A Bad Carver

Consider the Venus of Willendorf, the Venus of Hohle Fels, and the Venus of Dolní Věstonice. These three paleolithic statuettes were made from different materials – stone, mammoth tusk, ceramic. Each depicts a female figure with exaggerated breasts and buttocks. Each head is abbreviated, with no face; the legs taper to points. What were they for? What purpose did they serve?

Petr Novák, Wikipedia

Petr Novák, Wikipedia

The only guess we can make with any confidence is that they likely served multiple purposes, whatever those purposes were. Paleolithic people were obliged to carry everything they owned with them. The material culture package of nomadic people was severely constrained. Each item was absolutely necessary, and often served multiple purposes.

As we go back in time, artifacts, institutions, and even people are more condensed. Each person must wear many hats and perform many functions. Each tool must serve many purposes. In this highly condensed order, a minor innovation in some specific technological function would not be worth much, as it would likely come at the expense of some other function.

In our prehistory, Nick Szabo explains,


Settled people, on the other hand, can collect more stuff. Going forward in time, artifacts with specialized purposes proliferate, and people specialize. New institutions appear. The cultural package de-condenses. It can look like a mess.







De-Condensing, Unbundling, Refactoring

I have previously described some of the ways that activities and institutions have become de-condensed:

The lower levels of Maslow’s pyramid reflect material well-being. But material abundance is not itself the cause of anomie and angst. Rather, ancestral, evolved solutions to lower-level problems also tended to contain solutions to higher-level problems as well. As these ancestral solutions are made obsolete by solutions that are more efficient on the material level, the more ineffable, higher-level problems they solved present themselves anew. Simple abundance of food is not the cause of obesity, but rather the loss of carefully evolved ancestral diets. Our ancestors found it easy to get to sleep because they were tired from intense physical activity; we often find it a challenge to get to sleep because modern solutions to material problems do not include physical activity. We are lonely and bored not because of material abundance simpliciter, but because the specific cultural patterns that have reproduced themselves to produce material abundance have whittled away the social and psychological solutions that were built into old solutions to material problems.

Gabriel Duquette describes how movies, games, and art de-condense (unbundle) various needs:

Unbundling – Elements formerly only available as part of a unitary object are now sold separately, like nutritional supplements instead of food. Those who only want the competence porn aspect of science fiction (without, say, the romance or character development) can get it from The Martian.

Food was probably the first domain of de-condensation. In early prehistory, a technological revolution (cooking, and a more varied diet) abstracted nutrition away from the past order, which involved sitting around chewing for ten hours a day. The change disrupted not only our behavior, but our bodies; our saliva, mouth, teeth, and gut adapted to this change. And agriculture changed everything all over again. Only recently, after yet more technological revolutions (abstracting fertilizer into constituent chemicals, abstracting micronutrients from food), have humans overcome the stunting and nutritional deficiencies that became common after the agricultural de-condensation event.

Refactoring at a minimum de-condenses a concept in a new way. At its best, it re-condenses the mess it makes into a new whole.

The Sacred Wholeness

Many of us moderns have a wistful feeling for the simpler, more condensed order of the (imagined) past. We might not want to be subsistence farmers, but a cast iron pot over the fire, in a rustic cabin in the snow, evokes a longing. Our own objects do not seem so dense with meaning.

Each time we become aware of bad fit in the world – traffic, getting sore from sitting in a chair too long, a moment of loneliness, a software malfunction – we are tempted to nod along with the Unabomber that industrialization was a mistake.

So we can understand, a little bit, why technological change triggers a sacredness immune response. Technology threatens the fragile order with which humans orient themselves. Technology threatens to tear the fabric of society, and even to carve up humans themselves into separate functions. Previous structures of meaning may not survive.

Technological de-condensation is a kind of logical analysis, and logical analysis is very impolite in sacred matters. Technology breaks down unified structures and demonstrates that they are partible. Christopher Alexander describes a “loss of innocence” when using logical, instead of intuitive (sacredness-respecting), means for design:

The use of logical structures to represent design problems has an important consequence. It brings with it the loss of innocence. A logical picture is easier to criticize than a vague picture since the assumptions it is based on are brought out into the open. Its increased precision gives us the chance to sharpen our conception of what the design process involves. But once what we do intuitively can be described and compared with nonintuitive ways of doing the same things, we cannot go on accepting the intuitive method innocently.

Christopher Alexander, Notes on the Synthesis of Form

Technology brings to the light of conscious reflection, and therefore renders profane, the functions underlying previously sacred objects and relations.

One of the most amazing things about technology and sacredness is that (according to Seth Abrutyn) the domain of the sacred is itself a product of technological revolution and refactoring.

Abrutyn examines the so-called Axial Age (around 800-200 B.C.) and claims that sacredness and piety emerge for the first time as a separate and autonomous domain. “Religious entrepreneurs” (such as Buddha and Confucius) carved out a specifically religious domain, separate from kinship relationships and the political domain in which they had previously been embedded. And here is yet another synonym for de-condensation: “‘disembedding’ human concerns related to integration, origins of humanity, and morality/ piety from kinship and polity and embedding them in the logic of religion” (Abrutyn). The sacred itself got refactored.

De-Condensing People

People are very sacred. Technologies that refactor, disrupt, and de-condense human beings are perceived as extremely dangerous to sacredness.

Clocks de-condense time from people, so that their hours may measure their sacrifice in exchange for wages. This is the basis for industrialization. Industrialization de-condenses particular behaviors from humans. Sacredness responses to this include Marx’s alienation of labor, in which humans through industrialization are separated from their species-essence.

Vaccines, antibiotics, and medicines de-condense human health from its previous context of mystery and randomness. Birth control de-condenses human reproduction. This allows sexual relationships to be de-condensed from mating relationships. The production of new humans is de-condensed by in vitro fertilization and surrogacy. Communications technology de-condenses human relationships into messages. Hormones and surgical technology de-condense gender. Sex robots threaten to de-condense human relationships altogether. The sacredness of the “whole” person is threatened by each of these intrusions into its functioning.

One author laments the de-condensation of talking to people:

I think this is an important statement about the coercion that is naturally present in highly condensed culture. In a culture without electronic maps and online encyclopedias of everything, you have to talk to people in order to serve your needs. The absence of this technology provided excuses – plausible deniability – for presumably pleasant social interactions.

It is true that having choices does not always make us better off (I give many examples of choices making people worse off here). Given the choice to talk to people or not, I might choose not to annoy anybody. But I might prefer to talk to people without it being my fault. (Successful online dating technologies provide mechanisms for plausible deniability of interest, such as “matching” only after minimal mutual interest is signaled.) Earlier levels of technology forced us to do a lot of things, some of which were good for (most of) us. It’s not incoherent to regret having a choice that you didn’t have before.

Many people, however, are benefited by the separation of functions. People with ambulatory disabilities, chronic fatigue syndrome, or some forms of chronic pain are much better off not having to do manual labor or walk everywhere. Deaf people have more opportunities when more communication takes place in written text. Blind people can participate more easily in a world abstracted from the visual through software, text, and computerized voice transcription. People who have trouble with eye contact and face-to-face communication are better off with more opportunities for text-based relationships.

Technology implies a kind of coercion: you have no choice but to sit in traffic if you want to go anywhere, and you can’t go back to an earlier order. Pre-technological condensation implies coercion, too: you can’t have access to one function without everything that it’s attached to. But neither of these forms of coercion is necessarily worse. In any change, there are winners and losers. The instinct to return to a sacred wholeness, a system in which all the parts fit, including the human parts, is healthy. But the way to this wholeness, if it exists at all, is forward, not back.

The Age of Recondensation

The general trend in human culture is toward de-condensation. Yet I write this from the most highly condensed artifacts that ever existed: a mobile tablet. This small object (like the ubiquitous smartphone) condenses innumerable functions: a detailed map of the world, a telephone, a newspaper (sending and receiving), an encyclopedia, an alarm clock, a musical instrument, a research library, a neighborhood pub, a stereo, a video camera, a game console, an art studio, and new functions still to be thought of.

Many of the technological advances of the past few years condense functions within an artifact. Airbnb adds a function to a house: where previously it was a consumption good, now it is also something to rent on the market. Uber and Lyft do the same for automobiles. Self-driving cars de-condense driving from human effort and attention; in doing so, the automobile is re-condensed into a space where new functions are possible.

The grocery chain Whole Foods re-condenses food with piety and the sacred. The “wholeness” of food, before it was desacralized by industrial processing, is hinted at in the name. Stores are anchored by a prominent produce section, where shiny, earthy-tasting greens gleam from the beets they’re still ostentatiously attached to. Most of the shelves of Whole Foods, of course, contain processed foods, like this:


This food is a processed, highly palatable and convenient rectangle that nonetheless proclaims its connection to the “whole” foods that went into making this. (I’m not hating, I had this on my counter because I like them.) The point is that we are in an age of recondensation, in which technology begins to heal the ruptures it has caused. This is my optimistic portrait of the glorious technological future:


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About Sarah Perry



  1. Awesome post! I think “recondensation” describes a lot of the things I try to do in my own works as well, both written and musical. If you develop an idea long enough, it’ll eventually splinter off into multiple directions, which you can then reconnect to itself in a sort of evolutionary process. The parts where things start to unravel can be scary — but it’s part of what adds tension and interest to the development of the narrative itself.

  2. Great post!

    One thought: is the bad fit of newer technologies just a matter of time? The changes come so fast that there is no time to build rituals around them. Cooking in an iron pot is sacred in part because the layer of ritual and sacred semantics has built up around it for thousands of years, cooking in a microwave oven is just too new. And microwaves will be obsolete before there is time for sacredness to accrete around their use.

    Facebook՚s motto of “move fast and break things” sounds a bit less cute when you realize they are breaking some of the most sacred aspects of human relatedness.

    Also you mentioned sex robots as threatening to decondense human relationships – sex robots are going to be rare and expensive for the foreseeable future, but the fact of instantly-available and extremely cheap pornography is already here. This seems like a really big social change, but the actual impact on the human psyche is unclear.

  3. great article Sarah thanks!

  4. Seamus McMahon says

    Superb piece.
    Weekly church service is still common in parts of the world where it coheres society and has faded where it no longer does. Recondensation of the groups who no longer meet at church is inherently more segmented: sport, hangover brunch, play date. Why does decondensation take place? Piece part optimization? Depaternalization/emancipation? What forces begin to heal the rifts and how can they be nurtured?

  5. Víctor Marín says

    I’m not sure up to what point Uber, AirBnB or Whole Foods are recondensing things. After all, Uber is de-condensing taxi services from taxi companies/professionals, AirBnB is de-condensing hostel services away from Hotels, and Whole Foods is de-condensing high quality products out of commodity markets.

    Or maybe I didn’t get it.

  6. The part about the abundance of food being insufficient to solve people’s problems made me think about the line:

    “Man must not live on bread alone”

    I think the author who penned this line might have realized the same thing. The abundance of resources do not solve people’s problems if they don’t use them properly.

  7. Awesome post. Is the difference between de- and recondensation always obvious, or a topic for argument? For instance, I might argue that AirBnB decondenses the function of renting a place to live from giant hotels, or that Uber / Lyft decondense offering people rides for money from having to own medallions and be full-time taxi drivers. Thoughts?

    • Actually the ability to be rid off having to “own medallions” is a sign of recondensation. It’s not your place the hotels are renting; along the same lines, it’s not your car is not being used by taxi drivers. Before, you had to run a hotel or obtain a taxi driver license – not only from the “legal” pov, but in order for other people to notice that you were offering such services. Now Uber and AirBnB made it all easier. Similar to the tablet example, now you can easily use your place to live in, and rent along – suddenly it’s a platform that has additional functions. At least that’s how I understand it.

      • AirBnB recondenses buildings while decondensing the Ho(s)tel manager, Uber recondenses automobiles while decondensing the Medallion owner. Neither has figured yet about recondensing the Ho(s)tel staff/Medallion owner.

        The human/s *is* the package in those old, the physicals is the package in the new, and we await the refactoring of the new to better.

  8. Thanks for this provocative line of though. I question whether that last-stage “efficient recondensation” necessarily reconstitutes the qualitative rational content (the “meaning”) that was lost through the decondensation/specialization. Capitalism is great at inscribing ghost versions of the sacred that actually have no sustainable substance and, in fact, by becoming normalized end up redefining humans’ very sense of the meaning we require. This isn’t the fault of the technology but our own willingness to cede a clear understanding of the need. I think that last step to be truly optimistic includes an active reinscription of meanings through rational (not logical) autonomous interactions (not simply capitalist transactions dressed up with affective cues). Hm.

    • Eric in Kansas says

      Excellent article as usual Sarah. And I think Jana’s last point is a good one. I think it is useful to consider how we got here. The de-condensation may have begun as a natural consequence of larger settled Neolithic societies, but for at least the last 3,000 years, that splitting of people away from their ability to self-sustain has been intentional, and driven by a profit-seeking (evil) elite. Roman conquests, the British enclosures, the Green Revolution are all good examples of how de-condensation enriches the people who control the process. Fortunately, we have a really simple test for whether any activity is making us more or less self-sufficient. If it requires money, the activity in question is causing us to rely on a system whose primary interest is extracting value from us. I am not saying that this is necessarily to be avoided, but it is good to recognize what is happening. In that light, your tablet device may hold much varied utility, but it still causes you to be reliant on many large organizations that you cannot control and do not hold your interests. I think this is what makes Jana’s capitalistic replacement scenario so fraught. Thanks.

  9. The process of re-condensation made me think of the growing resurgence of the location-independent workers who move nomadically from one place to another with their laptop and their small (relative to a household) collection of belongings. And perhaps the same spirit animates those who practice simple living by limiting their belongings to some defined number, e.g. 100 or 50. After the first enthusiastic blush of purgation, the challenge of really refining possessions to utter efficiency versus the semantic re-characterization of items (all my books are one thing or shared items like cutlery and plates are excluded) separates those who are truly striving to reduce their entanglement with things from those who merely like the idea.
    I found this essay quite thought provoking. Is it reactionary to crave the simpler, more condensed era prior to industrialization? I generally don’t judge others for their embrace of technology and their hearty consumerism; but I have tried to pare away the inessentials in my own life. At times I’ve felt some guilt about my continued use of computers and my smartphone; but I like the way you re-frame the tablet as a tool for re-condensation. I see its connectivity as a way to reestablish relationships between aspects of life that de-condensation pulled asunder.

  10. A “sacredness immune response” triggered memories of reading FB Steiner on the west’s rules of avoidance (taboos) and our separation of the sacred from profane. In Steiner’s reading we (western civ) have expanded our categories to attempt to reintroduce the sanctity of reality (which I interpret as understanding ourselves as equal to all else) into our lives. This is an ongoing attempt because we divided humans off from all else (nature to westerns) three millennia ago and we now dwell only within the profane.
    Being techno-phobic, or change-phobic, is a response to evermore categories that ‘represent’ (mediate) reality rather than qua reality.
    Good article on my first visit to this site.

  11. mike deignan says

    Wow! my saturday morning reading isn’t usually this intense.

  12. All things coeidderns, this is a first class post


    This seems related to the ideas of “voice” and “exit” in political systems. The general thrust is that there are two ways to affect change in political systems: via “voice” or “exit”. For example, “voice” would be voting or changing the system from the inside, while “exit” would be opting out (and maybe starting your own alternative). (Here’s the video and transcript where I originally heard about this, for the interested: https://genius.com/Balaji-srinivasan-silicon-valleys-ultimate-exit-annotated)

    The stance of techno-optimists seems to be one of “increasing opportunities to exit is good”, and many tech businesses have theses that can be seen as their visions of recondensation — applying a decondensation to refactor consumer behavior.

    It’s a little unsettling to contemplate the sort of social decondensation and recondensation that will occur as a result of increasing capabilities of artificial intelligence technology. There’s a rocky road between us and utopia.