"Context is that which is scarce"

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Context Is That Which Is Scarce

The modern world is not short of information. It is short of the conditions under which information becomes competent judgement. That is the underlying truth of Tyler Cowen’s definitional phrase, “Context is that which is scarce”, which Cowen tends to drop cryptically into posts on Marginal Revolution.

It is not a clever way of saying that people should read more background material. 

Our high-connectivity, high-scale culture has excelled at detaching statements, numbers, images, prices, credentials and gestures from the circumstances that once made them intelligible.

• A sentence leaves a conversation and becomes a screenshot.
• A scholar's post becomes a likes count.
• A political remark becomes a tribal flare fired into the night.

The fragment is portable, searchable, rankable and monetisable. And utterly misleading.

Cowen’s aphorism meets James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State.

Scott described how states simplify reality in order to govern it. Forests become timber yields. Villages become administrative maps. People become taxable units.

What disappears is mētis: local, practical, tacit knowledge acquired through long acquaintance with a particular field of action: competence embedded in conditions too dense for documentation. The perils of book-learning have long been advertised by the wise.

The internet is high-modernism escaped the state bureaucracy. It performs the same flattening operation, but distributes it through platforms, mobs and algorithms rather than civil servants.

The state wants legibility from above; the digital world demands legibility from everywhere. Every utterance must be instantly available to strangers who know none of its history, genre, audience or tacit constraints.

AI enters this terrain ambiguously. A chatbot without memory is another context-destruction machine: fluent, generic, plausibly informed, and utterly ignorant of your local terrain. But an AI with curated memory, the relevant documents, your correspondence and repeated interaction may become something different: a partial prosthesis for lost context. Perhaps (though episodically to date) it may be more contextually wise than you.

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