Thingification, or How Fog Becomes a Tax Code

Reality, considered honestly, is a fog. It is continuous, smeared, partly overlapping with itself, and refuses to come pre-packaged. Things are something we do to it. We name a region of fog, decide it has edges, give it a noun, and proceed to act as if the noun were the territory. This is thingification, and it is how a continuous world becomes a usable one.

It is also how fog ends up writing tax codes.

Key moves

Object formation is a working cut: deciding “this region of stuff coheres enough to be treated as one thing.”
Naming is a force-multiplier. Once a thing has a name, it can be referred to, reasoned about, and traded, even by people who have never met it.
Categories are second-order things: thingifications of thingifications. Useful, dangerous, addictive.
Identities and social roles are thingifications applied to people, with the same benefits (legibility, coordination) and the same costs (oversimplification, capture).
Institutions (money, law, corporations, marriages, nations) are very stable informational things with very real physical consequences. They don’t exist in the way rocks do, and they don’t not exist either.
The continuous-to-discrete move is the bridge from metaphysics to daily life. Most of how a society works is downstream of how aggressively it has thingified.

Where this touches lived life

“I am a [job title]” is thingification working on you. It is also why losing the job hurts in a way that exceeds the loss of income.
A diagnosis can be a relief because it thingifies a fog you had been living inside. It can also be a trap if the thing-name starts doing more work than it earns.
Money is the most successful thingification in history. It runs the world, and it is, on inspection, made of nothing but agreement.

What we’re not claiming

Not that things are illusions. They are real as informational structures with physical consequences.
Not that all thingification is bad. We could not function without it. The claim is that it costs something, and we should see the cost.
Not that the continuous “underlying reality” is more true than the discrete one. Both are real. We get into how, in the next chapter.

Influences & Further Reading

John Searle The Construction of Social Reality (1995)

X counts as Y in context C: the mechanism by which collective declarations create institutional things with genuine causal power.

Alfred North Whitehead Science and the Modern World (1925)

The fallacy of misplaced concreteness: mistaking an abstraction for the concrete reality from which it was abstracted.

Gyorgy Lukacs History and Class Consciousness (1923)

Reification (Verdinglichung): dynamic human relations harden into thing-like objects and forget they were ever relations.

Eleanor Rosch Principles of Categorization (1978)

Empirical: categories are prototype-structured with graded membership, not defined by necessary and sufficient conditions.

Hofstadter & Sander Surfaces and Essences (2013)

Categories as frozen analogies: fog becomes tax code via the crystallisation of once-active comparisons into habitual classifications.

Wittgenstein Philosophical Investigations (1953)

Family resemblance: no single property is shared by all members of a natural category, a philosophical result Rosch later confirmed empirically.

Berger & Luckmann The Social Construction of Reality (1966)

The foundational sociology of how shared thingifications become taken-for-granted reality: habitualisation, institutionalisation, legitimation.

Bowker & Star Sorting Things Out (1999)

Classification systems as moral and political acts. The lived cost of being placed in the wrong category is distributed unequally.

James C. Scott Seeing Like a State (1998)

State simplification of complex reality produces both power and catastrophic failure. Legibility is a blade that cuts back.

David Graeber The Utopia of Rules (2015)

Bureaucracy as crystallised thingification: how fog becomes not just a tax code but a structural instrument of control.