The Vanishing Table, or Community in a World that is No World
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper investigates the possibility of community under modern conditions of “worldlessness,” displacement, and disburdenment, conditions recently materialized in, and accelerated by, digital information and communication technologies. The paper engineers an encounter between two literatures: the body of philosophical writing that locates the phenomenon of worldlessness in the progress of modern technology generally; and the growing social science literature examining the character and dynamics of digitally-mediated community practices and forms. The paper begins with a theoretical exegesis of aspects of the work of three thinkers—Harold Innis, Hannah Arendt, and Albert Borgmann—who have made thoughtful contributions to our understand of the technological phenomenon gathered here as worldlessness. It then proceeds to reflect upon recent empirical accounts of digitally-mediated community, in light of the philosophical questions raised by these thinkers. The paper concludes by arguing that digital technology, as it is elaborated in the context of contemporary liberal capitalism, provides a material setting in which community is likely to thrive only in a particular, truncated form: as an infrastructure of convenience for instrumental communication between networked individuals.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it