Every discipline develops its own language for describing its concerns, and that language shapes how it describes and engages with the world around it. “Everything is content,” “All decisions are design,” “All conversations are marketing,” etc
Part of my work is figuring out how to tease out the meaning from those domain conversations and translate them. It’s hard because sometimes you discover there isn’t a translatable message underneath it all — just a fundamental devaluation of other perspectives.
The language of expertise and how it shapes our view of the world can feel like low-stakes stuff when tear gas is flying and people are fying at the hands of militarized police. But watching military officers talk about America as a “Battlespace” really pegged that for me.
Just like hearing the White House refer to Americans as “Human Capital Stock” when discussing reopening during a pandemic pegged it for me.
One the one hand these are shorthand phrases with specific meaning inside an area of expertise. “Just jargon.”
But they are also a clear and unambiguous insight into what a particular domain regards as worth consideration, how it regards its relationship to other humans.
The point isn’t “It’s terrible to use the word battlespace” — it’s that our nation continually fails by erasing the value of human lives, black lives in particular, in favor of domain-values. engagement metrics. theater dominance. market performance.