Genuinely new phenomena resist recognition because people interpret them through familiar categories
Evidence
When we encounter something unprecedented, we automatically interpret it through the lenses of familiar categories, thereby rendering invisible precisely that which is unprecedented. A classic example is the notion of the “horseless carriage” to which people reverted when confronted with the unprecedented facts of the automobile. A tragic illustration is the encounter between indigenous people and the first Spanish conquerors. When the Taínos of the pre-Columbian Caribbean islands first laid eyes on the sweating, bearded Spanish soldiers trudging across the sand in their brocade and armor, how could they possibly have recognized the meaning and portent of that moment? Unable to imagine their own destruction, they reckoned that those strange creatures were gods and welcomed them with intricate rituals of hospitality. This is how the unprecedented reliably confounds understanding; existing lenses illuminate the familiar, thus obscuring the original by turning the unprecedented into an extension of the past. This contributes to the normalization of the abnormal, which makes fighting the unprecedented even more of an uphill climb. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 48
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to Kuhn’s paradigm blindness and to the general problem of seeing novelty that the reader’s platform/foundational reading grapples with; the horseless carriage idea also echoes McLuhan’s rear-view mirror. — connects to: Radical events resist reduction to subjective self-recognition — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 122; The Other-as-look resists being derived from one’s own consciousness or categories; Categorization simultaneously enables and impoverishes human perception and judgment. — John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice: Fifty Years…, 1154 (+4 more)
- SEED: Could seed an essay on why ‘metaverse’ or ‘AI’ labels obscure what’s genuinely new in a technology by forcing it into older frames.
Broader Connections
- Radical events resist reduction to subjective self-recognition
#corroborates(0.80) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 122 - New phenomena require new vocabulary, but familiar terms get repurposed
#expands(0.80) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 203 - The Other-as-look resists being derived from one’s own consciousness or categories
#corroborates(0.75) - Categorization simultaneously enables and impoverishes human perception and judgment.
#complicates(0.72) — John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice, 1154 - One’s class origins enable unique insight while also limiting what the mind can see
#corroborates(0.70)