wiring of the new generation of synthesizers producing the recognizable 80s sound impoverished choice, reducing the palette to single purpose buttons.

Simplexes have their widest and most immediate impact when materialized in the form of technologies that sidestep human agency. To know how the simplex functions, the noun should be linked to the verb it derives from. The best candidate is the verb ‘to simplicate’. The verb is a fascinating construct that has stayed under the radar of the social sciences. It has a more precise use than its lookalikes ‘reification’ and ‘alienation’. The website Wiktionary explains the verb from a blend of ‘simple’ and ‘complicate’. The history of engineering shines through in the definition: ‘To make a system more complex so that the use of the system is easier or simpler.’¹¹ The engineer takes up the challenge of automation which is to simplify for the user the control of a system. An engine has its wiring upgraded and extra equipment inserted in an all-out effort to anticipate decisions in complex situations.

In the cultural-analytical terms of the introduction, a nomos is chaotic like reality, while a logos is replicable, patterning like the brain does. A thing or speech is simplicated if nomos is turned into logos so that the effect of the former can be repeated. Simplication in speech and technology is a feat of translation and reduction the inventors get away with. One might call it ‘magic’ for the wondrous capacity, like synthesizing a multilayered, barely conscious desire into a tangible bundle of medicinal plants and symbolic organic material. The difference with the examples in this chapter is that the medicinal bundle will always remain to be seen as a simplication called magic. At which point does the achieved automation go awry to establish a unidimensional, immediate and disconnected response that negates humanity? An incredible amount of literature has been published since over a century about humanity’s so-called robotic future, the cybernetic organisms (cyborgs) infiltrating our lives, and eventually the cyborgs we are becoming through artificial intelligence.¹² The recurring theme is that of an original sin with the advent of modern technology.¹³ Surely, there is no need of technological awareness in the case of expediting meat-cutting with a chopper made from hitting flakes off a pebble. I am exploring the idea of a basic human activity whose ambiguous potential has been disregarded in our species’ history with every change of production mode. For our discussion, we can think smaller first, starting with an aircraft or any ‘craft’ that has undergone successive upgrading.

The disadvantage of simplication is to lose ‘the feel’ for the craft. We (can) no longer trust our intuitions. The engineer’s simplication limits operations to effective steps without the necessity of feeling (the craft). Meaning without feeling. An example of how the verb is used in engineering illuminates: ‘Our audience is getting younger and less educated, so despite the additional fabrication costs, we must simplicate the new model of this machine to improve ease of use.’¹⁴ A model consumer is pictured in function of sales. Were one free to decide about technological design, the company reasons, the primary value would be ease of use. The company reasons for and instead of the consumer.

Pushing the button on the machine causes a predictable reaction without seeming to prescribe anything to the pusher. Simplications prevail in many domains of life because they conform to the global systemic need of rapidly processing information in accelerated communication. They become simplexes when conveniently maintaining the illusion of complete freedom. Personal computers brought a technology to the public that until the mid-1980s was reserved for those mastering the computer language BASIC, which already introduced familiar language to improve accessibility for the layperson. The MS-DOS operating system was much more stable than the newcomer Windows but the latter’s ease of use made all the difference.¹⁵ Every window of functionalities is selected by the designer to limit the palette of options to guarantee a chain of activities by the user, who enjoys the freedom of opening windows and unleash creativity within them. The Microsoft software defines what is easy to use.

On the Internet, I let Google decide what to notice. Google helps me to find something by narrowing down the options, and thus making choices for me. My search as a consumer is limited to a list topped by advertising companies. The flickering banners for publicity do not even come across as harassment, because I was searching and I was helped. A good Samaritan waited for me with a colorfully lettered map at a sign post in the middle of the digital ghetto. Google has grown into a multibillion dollar business through clickbait. Ten thousands of ICT experts labor behind the scenes to perform complex calculations that consistently apply a simplication: ‘this is what you need.’ It appears on our screen as a message sending one signal. The calculations for marketing serve to identify potential customers based on detailed knowledge about their spheres (interests) intersecting.

How could memes, which are ideas or behaviors inviting imitation and spreading rapidly across the social network, come to define what is popular on the Internet? Memes only work if they are devoid of contextual information that might prevent them from being adopted by many. The meme carries minimal context. Once the meme spreads, the details that could qualify the statement disappear and the meme gets reinterpreted leading a life of its own.¹⁶ ‘Challenge’, ‘Fail’, ‘Prank’ categorize memes. The simplex quality of memes consists in the operation reducing life to a certain aspect motivating action. The operation should not be underestimated. Finding a popular meme to think through a multilayered situation is an art, a complicated translation of numerous contexts. Visual jokes placing renowned TV personalities in absurd situations are memes. But racist slurs too have been picked for memetic quality.

Communication is to build up a common frame of experience. Users of social media may never reach commonality.¹⁷ Neither does a common frame necessarily mean consensus.¹⁸ The built-up in a sphere of exchange is what matters. Precisely this intention lacks in the simplex. Communication means mediation with the probability of transforming each other’s original position. The two closely related processes are intra- and intermediation.

Interlocutors usually have slightly different frames to start a process of intermediation. Two opinions go on colliding until each speaker is willing to intermediate between the other’s frame and her or his own. In a dialogue between partners, the sentences ‘You are crushing me’ and ‘I was just joking’ point to two frames. As the respective partners subsequently respond to the other with ‘Am I?’ and ‘Are you?’ the two-way exchange toward a common frame is accompanied by inner (or intra-) mediation, an exchange occurring within each actor. The exchange realizes a feeling and feels out a reality, its meaning. Conveying a meaning always contains some feeling or intention, and every feeling conveyed refers to some meaning. Thus communication implies a two-way exchange between meaning and feeling. The minimally two dimensions form a frame for interlocutors to unravel. The listener in turn engages in inner mediation (intra-mediation) to consciously frame the situation.¹⁹ No language could perfectly capture what each person senses, but metaphors go a long way toward expressing the multilayered meaning of the interaction at that moment. A silence after quarrel may be likened negatively to a curling snake ready to strike, or positively to the night announcing a new dawn.

My definition of mediation emphatically does not limit itself to the specialization of anthropology, which would be to analyze culture ‘ceteris paribus’, as if the subjects that socialize culture have no consciousness or body. The introduction outlined that the ‘cultural’ dimension of meanings in frames relates not only to events in a network but also to the accumulative and neurobiologically embodied experiences of the human species. The ‘feeling of what happens’ is how neuroscientist Antonio Damasio describes consciousness.²⁰ Only, the anthropological contribution is to replace the reality of ‘what happens’ by the order of ‘meaning’. Frames determine meaning. Therefore, Fig. 2 replaces ‘reality’ by ‘meaning’. Summed up, consciousness is the feeling of meaning. If the dynamic attuning feeling and meaning falters, and the two go their own way, then consciousness will be split. We mean this (in communication), we feel that (in consciousness). Society and humanity look like they have parted.

Fig. 2

Intra-mediation

Memes simplicate reality. Consider images associating crime with cultural background. These deflect attention away from the causes of generational poverty. Drug addiction no longer seems a response to despair; petty theft no longer survival. Deprived of the underlying layer that ties meanings to a social situation and existential threat, drug use and theft are taken at face value, single-layered negative, calling for eradication. The condensed energy incites a reaction, direct and emotional, possibly violent. Unmediated, the emotion is immediate. Thus words can kill. At some occasions in the past decade, simplexes about race, gender, inferiority, crime and immigrants have provided the soundbites for mass shootings in a street, school, mall. An antidote to the violence would be if the actor went through an inner mediation: testing the reality underlying the feeling (of hatred); assessing the meaning attributed to the reality. Also intermediation will help. We then discuss with interlocutors the relation between meaning and feeling: does another’s crime or escapism still trigger me emotionally after I do the social analysis and the life sensing?

The simplex primes consciousness for reactions in a particular direction, in defiance of the usual volatility of affect. By hiding its frame, the simplex does not let the listener mediate between feelings and their meaning (the reality they refer to). In simplication the frame and mediation temporarily disappear in the background (see same hue in Fig. 2 for frame and for relation between feeling and meaning). The frame collapses into a simplex when meaning and feeling are permanently equated. The meaning is no longer felt but turned into a reaction such as an emotion that can be manipulated. Figure 1 on the perception of reality thus improves with Fig. 2.

Someone’s framing can be simplex, sealing off the equated feeling and meaning. Or it can be multiplex allowing the invisible layer that mediates between the realities of society and humanity through meaning and feeling them respectively. Part I deals mainly with the first process, Part II with the second. In the first, the frame collapses in ready associations such as stereotypes leading to false accusations. Witch-hunts were predicated on such simplexes. Western democracy can pride itself in curbing the surge of witch-hunts at the brink of modernity by creating a space for open and critical debate, about not only someone else’s frames but also one’s own, which Francis Bacon termed ‘idols’.²¹ But Western democracy created its own simplex frames as well as globules breeding populism, as we will elicit in Part II.²²

Which are the features of simplexes we discussed until now? They envisage ease of use in complex situations. They are unidimensional, conflate layers of meaning and thus conceal their origin. They skip mediation and the attuning between meaning and feeling, and thus take away some of the user’s agency. They pretend to be frameless.

Conflation in Automation

Social media have adapted their rhythm and scope to facilitate simplex energy. Facebook convinces me that a quick ‘like’ on screen strengthens friendship. Unfriending would simply undo the operation. The application maintains the chimera of frameless communication.²³ Tweets reduce opinions to the format of short reactions stirring predictable affects. Barely any time should be wasted on working through the information before tagging and responding.

In science, research needs to be pitched. A short quickly readable paper on a niche of the field is much more likely to be written and cited nowadays than a book rethinking the field. Discourse about the underlying paradigm or frame, for instance of psychiatry, is strangely reserved for popular books of non-fiction.

Psychiatric treatment has no room for the individual’s biography.²⁴ Psychotropic medications of pharmaceutical firms narrow down the wide variety of personalities to a universal model of what humans are supposed to be like and how they should feel. The binary informational logic of 0 and I is easy to apply in technology, to market and disseminate across large networks.

Such very different practices of simplication as stereotyping, standardized technology and formalist procedure all streamline communication in our information society. Postindustrial organizations put much effort into delegating key tasks of personal monitoring to digital programs. The ease of use of these standardized evaluations is to lower personal responsibility and remorse in the decisions. Behind every simplex lies a complex, in the psychological sense. “Chapter Three: Losing the Feel for the Craft” will discuss what drones do to our sense of humanity. “Chapter Four: The Human Experiment” on demonization will identify victims of simplex framing as the very category of persons the simplicator (apartheid regimes, plantation owners, factories) has to thank because structurally depends on.

Formalist procedures in digital society simplicate intuitions and negotiations. Workers claim to be ‘OK’ with a situation. The simple pair of letters results from their subconscious assessment of past events. Can a system operationalize and formalize what workers sense? The digital system monitors their situation according to factors ‘earmarked’ through an elaborate survey of policy objectives as well as the workers’ list of articulated needs. In a professional setting of education for instance, a monitoring system furnishes objective results with the caveat that these are to be interpreted. Since the condition is to skip the original frame (the team should not question the survey’s selection of parameters), the results enjoy more validity than they should. They influence the way members assess functioning. The team-member’s performance that is holistically grasped by individuals and negotiated collectively (e.g., ‘the job has to be adapted to his age’) is refracted into a new objectified reality (e.g., ‘he cannot handle the job’). In one way or the other, hearing the evaluation will change the members’ original assessment. The format takes over. Formalism manifests itself as formatism, whose disempowerment goes further than instrumentalism.²⁵ The services economy consists of such technical procedures that reduce the complexity of a reality in order to make the use of this reality simpler.

Why would anything be wrong with technology facilitating mass access through ease of use? The democratization of ICT could not have been without the genius of a Gates or Jobs to simplicate. Designers make choices, predict and also shape expectations of consumers. They have the talent to detect often unspoken desires. Respecting these will yield more profit, the market says. Constructivist sociologists stress this interaction, the dialectic through which technology is being developed. The bicycle of the nineteenth century with wheels of different size rides faster, but safety comes first. The value-laden choice is culturally supported and integrated in the technology.²⁶ ‘Slow down’ says the sign to those driving too fast in a residential area. If the sign fails to convince them, a speed bump will be constructed in the road to technologically integrate the cultural norm in traffic. So the story goes, about the democratic design of technology. Our values are at work in the things we buy and drive. Together we are free to decide how technology can make us free.

And yet on second thought, about the speed bump for instance, a more fundamental influence should be acknowledged. Why did car factories notice the sales of their four-wheel drive vehicles booming? Those cars absorb the shocks of the speed bump when driving too fast. The theory of constructivism may attract, but something more fundamental determines the dialectic of design. Those 4WD cars, ridiculously fit for other terrain than European tarmac roads and therefore a very rare sight until recently, are expensive. The tolerance for 4WD tempting to violate the cultural norm of driving conduct conveys an implicit norm. The market and car lobbyists count on us associating wealthy drivers with legitimate reasons. A frameless communication takes place. It sounds like ‘Did those car-owners not pay the higher price for more freedom?’ The unspoken premise points to a frame to detect.

A democratic system in principle does not legally privilege the wealthy. Capitalist economy spoils them already with buying power on the consumer market; ‘class justice’ and ditto legislation will not be accepted. Yet, we have been living for a while now in a knowledge society with a services economy whose welfare technologies apply science. Gated communities, security guards, lawyer firms, lobby groups, private hospitals and exclusive schools redistribute the fruits of scientific research subsidized by the people. The 4WD vehicle lending freedom to break the rules on unchecked terrain illustrates how these technologies have embarked on a course that simplicates social inequality.

What does the formula ‘technology is freedom’ conceal? It is a frame conflating two statements (meanings) which can be read along the columns in Fig. 3: ‘People free themselves, by paying for technology.’ The figure shows that recombined the two statements form another frame, thus reminding us of alternative views applicable in the economic sphere. Underneath I have a go at these recombined statements. The first frame says: ‘The people pay’ (downward diagonal in the scheme). The second frame states: ‘[Only] the free enjoy technology’ (upward diagonal in the scheme).

Fig. 3

The simplex and tensor of technology

Compared with the first frame, the second sounds unfair. Such asymmetry is unsustainable in any society. Simplex is the idea that technology liberates (which omits ‘the people’ and ‘pay’) or that those with better technology paid for it correctly (which omits ‘the people’ and ‘the free’ lucky few). “Chapter Two: Frameshift” will detail the procedure to relate meanings conflated in a simplex.

Simplexes maintain the status quo because they do not compare the frames in a sphere. They cover up previous choices and alternatives, which increases inertia, slows down societal interventions and firms up the technological bubble. Consumer research fills in the user’s expectations in function of available applications instead of the other way around, to invent functionalities that increase freedom. An ad-free internet exists, yet for those who can afford it, which reinforces the gap. At the macroscale, the carbon trade incrementally improves annual emissions, but the trade also prevents a radical reorganization of society through technology.²⁷

Whether as automation in technology or as stereotyping in social interaction, the complexity-reduction of simplexes pursues ease of use. They reduce agency, not just complexity. The new engineering steers expectations toward a specific end, which differs from older technology such as bicycles, films or games entertaining the consumers in whatever way they see fit. Automatized procedures do not merely simplify, like a training cockpit or go-car being a surrogate for flying or driving. They replace former activities. They alter the situation. At what point do the simplications of the new engineering become simplexes? Their deleted ‘if’ warns about the omission of conditionality, that the technology simplifies an activity by afterward barring the options. The thin line is crossed when automation sacrifices the user’s freedom.

The Multiplex: Going Back on a Decision

Two sociologists left their mark on post-war discussions in Germany, one a technocratic theorist, the other neo-Marxist. Luhmann described modernity neutrally as functional differentiation whereby certain spheres become subsystems such as economy, law and politics with their own logic of practice. The machines roll on, while the psychic system has its own truth. Habermas posited critically that the system the economic and political spheres together form in modernity threatens to ‘colonize’ the lifeworld, the community’s frames of reference. Both theories inform my thesis. Neither, though, accounts for the role of the imaginary or experiential, namely how the set of frames, including make-believe, can give different shape to the sphere. The dynamic of spheres and frames can be evinced through ethnography. We can start with a simple distinction.

The South African anthropologist Max Gluckman introduced the pair simplex and multiplex in the 1950s to distinguish relationships. In a simplex relationship only one link exists between two persons. A mailman or a judge are supposed to fulfill one specific task for you. They do this for you, no strings attached. By deriving simplex from simplication, I underline the temporary make-believe: we act as if the mailman or doctor has no other role in life than this task. We simplify in disregard of the simplification. We catch ourselves lapsing into this momentary alienation when unable to recognize our mailman or doctor out of their context, like in the shopping mall.

Multiplex relationships permit several links in the same communication comprising those of co-worker, kin, peer, co-member, neighbor and possibly more. In an African rural community, a judge maintains multiplex relationships, Gluckman inferred from his research in Botswana.²⁸ The multiplex definitely does not make the task simpler. The judge faces the complexity of having to interpret customary law in such a way that the quarreling parties cooperate again after the verdict. The judge greets them the next morning as clan-member or co-villager. Multiplex relations require persons to negotiate rules. The negotiators rely on intuition. Aware of their direct impact on the community, the influence also extending with age, individuals negotiate cautiously in palaver. They must be aware of the palette of experiential frames that are most adequate. Thus the judge may prefer a verdict that will preserve the accused’s roles as father and husband. Multiplex society trusts in people’s sense of the total picture and their role therein. As for life, we are in it together. Truth and efficiency come second. Multiplex philosophy in a nutshell.

Modern institutions have not been conceived that way. To avoid risks, actions should be predictable. Following our role in certain domains, we enact simplex duties. In a large network with much anonymity the actor would otherwise not know what to expect. Applying Luhmann’s theory of subsystems,²⁹ modernity made a massive effort in differentiating spheres to channel our multilayered desires through money-making in economics, voting in politics, diplomas in education and affective ties in family. At the macro-level, the system engages in sophisticated anticipations so as to devise rules for simplifying actions in various situations. The information society has further developed this atomistic system. Simplications sediment into simplex sequences of action.

Every sphere of activity thrives on a prior simplication.³⁰ To obey the law we must forget that the law has origins. We should not constantly try to renegotiate the set of invented, adaptable rules. The law ‘simplicates’ people’s expectations and conflicts, which is to simplify them through a complicated substitution: a set of rules which lawyers, prosecutors and judges interpret. The simplication becomes a simplex once the actors cannot stop reifying the substitution. They get alienated from its production. From this simplex, though, a new sphere will be budding, on top of that buried (simplicated) one. New normative frames preoccupy the members in that sphere, so they have a hard time getting back to the previous situation, before courts were set up. Think of the trouble that mediators have today in settling a conflict without one of the parties seeking to fight it out in the sphere of the law, namely in a court where lawyers bend the interpretation of rules to the maximum for their client rather than assist in mediating between clients.³¹ Mediators preceded judges. To be able to go back to the simplication and ‘de-simplicate’, one should combat the simplex. I write ‘should’ to remind us that simplexes proliferate precisely because affectively they are so well adapted to the social structure of this age.³²

Conflicts, which communities used to mediate, cannot get out of the judicial sphere. The sophisticated simplication permits to continue the aggression through legal means. In a knowledge economy, each subdomain sanctions deviant actors to become more calculable. The post-Fordist dimension of that economy nevertheless prompts creativity, so that technologies, expertise and policy measures progress. The progress comes down to specialization into a frame of experience. The sphere should not have parallel frames, sets of norms. All energy and creativity are invested in optimizing the made choices, not in exploring alternative ones that turn back time and undo previous decisions (‘progress’). Hence the difficulty of redefining our way of life and sense of purpose in the knowledge economy, which in the absence of mediation verges on post-knowledge.

Simplex organization means dividing complex procedures into manageable tasks. The question whether more collective wellbeing would be obtained from more intuitive, multiplex interactions is obsolete, for those interactions are supposedly the null situation to progress from. By and large, humans look for consent to settle personal conflicts, more or less pay their dues, often do the extra mile in duties, and prefer not to know the details of what they emotionally cannot take. In contrast, simplex society stimulates formalism and legalism rewarding individuals that try to get the maximum out of the system, hire a lawyer to settle a conflict, evade taxes where rules are unclear, stick to the prescribed tasks in their job and remain mercilessly informed on sensational new threats. Knowledge is denuded of its ethical, existential dimension. I call that post-knowledge. Such society expects imminent danger, specifically from individuals. Humans are treated as the system’s underlings. For them the upshot is constant stress. One and the same story is reproduced incessantly. What does the engineers’ complex wiring to make the user’s actions simple tell about ourselves? What are we to learn from the accumulation of rules in anticipation of violations and abuses? Underlying the simplicating arrangement, and inculcating us, is the belief that humans cannot be trusted. That is the message a simplex society conveys. The signal of distrust rebounds on the system through members suddenly feeling naïve if not exploiting the rules of the system.

That the multiplex, which spontaneously motivates members, might be a less costly way to attain social order, has been suggested in many ways the world over. One I cite here is the failure of Tanzania’s villagization program in the late 1970s.³³ Sukuma farmers had a polycentric society. Each extended family and homestead (kaya) stood for a singularity with a certain character and renown spread across the valleys, confirmed via daily greetings and renegotiated in healer compounds, in public festivities and on markets. The kaya traditionally was a fairly self-reliant center integrating all practices, political, economic, educational, religious and medicinal, yielding for adults a sense of cultural autonomy. Their polycentric society spatially translated the multiplex relations. If we switch from a horizontal perspective to a vertical one, a bird’s-eye view, then the imbricated, compressed layers look like relatively detached centers. The autonomy and ability for each center to define the situation contrasted starkly with the mental dependence on the nation by the country’s civil servants, churchgoers and intellectuals. In accordance with that national elite’s dependency, the ruling party had imposed a monocentric type of village with functional zones for economy (cotton silo), health (dispensary), education (school), religion (church) and politics (the ruling party’s office). How did the villagization program fare?

In the built environment, the simplex represents the zone serving one objective. Its spatial opposite is polycentric, a singular whole organically grown to fulfill many needs, at walkable distance and respecting the human pace. Critical voices defending organic growth have rediscovered the multiplex, a collective wisdom that individual reason (or the sum of educated minds) cannot beat.³⁴ Neighborhoods work best. In Tanzania, the failure of a simplex plan for society was clear enough. In three years, farmers re-migrated to their original habitats after the monocentric model—a spatial simplex—structurally caused social conflict, and land erosion. Witchcraft accusations soared, especially among neighbors within the community, in addition to suspicions within the family.³⁵ A later chapter will clarify how the logic of the simplex sustains bewitchment, and thus basically how African ethnography can help to comprehend the failure of planned simplication.

As opposed to hunter bands, agrarian communities and industrial society, simplex society is structured in such a way that individual actions remain almost inconsequential. To be on the safe side, the technologies take into account the worst version of their users. How does this regulation impact our self-image? It does not strengthen confidence. Moreover, a conflict lingers between what we want and what we are. Humans are bodily wired to deeply enjoy unpredictable events, which I name ‘the real’, yet the society they are building seeks to make life as predictable as possible. The excitement of meeting unforeseen challenges is found outside social reality, in kicks, short-term thrills and in gaming, the most popular entertainment. The intensity whereby an in se natural event, the corona pandemic, reminded us of life’s contingency illustrates the inculcated ideal of a predictable world.

What is the antidote? Frames in the plural imply that the subject has a choice. History does not bury us under a pile of past events and decisions. Culture does not entangle us in a web of meanings, as the trope goes. Consider the following.

‘Here I know no kin’, a sign in Swahili reads. It hung on the wall behind my Tanzanian friend standing at the counter of his newly opened shop, a one square meter wooden shed in a small roadside town. The sign refers to the dread of having to sell on credit without being able to enforce installments, which is inevitable when treating customers as kin. The sign establishes a split between economy and family. This process is known to sociologists as the functional differentiation that characterizes modernity.³⁶ Historians have referred to the rise of medieval cities to discuss its origins.³⁷ What interests me as anthropologist is the make-believe. An unspoken culture of pretense is implied. My Tanzanian friend referred to ‘modern times’, a historical breach, to legitimate the sign. The breach was not a fact but a performance, something he achieved through the sign.³⁸ The simplex sign was an act of illocution. My friend knew very well that his business would not be possible without the support he got earlier from his parents, who themselves are indebted to other family members. The attractively located little plot of the shop would not have been allocated to him without the extended family’s long-time engagement with the community. His shop made profit thanks to his wife taking care of the time-consuming household chores at home.

The make-believe is that family and economy are separate subsystems of society. The family itself is a convenient category to forget that blood ties are an arbitrary criterion to determine belonging, that blood ties always connect someone to more than one family, that land owned by a family is based on the mere convention of the first-comer’s rights, and that land existing in separation from Earth is an artificial idea too. Quite a culture of culturing, concealing the arbitrariness of convention, is needed to set up spatial divisions in a society. Of course, at an institutional level, once the conventions are established, the divisions become real in part. At the level of the local sphere. The human species in parallel is far away but does not disappear.

The most renowned example of functional differentiation must be that of Church and State. Modern rationalism and Enlightenment are predicated on the political system freeing itself from theocratic interference. Religious affiliation is a private matter. Voters are free to sanction parliamentary members for being religious or atheistic or whatever. Celebrate in church or festival, make policy in government. The subsystems of politics and religion each went their way after their medieval theocratic phase fooling citizens into thinking that God supported the monarch.

The next make-believe, though, consists in equating decision-making with the State, and in identifying holistic experiences with the Church. We know very well that the Church makes references to, but is unable to integrate the plethora of mystical connections humans experience (the institute of the Vatican rather counteracts everyday religiosity). We also know that the State makes references to, but is unable to integrate the concrete projects of households (party ideologies rather counteract families’ decision-making). Stronger still, the decisions we make in life and the sensed dependence on uncontrollable factors together form an existential condition underlying our everyday communications. The partition between politics and religion, whereupon modernity prides itself, veils this condition. There is as much rationality in religious attitudes as irrationality pervading political ideologies. At an existential level, politics and religion belong to the same semantic layer; they co-produce reality. At an institutional level, they differ. To limit the analysis to the latter layer is the simplex. It makes abstraction of life and humanity.

The institutional layer differentiates spheres of exchange, here of politics and of religion. The existential layer (where the participants’ frames meet) connects the two spheres to one source of production. The simplex approach to society then is to imagine like Luhmann and the West that separated spheres of exchange split up the source of production. The world of politics would apply one logic corresponding to one part of reality. The world of economy would produce another part of reality. The subsystems of family, religion and education would further split up the production source, producing their chunks of reality.

Of course, an important advance in community-building under modernity was to institutionalize distinct spheres of exchange. Ideally, the politicians deal in votes, the employers in money, the relatives in affection, the priests in belief and the teachers in knowledge. In practice, however, money may buy votes as well as belief and knowledge. The make-believe of simplex society is that the distinction between spheres of exchange would be natural; that the spheres stem from ever so many sources of production. In reality, their separation by state and civil society requires enormous and constant effort, and imagination.³⁹ When life and the sources of production were in the hands of an autocrat, the citizenry struggled to institutionalize distinct spheres and maintain their independence. They had every reason to, so that people obtain knowledge, irrespective of their earnings; that enfranchisement does not rely on ethnic affiliation or capital; that consenting adults can live out their affective or sexual preferences without being religiously sanctioned. But the spheres are not natural categories. Today proponents of slow democracy overhaul the social contract for future generations by delving into why systems of governance should end at the national scale, and what administrative level could better manage which sphere of life (also known as the principle of subsidiarity) and whether the modern differentiation does not jeopardize the production sources.⁴⁰

Sphere and Frame: A Dynamic

The combination of Luhmann’s functional differentiation (spheres as subsystems) and Habermas’s colonization of the lifeworld (transgression) inspired Walzer to warn against practices that dare a ‘transgression of the spheres’.⁴¹ The principle is too coarse to me. Spheres entertain a relation with frames.⁴² Multinational companies interfering with national governments or escaping taxation are clearly problematic, but in the case of a court ruling against a state to save the planet, the interference is positive.

A sphere interfering with another sphere does not necessarily transgress its boundaries and colonize. The reason is double. Firstly, spheres do not have fixed boundaries. Secondly, certain (e.g., ecological) frames can renew other (e.g., economic) spheres. The underlying cause for these two traits I have argued before: the subsystems are quite imaginary. The spheres painstakingly separated into subsystems artificially cut up the sources of production, by framing them in a certain way. The subsystems are themselves already disintegrated units, in need of rearrangements case by case. In brief, we should not consider a sphere without its frames, or we will lapse into technocratic (or legalistic) delusions about society.

Conversely, the consideration of a frame without its sphere leads to dogma or ideology and always proves unsustainable. The ecological frame fits within a welfare sphere. It is unfair to omit the sphere and the industrialization preceding it that set climate change in motion. As West-Europeans it is easy to prioritize the ecological agenda because green technologies suit the current evolution of the countries’ economy. India and China cannot be expected to embrace that frame wholeheartedly until having attained a welfare economy. It pains me to admit that an anticipated future may also be in the minds of Tigray and Ethiopian forces warring: they feel provoked by the past and cannot live in the present until a certain sphere with new or restored borders is achieved. Only then will they allow the frame of peace. It is a small yet no less painful step to reconsider the war in Ukraine. For Europe, the Second World War is over and the fall of the iron curtain was a logical epilogue, but for many in Russia the sense of equilibrium does not prevail. That the cards have been dealt and now a peaceful status quo should reign is a perspective to the advantage of Europe and the US. Their wealth was attained through conquest, colonization and slavery, an imperialist heritage they today despise, without consequences, and they will never accept as practice in countries that do not enjoy that welfare yet. The solution is of course not to let the countries do that. ‘North’ will have to pay ‘South’ until the desire to emigrate is more or less balanced out.

A frame fits in a certain sphere. The frame of democracy and peace is a luxury reserved for those who enjoy the present as a sphere in equilibrium. To do justice to a lived environment, an ethnographer will therefore describe frames and spheres, and relate them. As the introduction clarified, the description and relating happen in a meaning system shared across cultures. Does radical difference by definition exclude the encompassing layer where oppositions are drawn, where one agrees to disagree, or mysteries are left to linger? At first contact with German missionaries in 1885, the Sukuma chief said to his people: ‘But they are just humans like you and me.’⁴³ Nothing in the anthropological record indicates the absence of an encompassing level of meaning making. The ancient Indo-Germanic term manas refers to such knowing, a sensory, prelinguistic source of all meaning produced.⁴⁴ The meaning system inheres within the event of the Russian grandmother mourning her grandson and denouncing the war in Ukraine. Humanity inheres. Even though her society may not be in equilibrium and her grandson wanted to suspend the present for a better future, one of the layers in her plea is the encompassing level of humanity, which the simplexes of ‘traditionalist’ versus ‘democratic’ blur. Humans, unlike machines, can spontaneously shift frames. They can also extend, shrink or switch the sphere of relevance.