Slouching toward a zero-context culture

High-context cultures have deep shared understanding between individuals and across groups and require less explicit information to ensure accurate understanding via heavily oral and non-verbal communication. Low-context cultures require constant caveats and explication in order to ensure understanding via predominantly written communication that lacks the dimensionality of body, place, or spirit.

"A high-context culture will be relational, collectivist, intuitive, and contemplative. They place a high value on interpersonal relationships and group members are a very close-knit community. Typically a low-context culture will be less close-knit, and so individuals communicating will have fewer relational cues when interpreting messages. Therefore, it is necessary for more explicit information to be included in the message so it is not misinterpreted." ~Edward Hall

As a linguistic or anthropological concept, context level helps us distinguish how different cultures share knowledge, share power, make decisions, and how they (successfully or unsuccessfully) interact with each other. But as a tool for understanding our current civic life and the technology tools and media platforms that increasingly define our public spheres, if we are willing to value the power of higher context cultures on society and on our teams, it is something we can seek and design for that can make our society more cohesive, our teams more creative, and our lives richer.

The power of high context

In a society, high-context culture helps create tighter social fabric capable of both stronger bonds within groups and more durable bridges between groups. In a team, high-context cultures helps create deeper shared understanding of assumptions and intentions that eliminate meta-work. Most of the work about the work becomes unnecessary because alignment can be more safely assumed and decision making more integrated by default – rather than constantly having to be double-checked or enforced through planning, realignment, and after-action analysis.

Process matters, but how we get strong process can determine whether there is any effort left for the work itself. When we eliminate meta-work, we make more space for and can put more energy into our creativity and more effort toward our core purpose while remaining aligned and in sync. And as we spend less energy on meta-work, we become more productive because more energy is focused on the efforts that drive outcomes rather than efforts that drive process. All the meetings about meetings disappear. The debate about process becomes unnecessary, not because of uniformity of perspective or the elimination of process, but because of shared belief in and deeply held understanding about how we operate. It's not a reductive effect on diversity – it's the opposite: it's an ability to embrace new ideas, new thinking, and adapt to new situations with joy and creativity because we are safe in our assumptions about how we're going to do that that frees us.

The AI acceleration of already low context

Without history, without shared narratives built over time and generations and shared face-to-face storytelling that includes both intellectual, experiential, and spiritual learning amongst known groups and between unknown groups, our public spheres increasingly narrow the aperture of our experience and reduce our shared context to an instantaneous horizon. In our dysfunctional public spheres, the pressure our lack of markers for credibility and authority place on our capacity for sensemaking in our algorithmic filter bubbles has only been exacerbated by the emergence of LLM-based AI tools and will only be further weakened as we are disintermediated from more and more direct experiences by AI agents. A world without shared facts and a deeply uncertain sense of shared reality that we discern the world based on bad substitutes for reality in the form of confirmation bias, proximity, and frequency, eventually we will end up relying almost solely on intuition.

In a society already considered low context that is slowly reducing context to zero in favor of efficiency and ease over adaptability and creativity, each person left to predict the best truth based on bad substitutes for discernment operates like a highly dysfunctional, deeply emotional LLM. It's not just ineffective just because we aren't as fast or as "smart" as the LLM but because it's an oversimplified way to experience the world. The LLM a massively industrial-scale probability engine – the culmination of a dysfunctional, brute-force approach to sensemaking that reduces our human capacity for the adaptability and creativity we need. All based on the instantaneous intuition of the soothing false truth of the confirmatory, slowly narrowing our experiences making bridges more and more impossible across spans approaching infinity.

The familiar becomes what is true regardless of its proximity to fact. LLMs are trading creativity for familiarity, the next right token is the most likely one: it is correct not because is true but because it is known, predictable, familiar.

Current LLMs are built on massive training sets of text and image data called a corpus, but a huge corpus of data isn't the same as high context. It makes the model's predictability of what would be most likely to have come next in the corpus better but does not increase our capacity for adaptability, creativity, or innovation. In fact being better at prediction and more anchored to its training makes our current models more convincingly human precisely because they feel familiar. And because training and deployment are separate functions for LLMs rather than concurrent behaviors like they are in the human mind, they are fixed in time. So we're relying more and more on massively familiar highly predictable history-less engines of the next most likely token to shape our experience of society and increasingly to support our teamwork? That doesn't even sound exciting much less transformative much less like a source of new creative adaptable thinking.

While using these tools might feel like they are improving the effectiveness of a team, they are not doing that by increasing context. They are doing it through the brute force alignment of removing the unpredictable from society the same way meta-work imposes order on the team and consumes all the oxygen needed for creativity. Everyone will be aligned not because they share a deeply held how but because they will ultimately produce the same outputs regardless of the diversity of their skills and perspectives. In situations where the desired output isn't pre-known or predetermined, I'd rather have alignment on how a team will operate with freedom and creativity than certainty on what a team can produce. And in a society that needs adaptability and stronger social fabric more than ever, we need more capacity to embrace difference with joy and creativity, not less.

Last updated: 06 Mar 2025