Chapter One: Simpl(if)ication

Nothing is wrong with simplifying an event if (on the condition that) you and I know to be engaging in a simplification. Even this condition, the ‘if’, can be temporarily dropped to facilitate communication and technology. That is simplification. However, once the condition can no longer be retrieved, the simplication becomes a simplex. Globalization has exacerbated the tendency to simplicate for complexity-reduction. This chapter illustrates the process in various social domains that resulted in the proliferation of simplexes. The domains range from the spheres of politics, the streets and the classroom, to the informational binary of ICT hardware and software. A new context of depleted mediation and lost agency has arisen for stereotyping, scapegoating, racism and slimmed civil rights. The simplex, a unidimensional signal, addictively combines locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary forces. It conflates age-old premises to generate convenient convictions such as the one that technology liberates and that those with better technology duly paid for it. The chapter revisits Luhmann’s subsystems through Gluckman’s multiplex.