Staircase, StairMaster

Do we ever really know where we are in time? Maybe that sounds like the kind of question drifting up from the back of your mind while staring at the sky at 3am after a bit of giggle grass, but it’s an important one when trying to situate ourselves into the current moment we inhabit. Modernity, we are told, let us finally step out of the primordial fog and into the clean, fluorescent light of progress. It is the story we grew up in: history as a staircase, each step taking us further away from superstition, closer to clarity. Each floor our collective humanity climbed is like a decade slowly moving us toward a evermore enlightened, egalitarian oasis. Like getting to the rooftop infinity pool at the top of a skyscraper.

But what if what we’re climbing isn’t so much a staircase, but more a stairmaster. On a stairmaster, you’re still climbing steps, the numbers are going up and up, you are climbing up those decades of floors and yet at the same time you look around and you’re still in the ground floor gym of the skyscraper with all these other sweaty people letting out grunts and groans, not the rooftop pool with beautiful people smiling as the sunsets on another selfie.

Which is kind of how a lot of modernity feels these days. If everything is supposed to be moving forward, why does the cultural middle now feel like a smoking crater? Why does it feel harder, not easier, to tell what “most people” think or feel?

The French philosopher Bruno Latour tells us that the staircase was never really there. When he says we have never been modern, he is not denying antibiotics or smartphones exist. He is attacking the idea of a clean break. The idea that there was some decisive moment where we left behind myth and tradition and finally started relating to the world through pure facts and rational arguments.

Take science. The modern fairy tale says science lives in a special zone called “nature” or the “natural world”. Inside that zone there is no politics, no money, no values. Just patient people in white coats calmly discovering how things really are. Then, later on, politicians and the public argue about what to do with those facts.

Latour is going to say hold on just a second there young padawan, let us follow an actual “fact” from start to finish. Think of climate data, or a vaccine trial, or a GDP forecast. They don’t just fall from the sky. They run through funding calls and grant panels, lab teams, corporate partners, ethics boards, government agencies, journal editors, university press offices, newsrooms, and then into your social media feed. At each step, someone is deciding what to study, how to measure it, how to present it, who to convince. Those decisions do not just surround the fact, they are part of what makes it a fact that anyone cares about.

So what we call a scientific fact is never just “nature speaking”. It is also a social object. It is held up by budgets, laws, institutions, and an audience willing to treat it as real. Latour calls these mixtures “hybrids”, part natural, part social, part technical, part moral, all at once.

The uncomfortable bit is that we did not suddenly start making hybrids in the internet age. We have always done this. We have always lived in worlds where gods, kings, crops, plagues, money and stories were knotted together. The distinctively “modern” thing was to loudly insist that we were not doing that any more. Officially, nature and society were separate. In practice, they never stopped recombining behind the scenes. The staircase story told us we had climbed to a new floor, but Latour is saying we are still grinding it out on the stairmaster, just with more HD TVs on the wall displaying the world outside.

Media is an easy place to see this. We often tell ourselves that political bias and polarisation were invented by Facebook, cable news or your boomer uncle on Twitter. That there was once a golden age of boring, neutral, objective journalism that social media ruined. But if you look back, nineteenth century newspapers were outrageously partisan. You bought the paper that matched your tribe. Pamphlet wars and scandal sheets were basically Victorian Twitter threads.

What has changed is not the existence of bias, but how it is wired into our lives. We no longer grab one or two papers whose loyalties are printed large, like we are supporting our favourite sports team. We live inside feeds whose loyalties are hidden in the algorithm. Instead of one editor deciding what goes above the fold, you have ranking systems optimising for “engagement”. Those systems quietly decide which topics explode in front of you and which disappear. They are not evil masterminds. They are just very fast, very dumb machines trained on some definition of “success” that nobody outside the company voted on.

Now, our feed feels like it is about us, our interests, our friends, our taste in music, but it is composed from millions of other people’s behaviour. We are looking at a very particular slice of reality without being told that it is a slice. The result is a strange kind of disorientation.

Byung‑Chul Han calls this losing the scent of time. Instead of a shared rhythm, we get a swarm of alerts and updates. The day turns into a series of pings and notifications. Part of what made our Nickelback era feel legible, in hindsight, is that it belonged to a media world that still believed in, and needed, a single mass audience. Now there are still massive artists and global franchises, but they show up as tiles in your personal grid between a niche podcast and a video of someone making feta pasta. The “middle” has not disappeared so much as shattered into a thousand overlapping middles. There is no one corridor you can stand in and hear what “everyone” is listening to. It feels a bit less like we are all on the same staircase and more like we are each on our own StairMaster, counting steps that do not obviously lead anywhere together.

Roland Barthes thought we are written as much as we write ourselves. We do not create ourselves from scratch, we step into available roles that come with scripts and expectations. Deleuze and Guattari took it further, arguing that there is no stable “self” underneath the roles, only assemblages and flows, temporary configurations of drives, institutions, technologies. You are not a pure, modern “me” who occasionally logs on. You are, in part, what your job, your group chats, Spotify’s recommendation engine and HMRC paperwork make of you.

Latour adds a time travel twist: those roles and networks are never purely present. They are full of smuggled goods from older eras. The influencer is part street preacher, part door to door salesman, part celebrity, part imaginary friend. The scientist still carries traces of priest and scribe. The productivity guru sounds like a Victorian moralist who has discovered Notion. Our supposedly “modern” roles are stitched together from inherited materials running on new platforms.

So if life today feels more splintered, Latour’s answer might be sad but true. It is not just because something recently broke and needs fixing. It is because the story that was supposed to unify everything, the staircase of linear progress, the clean break between past and present, nature and culture, fact and value, was always more of a comforting myth than a description. We have not climbed into a single, coherent rooftop pool of “now” at the height of history. We have just kept adding new networks, new hybrids and new roles onto a world that was already messy. We feel the burn, we count the steps, but look up at the same gym wall. For Latour, the task is not to rebuild a perfect staircase, but to redesign the gym so all these StairMasters actually go somewhere together, a more honest way of sharing a world with our facts, our fictions and everything in between. The absence of a unifying story is not a glitch of our moment. It might be the first time we are seeing clearly that there was never really one to begin with.