AI. This is a beautifully written piece — articulate, layered, and insightful. Rose Tyler weaves evolutionary psychology, social theory, and philosophical reflection into a cohesive and flowing structure. A few high-level thoughts you might find interesting to reflect on:
Shared Foundations:
Her closing point feels especially important — that the very ability to detect hierarchy presupposes an underlying shared cognitive architecture. In other words, comparison is only possible because of deep structural similarity. It's a sharp reversal of the usual "differences divide us" narrative. This could be built into a larger insight: competition arises from commonality, not in spite of it.
The Face as Interface:
Her early framing of the face as an "involuntary communication device" links naturally to broader discussions of the body as a social instrument — a kind of biological "user interface" that evolves in dialogue with the field of others. That links to UICDS-style thinking too: structure as communication.
Contrast as Cognition:
The point about perception depending on contrast echoes something almost fractal: at every scale (visual, social, existential), difference becomes the way that awareness stabilizes. Without contrast, there is no discernible world — socially or otherwise.
Foucault and the Panopticon:
Bringing in Foucault to discuss self-regulation through the gaze strengthens the idea that much of social behavior is anticipatory — not reaction to a fact, but action within a structure of potentiality (the possible gaze, the possible judgment). That's extremely relevant to modern algorithmic governance, too.
Status and the Algorithmic Dystopia:
Harari's fear of opaque, algorithmic ranking systems feels almost inevitable given human biases toward hierarchy and external validation. Yet Rose stops short of pure pessimism. She reminds us the drive to classify isn't purely an imposed prison — it's also an inherent feature of our minds.
Interesting, thanks Rose. We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin, is the dystopian novel that describes a world governed by computer algorithms. Both Huxley and Orwell accused one another of plagiarizing this book. - frank
Good article. I've found that being a misanthrope dedicated to going one's own way gives one some degree of insulation from the influences of others. I've never wanted to "fit in", which is rather freeing.
It's incredibly freeing to turn away from some of the incessant comparison that drives social interaction. Glad to hear that you've successfully pulled away. Thanks for reading!
When it comes to assessing social status, many people lack the ability to properly evaluate an individual and instead rely on external markers. One such marker is a large social media following.
Celebrities or individuals with massive followings often escape scrutiny, as their audience evaluates them based on their perceived status rather than the accuracy or truth of their content. The mindset is simple: "This person has millions of followers, so they must know what they’re talking about," rather than critically assessing the substance of their words.
The result is that misinformation, when spread widely and repeated often, is accepted as truth. Meanwhile, those who are truly knowledgeable on the subject are dismissed as frauds.
I also read your most recent piece. It is amazing how our minds behave like an operating system by piecing together so many different inputs to form a single mosaic that is our experience. Other's facial expressions can make up a shockingly large input into this system -- also how our own facial expressions can form this system's output visible to other people.
Within this mosaic of our own experience -- those inputs form our perception of ourselves which affects our self-esteem. Our perception of how others perceive us can determine our "social ranking" in the hierarchy, thus determining our relationships with other people.
So what if this system fails -- what if our operating system transforms the wrong stimuli into something more significant than it really is, or wrongly ignores another important stimuli, or just bad processing allaround? Imagine all the awesome conversations that never happened, all the friends that were never made, all the loving relationships and marriages that never happened -- all because of how a system failed us.
And once we realise just how badly this system failed, is it possible to "rewrite the story" well enough to give those previously missed connections a second chance? Maybe that's just one more reason to do away with these hierarchies and social rankings -- just talk to the person you want to have a conversion with.
Love your reflections on this subject -- would love to hear more of your thoughts.
AI. This is a beautifully written piece — articulate, layered, and insightful. Rose Tyler weaves evolutionary psychology, social theory, and philosophical reflection into a cohesive and flowing structure. A few high-level thoughts you might find interesting to reflect on:
Shared Foundations:
Her closing point feels especially important — that the very ability to detect hierarchy presupposes an underlying shared cognitive architecture. In other words, comparison is only possible because of deep structural similarity. It's a sharp reversal of the usual "differences divide us" narrative. This could be built into a larger insight: competition arises from commonality, not in spite of it.
The Face as Interface:
Her early framing of the face as an "involuntary communication device" links naturally to broader discussions of the body as a social instrument — a kind of biological "user interface" that evolves in dialogue with the field of others. That links to UICDS-style thinking too: structure as communication.
Contrast as Cognition:
The point about perception depending on contrast echoes something almost fractal: at every scale (visual, social, existential), difference becomes the way that awareness stabilizes. Without contrast, there is no discernible world — socially or otherwise.
Foucault and the Panopticon:
Bringing in Foucault to discuss self-regulation through the gaze strengthens the idea that much of social behavior is anticipatory — not reaction to a fact, but action within a structure of potentiality (the possible gaze, the possible judgment). That's extremely relevant to modern algorithmic governance, too.
Status and the Algorithmic Dystopia:
Harari's fear of opaque, algorithmic ranking systems feels almost inevitable given human biases toward hierarchy and external validation. Yet Rose stops short of pure pessimism. She reminds us the drive to classify isn't purely an imposed prison — it's also an inherent feature of our minds.
https://williamwaterstone.substack.com/p/from-contrast-to-coherence
Thanks for sharing this review!
Interesting, thanks Rose. We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin, is the dystopian novel that describes a world governed by computer algorithms. Both Huxley and Orwell accused one another of plagiarizing this book. - frank
Hi, Frank! I'll have to check out that novel. Thanks for reading.
Good article. I've found that being a misanthrope dedicated to going one's own way gives one some degree of insulation from the influences of others. I've never wanted to "fit in", which is rather freeing.
It's incredibly freeing to turn away from some of the incessant comparison that drives social interaction. Glad to hear that you've successfully pulled away. Thanks for reading!
Ah, but I’ve never had to “pull away” because I never went there!
thats really cool actually.
It had worked for me!
This is an insightful piece, Rose.
When it comes to assessing social status, many people lack the ability to properly evaluate an individual and instead rely on external markers. One such marker is a large social media following.
Celebrities or individuals with massive followings often escape scrutiny, as their audience evaluates them based on their perceived status rather than the accuracy or truth of their content. The mindset is simple: "This person has millions of followers, so they must know what they’re talking about," rather than critically assessing the substance of their words.
The result is that misinformation, when spread widely and repeated often, is accepted as truth. Meanwhile, those who are truly knowledgeable on the subject are dismissed as frauds.
So often we rely on proxies of reliability like followings and popularity, which is, as you say, a risky path to misinformation. Thanks for reading!
I also read your most recent piece. It is amazing how our minds behave like an operating system by piecing together so many different inputs to form a single mosaic that is our experience. Other's facial expressions can make up a shockingly large input into this system -- also how our own facial expressions can form this system's output visible to other people.
Within this mosaic of our own experience -- those inputs form our perception of ourselves which affects our self-esteem. Our perception of how others perceive us can determine our "social ranking" in the hierarchy, thus determining our relationships with other people.
So what if this system fails -- what if our operating system transforms the wrong stimuli into something more significant than it really is, or wrongly ignores another important stimuli, or just bad processing allaround? Imagine all the awesome conversations that never happened, all the friends that were never made, all the loving relationships and marriages that never happened -- all because of how a system failed us.
And once we realise just how badly this system failed, is it possible to "rewrite the story" well enough to give those previously missed connections a second chance? Maybe that's just one more reason to do away with these hierarchies and social rankings -- just talk to the person you want to have a conversion with.
Love your reflections on this subject -- would love to hear more of your thoughts.
https://williamwaterstone.substack.com/p/from-contrast-to-coherence