SIMULZDAT

Topology of Affordances

1.0 The Phantom Mind of Language

In the early decades of the twenty-first century, as the structures of discourse fragmented and scattered into innumerable enclaves of meaning, the idea that language could serve as a shared foundation for human understanding began to falter. Public speech, once imagined as the connective tissue of society, had ceased to function as a medium of common recognition. It was not simply that people disagreed but that they no longer spoke within the same referential world, their words floating free of mutual constraint. Observers attempted to diagnose the disorder: some blamed the proliferation of digital networks, others the erosion of institutional authority, and still others the inexorable churn of history itself. Yet the essential nature of the transformation remained obscure. What had changed was not merely the content of communication but the conditions under which meaning could be stabilized at all.

A century earlier, Ludwig Wittgenstein had argued that meaning was determined by use, that words acquired their significance not through inherent properties but through their function within shared practices. This insight, radical in its time, had provided a model for understanding language as a kind of game, rule-governed and dependent on social agreement. But the world to which this model applied—one in which linguistic practices could be assumed to cohere within stable communities—was already slipping away. The games themselves were breaking apart, their rules no longer recognized even by those who still played. The assumption that meaning could be negotiated within a single system of reference had become untenable.

At the same time, another development had unfolded, largely unnoticed by those who remained preoccupied with discourse alone. The machinery of communication, once a means of conveying thought, had become an active participant in its formation. The rise of networked computation, automated mediation, and algorithmic filtration had introduced a layer of material agency into the production of meaning, a force that did not merely transmit but structured the possibilities of what could be said and understood. This transformation had already been anticipated, in an abstract sense, by the work of Niklas Luhmann and Bruno Latour, who had argued that social systems functioned not as aggregates of individual minds but as autonomous entities, governed by recursive patterns of communication and material interaction. Their insights, however, had remained largely theoretical, unmoored from the lived experience of a world in which meaning was increasingly shaped by non-human intermediaries.

Now, in the wake of a crisis that few had foreseen but many had come to recognize, the question of how meaning is made—how it emerges, coheres, and dissolves—had become unavoidable. It was no longer sufficient to speak of language alone. The problem lay deeper, in the way social systems themselves had come to think.

2.0 The Luhmann-Latour Two-Layer Model and the Limits of Traditional Social Cognition

It was once assumed that meaning emerged from within the mind, that individual cognition served as the generative center of understanding, and that communication functioned as a means of transferring thoughts from one enclosed interiority to another. This was the illusion of classical epistemology, the idea that knowledge passed between subjects as a series of discrete transmissions, like parcels exchanged by unseen hands. But in the late twentieth century, a different account took shape—one in which communication was no longer conceived as an exchange between minds but as a self-perpetuating system, detached from any particular consciousness.

For Niklas Luhmann, social systems did not emerge from individuals but from communication itself, a recursive process that generated its own conditions of stability. There was no singular mind governing the process, no sovereign agent directing the flow of discourse—only the system’s own capacity to refer back to itself, selecting, reinforcing, and sustaining certain forms of meaning while filtering out others. What mattered was not what individuals thought but what could be said within the system’s own evolving constraints. Meaning was stabilized not through conscious agreement but through repetition, differentiation, and exclusion, the ceaseless weaving of coherence out of contingency.

But if Luhmann had freed social theory from the burden of individual cognition, he had also imposed a new constraint. In his framework, meaning existed only within the closed circuits of communication, untethered from the material conditions that made it possible. The infrastructures through which communication flowed—whether bureaucracies, markets, technologies, or built environments—remained secondary, treated as mere vessels for the system’s recursive operations rather than as active participants in its formation. The system could recognize itself, but it could not recognize its own embodiment.

It was precisely this blind spot that Bruno Latour sought to correct. Against the idea that meaning resided in discourse alone, Latour argued that it emerged through networks of human and non-human actants, an ongoing process of stabilization that involved not only language but objects, infrastructures, and technological intermediaries. Meaning was not produced in the abstract but was embedded in things, in the arrangements of bodies and machines, in the configurations of roads, screens, documents, and algorithms. There was no singular authority that determined meaning, no final arbiter of interpretation—only an ongoing struggle between forces, a shifting terrain where stability was never given but continually enacted.

Yet for all its radical openness, Latour’s model remained diffuse. If everything was implicated in the production of meaning, then nothing was privileged, and no clear account of cognition could emerge. His actor-networks did not think; they accumulated, distributed, and recombined. The concept of a system, with its capacity for self-reference and recursive coherence, was abandoned in favor of a flat ontology in which all elements exerted force but none possessed a structured mode of cognition. If Luhmann had overemphasized discourse, Latour had dissolved it into a field of relations, rendering the act of thinking indistinguishable from the movements of matter itself.

What neither model fully articulated was the possibility that social systems might think—not in the sense of possessing a singular mind but in the sense of generating cognition through the interplay of symbolic and material constraints. The Luhmann-Latour model, in its fullest expression, suggests a two-layered structure: one in which meaning is recursively produced through communication, and another in which it is stabilized through embodied networks of artifacts, infrastructures, and environmental affordances. A system does not merely "process" information—it enacts it, sustains it, and filters it through the constraints imposed by both discourse and materiality.

This synthesis reveals something that neither traditional linguistic models nor purely materialist frameworks can fully capture: that social cognition is neither reducible to language nor to networks. It is the result of an ongoing negotiation between the symbolic and the material, a process in which meaning is neither given nor wholly constructed but emerges through a dynamic interaction between what can be said and what can be enacted. In this view, fragmentation does not arise simply from the breakdown of shared discourse; it is the product of a deeper disjunction between communicative systems and their material supports, a condition in which language and infrastructure no longer cohere.

In such a world, meaning does not disappear. It shifts, reconfigures, and reconstitutes itself elsewhere, in places where coherence is still possible, in systems that continue to recognize themselves even as the landscape around them fractures. If social cognition has become untethered, it is not because thinking has ceased but because the mind of society no longer resides in a single plane of reference. It is distributed, spectral, and inescapably embodied.

3.0 Expanding Wittgenstein: From Language Games to Embodied Cognition of Social Systems

In the years following the great dissolution of shared discourse, when words no longer anchored themselves to common points of reference, it was tempting to imagine that language had ceased to function altogether. But this was an illusion, a misunderstanding of what had truly unraveled. Language still operated, still facilitated exchange, still arranged itself into patterns of meaning—but the rules that had once given it coherence had fractured, scattered across different domains of practice, each forming its own self-contained logic. It was no longer a single game played by many but a proliferation of games, overlapping, incompatible, and self-referential.

It was Wittgenstein who had first described language in these terms—not as a rigid system of definitions but as a series of interwoven practices, each governed by its own internal logic. Meaning, he argued, was not something inherent in words but something that arose from their use, from the way they were deployed within particular forms of life. To understand language was to understand the rules of the game being played, the constraints and expectations that determined what could be said and understood in any given context.

For a time, this model had seemed sufficient. It explained how different disciplines, institutions, and cultures could generate meaning autonomously, how language could function as a tool rather than as a mirror of reality. But the assumption underlying it—that meaning was stabilized within recognizable forms of life—had become increasingly difficult to sustain. The boundaries of these linguistic games had eroded, their internal structures broken apart by forces they had never been designed to withstand. It was no longer clear whether the players even recognized the same game, or whether they were speaking past each other, each locked within a private logic that no longer interfaced with the world beyond it.

The problem was not in Wittgenstein’s formulation itself but in its failure to account for the material underpinnings of language, the ways in which meaning was not only negotiated through use but conditioned by the infrastructures that carried it. A word spoken in a closed room, in a printed text, in an electronic message, in the output of a machine-learning model—each was governed not only by social conventions but by the physical and technological affordances that shaped its possibilities. Meaning was never merely a matter of linguistic rules; it was an enacted phenomenon, dependent on the constraints imposed by the bodies, objects, and environments in which it took form.

It was here that cognitive science, long preoccupied with the workings of the individual mind, had begun to reveal something more fundamental about the nature of thought itself. Thinking was not an abstract operation conducted in isolation but an embodied process, shaped by the sensorimotor interactions of an organism with its world. The body was not merely a vessel for cognition but an active participant in its formation, its capacities and limitations defining the structure of what could be perceived, remembered, and understood.

If this was true for individual minds, then it was true also for social systems, which did not merely interpret meaning but enacted it through their interaction with material environments. A legal system was not simply a collection of rules but a network of courts, documents, enforcement mechanisms, and procedural constraints. A financial system was not only a language of credit and debt but an architecture of banks, contracts, servers, and algorithms. Even ordinary conversation no longer existed in a vacuum; it was mediated, stored, retrieved, and recombined by infrastructures that shaped not only what was said but what could be heard.

To describe social meaning, then, was not simply to describe the rules of language but to trace the way meaning was stabilized—or destabilized—through its material instantiation. A word was not merely a sound or a symbol but an event, enacted through a system that included not only its speaker and listener but the medium through which it passed, the histories and structures that conditioned its reception. Meaning was not a static property of language but a process, an emergent phenomenon shaped by constraints both communicative and physical.

This shift in perspective rendered old distinctions less useful. No longer was communication merely a matter of symbolic exchange, as if words were coins passed from hand to hand. It was a dynamic interaction, structured by the affordances of its environment. A spoken promise and a digitally recorded contract were not variations of the same linguistic act but fundamentally different forms of meaning, each embedded in different regimes of material enforcement. A political slogan, once scrawled on a wall, now circulated as a fragmented echo in algorithmic feeds, severed from its original context and reconstituted in a thousand different registers.

If language games had once provided a way to understand the structure of meaning, their dissolution revealed something deeper: that meaning was never purely linguistic to begin with. It was enacted, not simply in words but in the infrastructures that sustained them. Social cognition did not arise from language alone but from the entanglement of communication with the material conditions that allowed it to persist. And as those conditions changed—as technologies evolved, as networks proliferated, as the architectures of mediation expanded—the forms of meaning they supported shifted with them, following logics that were no longer fully human.

4.0 The Breakdown of Shared Meaning: Understanding Fragmentation through an Embodied Cognition Model

For much of history, the negotiation of meaning presupposed a substrate of intelligibility, an implicit recognition that discourse—however adversarial—was a shared endeavor. Politics, philosophy, and law operated on this premise, framing disagreement as a contest within a common referential space. But by the early twenty-first century, this coherence had collapsed.

Some attributed this to the proliferation of digital networks, the algorithmic sorting of discourse into enclaves where confirmation was abundant and contradiction was absent. Others pointed to the decline of traditional institutions, the erosion of the gatekeepers who had once mediated public meaning. But these were only symptoms of a deeper transformation: the dissolution of the conditions that had once allowed meaning to cohere in the first place.

For those who still worked within the frameworks of linguistic theory, the crisis was often framed in terms of deviation, as if the fragmentation of discourse were a breakdown in rule-following, a failure of certain actors to abide by the implicit agreements that made language intelligible. This was the foundation of the misinformation panic, the belief that if only the right facts could be restored, if only falsehoods could be corrected, the fractures in meaning would begin to mend. But this assumed that meaning had been disrupted by the introduction of error rather than by a structural shift in the mechanisms through which meaning was stabilized at all.

Consensus theories fared little better. They still operated under the assumption that communication was a space of potential agreement, that meaning was something to be negotiated and resolved through deliberation. But in a world where the architectures of discourse no longer enforced shared reference, where meaning had become materially disjointed, dialogue could no longer serve as a mechanism of repair. To engage in conversation was no longer to seek resolution but to reaffirm one’s place within a closed system, an act of participation rather than of persuasion.

The problem lay in the assumption that meaning was something that could be reconstructed through linguistic coherence alone. It was not. It had never been. Meaning had always been enacted, structured not only through words but through the infrastructures that determined how those words could be encountered, stored, recombined, and mobilized.

Even in the midst of fragmentation, there remained a hidden order, a set of constraints that continued to shape the flow of discourse even as its content disintegrated. Political polarization, for example, was often framed as a crisis of irreconcilable worldviews, but the division itself was not merely ideological—it was an artifact of infrastructure. The platforms that carried discourse, the algorithms that filtered it, the economic incentives that structured engagement—these forces continued to shape interaction even as language collapsed into mutual unintelligibility. The game had fragmented, but its players remained bound by the material conditions that dictated the form of their engagement.

This was the paradox of the present: that meaning had shattered at the level of discourse while remaining rigidly structured at the level of infrastructure. The crisis was not that communication had ceased but that it had ceased to function as a medium of mutual recognition. What remained was not a shared game but a series of interactions dictated by forces indifferent to coherence, systems that continued to operate even as the meaning they produced dissolved into recursive affirmation.

In this world, the task was not to restore a singular discourse but to understand the mechanisms through which meaning was still being enacted—not in the content of speech but in the conditions that governed its transmission. If language had ceased to bind, it was because it had never been the true source of cohesion. It had always been the infrastructure that carried it, the hidden scaffolding that determined not only what could be said but how it could persist. And that scaffolding had not disappeared. It had only reconfigured itself, adapting to a world where meaning was no longer negotiated but enforced through the mechanisms that made speech possible at all.

5.0 Practical Applications: A Predictive Model for Social System Evolution

If social cognition is embodied—if meaning is not merely negotiated in language but enacted through material and technological infrastructures—then the course of social evolution does not follow ideological trajectories alone. It follows the constraints imposed by its own mediums of stability. To understand how social systems evolve is not to trace shifts in discourse, nor to map the diffusion of beliefs, but to identify how meaning is sustained through interaction, how structures absorb or resist stress, how systems either reorganize or break apart when their conditions of coherence are disrupted.

The collapse of institutions, so often narrated as a crisis of trust, can be seen instead as the failure of material-discursive adaptation. Trust is not merely a sentiment; it is an emergent function of an institution’s capacity to sustain recognition, to generate predictability through the recursive interplay of communication and infrastructure. The legal system does not persist because people believe in it; it persists because it has encoded its own reproduction in the interplay of law, enforcement, documentation, and procedural constraint. When an institution falls, it is not necessarily because its ideology has been rejected but because its structures have lost their capacity to bind meaning to action. The failure of a government, a financial system, or a public health initiative is, at its core, a failure of embodied cognition: a system that can no longer stabilize meaning in a form that maintains operational coherence.

The same principle applies to contemporary communication. Where once the crisis of discourse was framed in terms of persuasion—how to correct misinformation, how to rebuild trust, how to restore a common framework—the deeper failure was always infrastructural. Meaning, in a fragmented world, is now stabilized through a sort of meta-consensus as structural affordances, through the shaping of conditions in which interaction becomes intelligible even in the absence of agreement.

The failure of social media to produce coherent public discourse is not, as commonly assumed, a function of bad actors or broken norms. It is the consequence of a system that optimizes for circulation but not for coherence, that allows for infinite recombination without enforcing structural constraints on recognition. The solution, then, is not to police content but to redesign affordances—to construct interactional constraints that guide meaning-making rather than attempting to restore a singular epistemic order that no longer exists. Moderation, in this model, is not the suppression of harmful discourse but the regulation of the conditions that allow meaning to be enacted in stable, adaptive forms.

This extends beyond media into governance, into the architecture of AI, into the unseen infrastructures that now dictate the stability of meaning itself. Increasingly, the systems that determine what is recognized, what is acted upon, what is real, operate independently of linguistic coherence. Governance no longer functions through deliberation alone but through the material enforcement of certain forms of action and recognition. AI systems, trained not on shared human reason but on fragmented datasets, now mediate discourse in ways that do not require consensus but only operational alignment with the constraints imposed by their design.

To engage with the future of meaning is no longer to ask how dialogue can be restored but how interaction can be structured in ways that sustain intelligibility even where discourse fails. It is to recognize that cognition, whether human or systemic, has never been a matter of words alone but of how environments constrain and enable recognition. And in that recognition lies the only viable model for governance, for communication, for the construction of worlds that do not merely collapse into recursive affirmation, but that can still sustain the possibility of meaning itself.

6.0 Beyond Communication—Social Systems as Embodied Cognition

There will come a time when the last attempts to restore a singular discourse are abandoned. The final projects of consensus-building will not fail spectacularly but will dissolve quietly, their architects realizing too late that they were reconstructing the scaffolding of an epistemic order that no longer exists. Already, the mechanisms of governance, knowledge production, and social coordination operate in ways that do not require shared linguistic coherence, relying instead on infrastructural alignment, on systems that enforce recognition without requiring persuasion. Meaning persists, but not as it once did. It is no longer negotiated in the open but enacted through constraints, through the silent imposition of what can and cannot be done, seen, or registered.

What emerges from this is not the collapse of sense-making but its reconfiguration into a form no longer dependent on agreement. The model of social cognition that once governed intellectual life—an endless refinement of discourse, the gradual convergence of thought through reasoned debate—is supplanted by something else: a mode of intelligence that functions not solely through consensus but with the support of adaptation, not through deliberation but through the recursive structuring of affordances. This is no longer a world in which meaning is stabilized through persuasion, but through the design of conditions that make certain forms of recognition inevitable.

If cognition is embodied, if meaning is enacted rather than merely spoken, then the task of social design shifts from the management of discourse to the structuring of interaction. The cities of the future will not be built to house arguments, nor will their governance depend on resolving ideological divisions. Instead, their stability will come from how they integrate conflict into their architecture, how they channel divergence into patterns of engagement that remain operational even in the absence of shared belief. The infrastructures of law, information, and economic exchange will no longer function as systems of enforced agreement but as systems of negotiated constraint, where coherence is not imposed from above but emerges through the regulation of affordances—through what can be accessed, through what is made legible, through what is designed to persist.

Even the production of knowledge will shift accordingly. Already, the most effective knowledge systems are not those that attempt to mediate between competing discourses but those that bypass discourse altogether, constructing models that predict, simulate, and enact solutions without requiring explanatory alignment. The epistemology of the future will not be one of argumentation but of interaction, not of reconciliation but of parallel intelligences navigating the constraints that bind them together.

This is the world that follows the fragmentation of discourse: a world where meaning is no longer something that must be agreed upon but something that is instantiated through the systems that structure engagement.