On a holiday we laud the beauty of the Austrian valleys, the clean environment and the charming old-fashioned solidarity in Carinthian villages. Haider’s antimigration party won one election after the other in the 2000s in a region with barely any immigrants. Ridiculous. And all the more telling. Are those rightist fears of ‘others’ and of the tiniest change in the valley a scandal? The dream of ‘no borders’, freedom of movement, excites as a cosmopolitan frame in the urban sphere. How about the dream of a traditional community? What if the Carinthian hills and valleys managed to precariously save a communal sphere? A frame cannot be judged without considering its sphere. It is a wisdom that EU officials should have applied to the Brexit as well, so as to anticipate the perspective that motivated (almost) a majority, all the more after they were disparaged for their provincialism.

Ethical principles are easily diffused. NGOs and international organizations export democratic parliamentary elections to Northern Africa. Next, they are surprised at the aloofness or disappointment of the unemployed, uneducated and elderly in that region. Does the frame work in that sphere? That is the first question to ask. Name a frame (e.g., an ideology such as social democracy, liberalism, anarchy) and an appropriate sphere for it can be found. The converse is true as well. An action has its place or else is misplaced (e.g., fascist speech can suit certain bedrooms). Pointing the finger will only appear self-righteous and end the exchange. An NGO’s first focus should be on cultural translation across layers of society.

The differentiation of frame and sphere allows for a multilayered approach to beliefs and norms in ethics and politics. Sphere A calls for frames X or Y, while sphere B is better off with frame Z. National borders are an obstacle to ecological policy, for climate pertains to the planetary sphere. No point in recycling in country C when we are polluting in country D. Without a global government regulating, the multinationals export unhealthy, environment-unfriendly industry. Mayors refuse electricity pylons in their town? The subsidiarity principle determines which frame is right for what sphere. National authority performs tasks the local level is unable to, because of NIMB or technically. Migration pressures and illegal labor traffic have to be tackled in the interregional sphere. Other sectors thrive best with policy at the more local level. Also, in the spheres of knowledge, leisure, travel and housing, the frame is ideally not a currency like money. The current situation takes for granted that an economic frame, that of money and transaction, applies to all spheres, to the international market of commodities, as much as to the regional sphere of education (money buys the best universities) and the local sphere of housing (young adults can since the 1990s no longer count on having a house like their parents’). There is no cultural reason, or reasoned logic, for that. The discussion of frames and spheres has yet to be done. What prevents the discussion is the idea that ‘every situation is unique’; that there would be no logic underlying the network of events, let alone that this logic could be rooted in life, as in a tensor. This phenomenological primacy of singularity maintains the status quo. It surrenders the decision on policy to power games, to the advantage of the already most prosperous and their frame. There cultural relativism and neoliberalism converge. Child labor and exploitation are possible in factories in the South because there would be no encompassing sphere and frame or ethic. Each culture would have its own source producing meaning and norms. The conflation of layers, into essentialized cultures, results in a normalization of structural inequality.

A European university’s vice-chancellor was recently criticized in an open letter by his personnel of professors and researchers for twittering in support of the chairman of the country’s far-right party.Footnote 1 The politician had confronted a news anchor live on TV for his double standards: how could he reconcile his clamor over local football fans forgetting their facemasks during championship celebrations with his prior silence about the same noncompliance among pro-Palestine demonstrators in the capital? The VC was inveigled by the cogency of the politician’s reaction. The perception by some of his personnel is that he normalized far-right ideology.

Let us peek in the toolbox and take out ‘statement’, ‘frame’ and ‘sphere’. What the academic supposed he could neglect was the frame of the politician’s reaction, which was an extreme-rightist ideology. The politician’s statement played into the affinity between Palestine and leftist causes without needing to mention it. A statement which literally has the same meaning, warning about double standards, can have a totally different feeling with the frame added. The VC sought neutrality by considering the statement alone. Thus he inadvertently justified the extreme-rightist frame which trailed it invisibly but was plain for all to see. Cultural analysis stresses the dependence of a statement on a logic (a higher-order meaning) such as the frame.

The VC’s critics and colleagues signing the letter seem unable, in their turn, to distinguish frame from sphere, for whatever the extremist politician says should according to them be rejected. He should not be given a forum, for anything he and his fellows do can be expected to build up to events reenacting the fascist 1930s. A social analysis could have clarified to them that this position amounts to excluding from society the sphere, the circle to which he and his fellows belong. The critics had better focused on the frame, to show how it is fascist, because that frame may live among the wider population, and this irrespective of the sphere’s public presence on TV or other channels—possibly even proportionately to its exclusion from public channels. Letting people talk is not normalizing their discourse. Not questioning their frame is normalizing. ‘Surely, refraining from facemasks in an ordered demonstration is a personal choice that hardly compares to an unruly crowd of drunks dragging along parents and children against their will into a medically risky celebration?’ Such question would have exposed the party chairman’s framing. Banning him from media is another intervention altogether, which will understandably aggravate the quarter of the population voting for that party, many of them doing so precisely to express their discontent about the critics’ wish to censor.Footnote 2 The VC’s disregard of the frame in a statement is matched by his critics mixing up frame and sphere in their combat.

Humanity requires we include everyone while respecting their differences and without becoming a radical relativist. How to do that? My answer is to respect the different ways, or frames, in which people experience the world, but not necessarily the opinions, statements or actions that come from these frames of experience. I carry in me the frames of both competition and serenity, and should be allowed to reject the excesses resulting from both, such as the economic rat-race and moral indifference. Similarly, it should be possible to denounce the practice of female genital mutilation as traumatizing without rejecting the cultural motive of purity, namely the frame of experience that gave way to the practice, which itself exists in a range of variants, some far from traumatizing.Footnote 3 I carry in me the frame of purity too, which my culture stimulates less or articulates not in a body ideal but in rationality, a purity of thought. After long enough contact with members of a tattooing and piercing sphere I can get into their body ideal, but may still judge some of the actual practices negatively. I may do my best to understand the experiential frame of Jewish settlers in Gaza, but will reject the colonizing practice. Adding the concept of frames to that of spheres helps me to recognize certain progressive frames in conservative spheres, which tend to marginalize those frames. It also helps me to judge the meanings (expressions, opinions, practices, etc.) that derive from those frames. In this way we can approach each other as equal members of humanity without bracketing off what we hold dear. The alternative I fear is a neglect of frames, leaving awareness shallow, with policymakers waiting forever for consensus before implementing an opinion. As a result, activism may degrade into a job, a hobby or attitude, instead of an intense activity building up until the goal is achieved.

Gut Feeling Versus the Globe’s Distended Frame

Post-truth politics solicit emotions more than evidence.Footnote 4 The disconnection between meaning and feeling also shows in the first being stagnant and the second erratic: affective polarization waxes during elections.Footnote 5 The polarization and ‘gut feeling’ of voters that put populists in power was not what intellectuals hoped for with increasing democracy.Footnote 6 From Hochschild’s five years of ethnography in the bayou area of Louisiana I infer something else. Supporters of the Tea Party, older, largely white and male, feel like ‘strangers in their own land’.Footnote 7 Should their contribution to the conservative win not reassure us about the workings of democracy? Yes, populist discourse is impulsive and reactive, highlighting neglect and making impossible promises of individual retribution, but it is also a mass of voters still feeling committed to the future of society and voting, which beats indifference. What should worry is if their choice were solely motivated by group belonging and not interest or policy. Herein intellectuals have a role to play. Instead of fighting the irrational rule of the gut (against Enlightenment), they should respond to people’s search for intuitive capacity, for skills to assess society’s functioning as a whole. Does the amazing abstraction we agreed upon since Enlightenment, of a democratic political system serving the collective good, actually work to adjust the system whenever it begins to dehumanize? Did we as intellectuals cultivate the language to discuss the viability of our production mode, or did we disparage the question as ‘functionalist’ and rather opt for the clash of Marxist and liberalist frameworks? Failing to develop the language of life-sensing deprives a democratic system of its purpose to make majority decisions for the collective good and not for a particular group. Intra-mediation and intermediation attune feelings (a vote) to meanings (the changing environment). Disconnected, the ghost of fascism can resurge.

The contemporary ‘inflation’ of feelings shows in more than one way. Psychiatrists and philosophers alike decry the cultural phenomenon of psychologizing, which is reflected in the public’s emotional oversensitivity.Footnote 8 The officially happiest countries, boasting the highest standards of living, harbor the greatest number of depressed inhabitants. Clients get centered on their ego and expect their therapists to treat common human conditions of fear and despair as mental illnesses. The modern image of the subject since the Cartesian dualism of body and psyche would be to blame. But this should not blind us to the changed reality of a globalizing information society burdening the user. More of what happens in the world concerns everyone. We feel ‘more’.

Globalization is bidirectional.Footnote 9 On the one hand, Euro-American imperialism meant the centrifugal extension of the center’s influence to all corners of the world. On the other hand, after Independence of the former colonies, to remain internationally relevant, the formerly imperialist center had to decolonize its attitude and centripetally integrate the cultural perspectives from all corners of the world. For some conservatives, especially the poorer ones buying into the meritocratic American dream, the affirmative action estranges, whether it is nationally for women, immigrants and racial minorities, or internationally for developing countries. Do we really think it is decolonization that estranges? Hochschild’s respondents repeatedly mentioned the queue jumping by the intellectually connected. One may disagree ethically, which is a matter of ideology, but at least these feelings, of indignation, are meaningfully tied to actual events. The polarization between populist voters and prodemocratic movements came after globalization.Footnote 10 The ‘conservative’ reflex is to narrow one’s sphere down to the immediate interest group. The next paragraph illustrates the ‘progressive’ reflex. A (mostly intellectual) frame of experience distends to eventually span the world population. It carries a risk of its own. In the first case we feel less about the rest. In the second case, we feel more, yet less profoundly.

The documentary ‘Framing Britney Spears’ recently set off outrage in the wider public about how the press and the music industry in the 1990s had made a business model out of humiliating the teenage star as the prototypal ‘dumb blond’.Footnote 11 Interviewers objectifying her sexually, like the Dutch TV-host asking her bluntly at the age of seventeen about her breast implants, did not see the harm of it. After ‘#MeToo’ we think differently. According to popular consensus this is thanks to a historical evolution heightening our sensitivity to women’s fate and intrusive sexuality. Yet, those who lived in the 1990s will remember that feminism existed and bloomed. It just seemed easier then to shift from that political concern to the frame of ‘showbusiness’, and differentiate the spheres, each with their own norms, hence frame of experience. Stars, jealously admired, were fair game because of their exuberant pay to stand the heat. What has changed human beings in the meantime? How come today we feel guilty of Britney’s humiliation, or at least of condoning it? And do we act upon the guilt?

The answer is that the distinct perspectives of feminism and showbusiness have coalesced into one frame, a frame distended because meant to serve the entire globe. Uniting opposite views creates an inner conflict, indeed guilt, which can be avoided by invoking the frame of a separate sphere (showbiz) but this nowadays comes across as eluding moral judgment. I should qualify this statement politically: it seems so mainly in progressive eyes, whose focus is the globe, a knowledge society that globalizes. Progressives take up the gauntlet of inventing a frame for humanity, after lifting the partitions between spheres that safeguard the conservative’s bubble. (My remarks against self-righteous niching serve that progressive cause). Conservatives specialize in the local sphere, which teems with feelings, unrestrained by an encompassing field of meanings. For progressive outrage to translate into policy, the globe should be experienced as if it were a (local) sphere in its own right. To be felt, meanings have to be embedded somehow in a particular situation. Characteristic of a meaning disconnected from feeling is that the indignation passes. Our guilt feeling about Britney is fleeting. The next peak of mediatized emotion is underway.

Beyond Ontology and Intersectionality: The ‘Incel’ Vector

‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. So there is no such thing as an ugly person.’ These words sound all so true. They are also suggestive of a taboo, on the social relevance of looks and thus on raising the issue of ‘lookism’. The comparison can be made with race, which has to be acknowledged first as a socially relevant category before one can combat the racism. One could taboo speech about race for it being a socially determined construct of physical traits. But will that not prolong the discrimination by the simplex ‘race’ framing people with those arbitrary traits? In lookism too, people deemed unattractive have a disadvantage in employment, promotion, romance and self-image. To not recognize this reality in a society, in name of a desired situation of non-lookism (like non-racism), condones the discrimination; is an injustice.Footnote 12 The reason for ignoring or even tabooing lookism is the sheer arbitrariness of the traits anyone is born with and how an epoch values these, but this reason lies at the very root of the predicament of the discriminated: their powerlessness in the matter. In that light, it is a sign of emancipation when ‘unattractives’ form a group to break the silence and express their frustration.

A striking example seem to be the ‘incels’, involuntary celibates. These young men feel genetically unable to sexually attract women. Several of their online platforms however spread a misogynistic ideology as well as jealousy against ‘alpha males’. Five incidents of mass shooting by platform members between 2014 and 2021 in North America resulted in a death toll of about 50.Footnote 13 The killing sprees are the top of an iceberg, a trend that is formally studied to detect potential killers and also informally discouraged by online platforms poking fun at incels.Footnote 14 Both counterinitiatives obviously do not regard involuntary celibacy as an intersectional category of disadvantage. On second thoughts, why should that be obvious?

One of the unmistakable advances by the ontological turn in anthropology is to be able to state that people live a different reality rather than have different perspectives on the same reality.Footnote 15 The second part of the phrase is presupposed by anyone tabooing the issue of lookism. Feeling unattractive, and disadvantaged because of that, would merely be a ‘perspective’, a wrong or at least subjective one at that, on a reality that the tabooist claims to know better (compare enjoying to read Amerindian cosmology while being in the know about the physics of the cosmos). It seems fairer to accept as true to reality what the self-proclaimed ‘unattractive’ person has experienced, like ontologists do. So far ontology works: hardening the concept of perspective, to ontological extent.Footnote 16 Where the ontological turn falters is the differentiation among those ‘being’ unattractive. Only a minority of them have ‘emancipated’ themselves to the point of identifying themselves as such. And of those, yet again a very small percentage consider themselves incels, or did so during their life and maybe moved away from that. In other words, ontology cannot entirely deliver what the concept of culture can with the support of frames, namely to research along two tracks: people live a different reality and have different (cultural) perspectives on that reality. (Consider the ethical plus: ontology might legitimate incels’ acts of violence consistent with their lived reality). The second part of the new formula points to the dynamic of frames within spheres.Footnote 17 The fact that not everyone suffering lookist discrimination has an incel-like experience is also a critique on intersectionality theories and policies. Their phenomenological deficit reducing individual experiences to group identities is a well-known flawFootnote 18 (so is their underestimation of the structural class-features of discrimination).Footnote 19

My book’s contribution is to discern, firstly, the vector of power that drives the unconscious discrimination of in this case an ‘unattractive’ person, as well as the latter’s resort to violent reaction, and the denial of (and taboo on) that discrimination. Secondly, I transcend the vector to reach the matrix of comparison that contrasts views on attractiveness (like ontology and intersectionality theorists do): the disadvantage is real but not intentional. It is the product of cultural framing.

Incels act like they do the comparison. Do they not master the matrix? Are they not ready to emancipate, perhaps even show the world a new path good for them too? No. They engage in ‘pilling’. They swallow the black pill (besides red and blue pill in the matrix) positing that there is no way out of their genetic reality of being sexually inferior. They have interiorized the status quo view. Their inner hopes of arousing a woman’s desire will never come true so what remains is suicide and taking the lives of attractive women and men in the fall. That makes their framing simplex instead of matrixial: one-layered and vectorial after all.

An underlying layer could have unveiled the social structure the aesthetics come from. They could have demonstrated how stuck-up beauty ideals stress out communities. That, thirdly, the tensor of transformation does. It retrieves a dynamic, showing the way to cope with beauty ideals and adapt sexual competition, to alter the current survival of the fittest, in view of a viable society. Incels could have been stopped in their tracks after they and the rest of society together face the sociohistorical and bioecological sources of the negative energies that steer them.

Figure 1 pictures the three steps in a tensorial feeling of meaning. To meaning-making humans, there can be no reality unless they frame it, which is to select. That mechanism I named simplication. The simplex presents a frame as if it were a vector, unrelated to any other frame. Its symbol is a single or double arrow articulating impact or opposition. A scientific paradigm simplicates, opening up new avenues of research but also narrowing down focus, erasing the memory of previous motives for decisions and flooding the discipline with specialized literature at the cost of general overview (see the domain of ecology).Footnote 20 Sooner or later, according to the Kuhnian history of ideas, a paradigm becomes a simplex frame warranting a scientific revolution to replace it. To be valid, an anthropology of a lifeworld should stand the test of time (and the test of place). Therefore, anthropologists should refrain from vectorial knowledge about that lifeworld, as in chronicling what happened in the community. Instead, the reader should be able to trace cultural translations through a more-dimensional approach. The matrix juxtaposes frames. In the figure, a double colon (each point standing for a term in a relation) and sometimes a cross represent a fixed or hierarchical relation (one frame is superior). The matrix evokes a minimal multiplex of two dimensions, for an attempt is made at capturing the meaning of one frame in terms of another.

Fig. 1
An illustration of the shift from 1 D vector to 2 D matrix, and 3 D tensor. It corresponds to the shift from the simplex frame, juxtaposing multiplex frames, and a dynamic of shifting multiplex frames, in order.

From vector to tensor: a three-dimensional experience

Full size image

Crossing diagonals and vertical lines describe a dynamic between (shiftable) frames. These portray a tensor, conceived here as a bundle of tensions whose three dimensions can vary and thus transform social space. Vectorial meanings drive surveillance, to detect and frame someone as ‘incel’. Matrixial language is ‘in the know’ by comparing the incel lifeworld to one’s own. Tensorial meaning dynamizes the situation of the incels and their observers, so life can get better.

Obstructions to Communication in the Knowledge Economy

A knowledge society, processing meanings, verges on post-knowledge. Why? Meaning does not occur as a given, it is felt. To feel anything, a selection of impressions is inevitable: a frame. An advance for (post)knowledge society is to train awareness of the frames. Do not say: ‘Stop framing me’, but ask ‘what is your frame?’ At that moment an intuition can blossom whereby speakers (intra)mediate their framing.

The numbers in the scheme (Fig. 2) situate where, in three directions, a simplex obstructs the feeling of meaning. All six concern aspects of communication. Speech and things become simplex in at least three key aspects: (1) unidimensional, (2) unmediated, (3) disconnected. From these a range of secondary effects have been mentioned. I limit myself here to three: (4) frame(shift)less, (5) fragmented, (6) viral. To sum up the six aspects: simplexes have a unidimensional meaning (reductionist), occur as an unmediated event at the expense of agency and are disconnected from life (anti-intuitive). As a consequence, they prevent the shifting of frames, cause spheres to fragment into bubbles, and (nevertheless) spread uncontrollably across the social network to affect the entire human species. The next paragraphs theorize these aspects a little more to substantiate the general idea.

Fig. 2
An illustration of the vertical dimension of the meaning system has 6 elements. 1. 2 colliding arrows. 2. Horizontal arrow between meaning. 3. Downward arrow from the meaning system. 4. 2-way arrow between frames. 5. A sphere with frame and culture. 6. Horizontal arrow points to network information.

Six obstructions to communication (2D)

Full size image

Unidimensional. In the first aspect of communication affected by the simplex, the vertical dimension of meaning system, cultures and frames conflates and collapses into a fixed meaning. The two colliding arrows in the scheme on the right express the reduction of multidimensional experiential complexity to a lateral field of vectors, influences (in it I recognized ANT’s network of actants). The most effective simplexes were found in modern technology, especially within the complex digital field, because their designs contain a message of complexity-reduction that remains implicit. The designs envisage (decontextualizing) information rather than (contextualizing) communication. Simplex things are ‘informers’, influencing a sphere, while evading discussion about the framing itself. They preclude dynamic. Populist parties win elections by compressing multilayered reality into—bang!—a unidimensional idea. They give a false sense of clarity in the typical paradoxes of the day where economy and ecology collide, and policy requires wide support (e.g., nitrogen farming).Footnote 21

Unmediated. In the second aspect, the horizontal dimension of network and sphere contract to an event. Interlocutors affirm their identity without being engaged in situations to mediate their meanings (opinions) for consensus or in relation to personal experiences. The actor does not see how the event is related to other events in a sphere, or how a choice is made in the now between possibilities (in my view not unlike Barad’s post-humanist materiality). The simplex adopts ease of use at the cost of the users’ agency and decision-making. It is instrumental in imposing a format. A system’s neutral definition of the formatism and instrumentism hides that a simplex exerts control over the listener’s and user’s feelings. Covertly integrating semantic layers permits automation of reaction. These are events of ‘immediation’. In the case of a search engine the reaction is a satisfactory if illusory feeling of control.

Disconnected. In the third aspect, the dimension to care about life and production sources has contracted into an energy unleashed. Intuition has weakened into gut feeling. The disconnection between feeling and meaning has uprooted people’s affect and entailed escalation of emotions. As meaning and feeling disconnect, we lose our instincts, such as the capacity to distinguish nuances in communication. Social media prosper from the growing intolerance to multilayered meaning in communication. The likes and reactions mushroom when vloggers quarrel. The unilinear sequence of simplexes without attention to underlying frames is easy to follow by a broad audience taking sides in the comments and pitching in. The friction mounts and goes on a little longer than usual if one side represents the ‘oversensitive politically correct’ position (with good/bad as their unidimensional reference) and the other side the ‘unsensitive politically incorrect’ position (with weak/strong as their unidimensional reference).

The next aspects follow from the first three. They zoom out from micro- to meso- and macro-level, that is, from meaning, event and energy to respectively frame, sphere and production source, and eventually to cultures, network and species. I select three aspects, two at the meso-level of frame and sphere, one at the macro-level of the network.

Frameless. In the fourth aspect, a simplex (frame) denies its application of a frame. Hence, frame-shift is impossible (see ‘4’ at the heart of the scheme). We have encountered ample instances in technology when simplication engineers away the palette of frames, for easy use. The same happens in communication that does not acknowledge the plurality of frames: as a consequence, I project my own perspective on others as universal. If rivalry is my frame, I will interpret the other’s actions in those terms (for instance, interpret a show of empathy as schadenfreude). Frameless associations happen also in academic settings, for instance when we assume someone who is nostalgic about lost cultural heritage to be reactionary, since extreme rightists tend to be nostalgic too.Footnote 22 To know the meaning of a statement we must take the experiential frame into account (and thus we do ethnography). A society simplex and verging on post-knowledge is a social network that does not reward frame-awareness; prefers fixed labels leveled at opponents. Equally alienating, besides the unfree label, is the bubble, granting freedom within strict limits. That brings us to the fifth aspect obstructing communication.

Fragmented. In the fifth aspect, not frames but spheres become invisible. Once again, society and humanity part. A typical example of sphere-denial is scholars staying within their circles of the likeminded, thinking to change society with their writings, while really they are just preaching to the converted. They contribute to the further fragmentation of the social network. The simplex reaches a structural scale, becoming ‘a simplex of the world’. The internet surfer gets categorized under a particular sphere of consumption and remains in that bubble through gate-kept adverts. Unlike a subliminal message, the googled search is vested with the attractive energy of complexity-reduction. The googled list takes away the actor’s freedom while allowing for control that was previously impossible.

Spheres of exchange are delimited spatially (e.g., a location), socially (e.g., a speech community or political domain) and/or historically (e.g., an epoch) with varying degree of porosity or overlap. Together they form the social network. Every sphere coincides with a set of frames. A variant of sphere-denial is to employ frames out of context as if they were applicable in any sphere. For instance, ‘undisciplined…’ sounds like an innocent reproach among peers but among school teachers in search of explanations it leaves a pupil’s reputation tainted. ‘Autistic’ is a diagnosis in the medical setting, but an effectively harmful remark when employed about an unpopular colleague at work. ‘Silent genocide’ about an unacknowledged category of deaths is suggestive enough in any context, though should apply to specific events in a place at a point in time.

Viral. The sixth aspect of communication, about its viral spread, highlights a surprising origin of simplexes, namely the network wherein the speech or technology winds up. Whereas formalist procedure and perlocutionary speech directly simplicate, certain communications do so indirectly via the environment they act upon. The researcher’s attention shifts away from an event of interaction to the network, although in the knowledge that situations take place simultaneously at various scales, from micro (an event such as speech) over meso (sphere or group) to macro (network). The following example illustrates the interplay between an event of speech and the sphere.

‘Recession’ says a politician on TV and the stocks plummet. A society frightened about the future can be the breeding ground for such complexity-reduction. The disconnection from reality it causes was seen most tragically in the crash of 1929, and regularly since, whenever pessimism on the financial markets followed a long period of optimism.Footnote 23 To give an ordinary, less dramatic example, Tesla shares dropped by 8 percent in one day after the autopilot of its model X caused a fatal accident in California.Footnote 24 Investors react impulsively because that is how they believe the market responds. Should they wait for the outcome of the investigation to determine the cause of the accident? Should they check whether the news of this accident reaches the east coast and the rest of the globe? No, profit is made from anticipating fast, which means that time and space are contracted to a simple decision about a supposed link. The reflex wins. The link between one accident and the firm’s presumed future is a simplex. Investors react not to a simplification but to an idea reducing the complexity of reality, without paying attention to the conditions of the presumed outcome—the ‘if’. A globalized network of information rewards those reacting in a reflex, at least those that afterwards happen to be right. Because of the absence of both mediation and reflection in selling the stocks, I denote this reflex as simplex and potentially viral.

The process takes place at various scales of society, which each has an affective value: connection, impact and trust. The first refers to the meaning felt by the individual, the second to the influence reached via the group, the third to what the larger environment inspires. The word ‘recession’ fell in a situation of uncertainty on the stock market. Firstly, at the micro-level of mediation in communication, the brokers disconnected their feelings from reality. They closed themselves off from preoccupations as family member or friend. Secondly, seen from outside, their sector known as Wall Street (the meso-level of the sphere) appears to operate in a state of irony, for during the above communication the members of the sphere acted not upon fact. Nobody had a grip on the outcome either. On televised forums, the expert defending a diet, health trend or epidemiological hypothesis opposes last week’s expert on the subject. The goal is to score attention. Popular artists display the futility of life at the meso-level through images of ‘bling bling’ which they ridicule themselves.Footnote 25 The struggle for persuasion on social media indicates that we love our influence (perlocution) now as much as we did our capital before. Thirdly, the reductionism by broker and pundit is consequential nonetheless because partakes of the global network. Nobody knows which monster grows in the background of our simplications, so there is reason for distrust. “Chapter Ten: Entropology” shall schematize the various scales of simplication.

Simplex Aspects Applied: Boycott and Science

The six aspects permeate the horror of Mwanga magic in Tanzania. The client bought a single-stranded, instrumental item that went viral and that in its use and meaning deprived the user of agency, frameshift and awareness. The use of Mwanga reproduced an economic sphere no less contingent than before, and with certainty, with no respect for life and peace as production source, hence having violent impact. Without the experiential frame of contingency that accompanied medicine, people felt more than ever in need of fortune and success. The logos of their magic echoed their nomos.

Consider a case of ‘magic’ in the sphere of geopolitics. “Lessons not, and never, learned”, an urban geographer warns about the US’s Caesar Act of 2020 which sanctions businesses cooperating with the Syrian regime.Footnote 26 She joins a report on the catastrophic consequences of the economic sanctions the UN Security Council imposed on Iraq from 1990 to 2003. The civilian population, meant to be protected against the regime, bore the brunt of forbidding import of food, water, clothing, sanitation and agricultural equipment. The interpretation of possibly ‘dual use’ of these goods, by civilians and military, led to a humanitarian disaster. A bizarre reasoning underpins the sanctions, the geographer suggests. In my terms, they are the product of simplex logic in international politics. Let me clarify.

The more devastating the consequences are for the population, the more willing the regime would be to step down, or be forced to by the population, necessarily through revolution since the sanctions target an undemocratic regime. The apparent assumption is that either the regime would care about the population or the population would have the weapons and readiness to overthrow it. The sanctions are however imposed precisely because neither statement holds true. I can only explain this mistaken reasoning from the simplex that identifies a country with its regime, as in Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The sanctions are imposed on ‘Iraq’ or ‘Syria’ or ‘Russia’ which cloaks the issue whether inhabitants back their leaders and whether those who do (for whatever reason, out of conviction or lack of information) should be punished for it. Unintentionally, the sanctions exonerate the regime, which will moreover recover legitimacy in the country thanks to the population’s hardship now projected on an external enemy. The population and the regime are condemned to stick together in a self-fulfilling prophecy with socially disastrous effect. After the facts, will the troubled souls of Daesh combatants and their near ones ever rest? And the souls of Russian and Ukraine soldiers and victims?

The crux seems to me the unspoken cultural associations by the policy, homogenizing Syrian (Iraqi, Russian) identity. Social interventions have to cope with their cultural blind spot. Conversely, the critical analysis above of cultural premises in global governance should take into account the social fact of distributed economic means. The members of the regime and their social class have secured enough funding to not personally suffer from the sanctions, which in the final analysis renders the international measure of a country’s boycott no less than ludicrous. Thus the cultural analysis is complemented with a social analysis.

The lesson to be learned concerns the formalist procedure ignoring its cultural logic. ‘Dual use’ is a simplex for the administrator to hide behind, exempting from critical reflection. It allows for formally correct interventions that eventually destroy livelihoods. Formally, the international boycott sends a clear message to a country, but frame-wise, it helps the regime’s seed of violence to come to fruition. Simplexes sustain the cycle of frames colliding without mediation and translation. Vectorial action and reaction keep dictators in place. More of the same means more violence, because no attempt is made to break the mold, enter the matrix of each other’s premises and possibly launch a tensor that raises the speciated issue of viability.

The tag ‘Syria’ killing thousands of innocents loses its harmful persuasive force once politicians do not associate a culture anymore with one frame but acknowledge the internal diversity of frames, among others opposing regime and population within a country. The dictatorial regime and the Western imposer of sanctions belong to different local spheres but they play the same game named geopolitics. Activist groups both inside and outside Syria find connection too. In the opposition and alliance of frames across spheres is at stake a production source named justice.

In conclusion, applied to the boycott for regime change, disintegration occurred in the following six aspects that otherwise flourish in communication. Firstly, ‘regime equals country’ is a single-strand reduction, away from the multidimensional complexity of experienced reality that a cultural analysis affords. Secondly, the boycott is not effective in the absence of intra- and intermediations among the population, which a social analysis requires. Thirdly, prohibition on dual use happens at the cost of civilian lives. It is a meaning without feeling, disconnecting people from the reality of production and life. Fourthly, without frame-shift the organizers of the boycott sustain the frame of violence. Fifthly, administrators and diplomats of the geopolitical sphere remain in their bubble dominated by the formula ‘no dual use’. Sixthly, the boycott can be presented through a simplex message disseminated virally wherein the dictatorial regime pictures the people as victim of the international community. The corresponding six types of entropy return in “Chapter Ten: Entropology”.

A second and final application contextualizes the post-knowledge condition wherein conspiracy theories flourish despite increased dissemination of scientific knowledge. Once scientific results partake of information flows, the above six aspects of simplex communication tend to surface. I rearrange the set in terms of their relevance. The first two aspects I treat here are part of all scientific simplication, yet consciously organized and within agreed limits that outsiders rarely observe: reductionism and disconnection. The third is proper to science within a globalized social network: uncontrollable dissemination. The next three aspects are risks to deal with: im-mediation, sphere-denial, obstructed frameshift.

Firstly, scientific analysis does entail one-dimensional reductions, beginning with the separation of researched object and researching subject. How else could scientific results be generalized and applied? Secondly, the researcher’s objectivity does require disconnection of feeling from meaning (against subjectivity), and meaning from reality (against cultural relativism). In the positivist tradition, subjectivity and cultural relativism as well as ethics undermine the validity of a study. Thirdly, results have the tendency to go viral, depending on the sensational value of the claims. The media love to stage scientists that shock with advice defying accepted behavior. In all three cases however sedimentation into simplex can be prevented on the condition of conscious use and discussion of the simplication. Scientific debate is all about that.

The next three simplicating aspects are restrained by scientific principles, but can erode into simplex communication. First of all, the intermediation between peers, to critically discuss results, softens in niches of colleagues networking in conferences, collaborating in publications and advertising their field for funding. Secondly, scholars take their circle of likeminded for granted, or the societal relevance of research can be so limited that they have no qualms about the artificiality of their sphere. The public’s agency is very indirect through the peers the state pays for, who professionally intervene in the procedure. Thirdly, disciplines normally do not deny their limitations, as they frame object and method of study. In scientific communication, though, the limitations due to a particular scientific frame wind up in the background as information is disseminated on spectacularly convincing results. This delicate balance of science’s power in important issues determining human behavior can explain the intensity of ‘science wars’, in particular the conflict between the optimist realism of positivist sciences and the critical pluralism of postmodern humanities and social constructivism.Footnote 27

Science has a hard time coping with the current increase of simplex tendencies regarding knowledge. The global network is so complex that interest groups can reframe and sometimes manipulate information. Stronger still, science has moved to the forefront of society’s discontent. Even if the scientists’ interpretation of data, their debate of results and their possible retraction occur in public without censorship, for outsiders the process appears all the more obscure, taking place in the cenacles of ‘the elite’. Conspiracy theories invariably hold elites accountable for whichever disaster, from pandemic to recession. The suspicion that these would be steered stems from the larger problematic: the parting of society and humanity. The elite is situated on the first pole. And so is science. Their framings scare. Trained and rooted intuition countervails the scare.