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Ross Fonteyn
Contextualist, cognitive systems designer and founder of Unset, exploring how context shapes the stories, systems and decisions through which people understand the world.
About
Ross Fonteyn is a contextualist, cognitive systems designer, writer and founder of Unset. His work explores how meaning changes when ideas are placed back into their wider historical, cultural and human contexts.
At Unset, he is developing a change-led knowledge system that connects concepts, people, creative works and the relationships between them. Rather than treating information as isolated pages, the system maps the structures that give each subject its place and make new connections visible.
His writing moves between film, television, music, philosophy and the underlying ideas that shape everyday life—from agency and identity to time, matter and information. Across these subjects, his interest is the same: understanding not only what something is, but what it reveals when seen in context.
Work
What the Hit Show Severance Is Really About
Severance centers on Lumon Industries’ radical procedure that severs employees’ work memories from their personal lives, creating two distinct selves—an unknowing “Innie” trapped in a mysterious office complex, and an…
Murderbot and the Violence of Being Misread
Murderbot is not a story about a machine becoming human. It is a story about a person trapped inside a category designed to make personhood invisible.
Drake is the Ronaldo of Rap
Ronaldo was never the easiest genius to love. Too polished, too hungry, too aware of the scoreboard. Yet season after season, he kept arriving where it mattered. Drake has built a rap career with the same uncomfortable…
How the Collapse of the Soviet Union gave Rise to Mafioso Rap
The Cold War ended in Moscow, but one of its aftershocks moved through New York basslines. As America celebrated the free market, whole neighbourhoods were left staring at wealth from the wrong side of the glass…
The Right to Be Unpredictable
Freedom means being allowed to become someone your algorithms, your friends and your family did not expect.
Cinema
What Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Teaches Us About Agency
Dead Reckoning is the seventh instalment in the Mission: Impossible franchise, directed by Christopher McQuarrie and starring Tom Cruise as IMF agent Ethan Hunt. Released in 2023, the film raised the stakes from nuclear…
What Final Destination Understands About Growing Up, Staying Alive and Facing the Inevitable
Death is coming. So dance. And watch films — not at the same time. Okay, sometimes at the same time.
Sometimes We Need the Perspective of an Alien Spider
What Spaceman understands about perspective, human connection and the things that become invisible when we are standing too close to our own lives
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Blame the Kids
Technology has always changed us. Why do we keep treating the newest version of humanity as evidence that something has gone wrong?
The Universe
Matter
Matter feels like the one thing that all of reality agrees on. A wall pushes back. A stone has weight. A body occupies space. But the solid world began as heat, particles and instability, then passed through stars…
Time
A clock is one of the most trusted objects in modern life. It tells us when to leave, how long we waited, and how much of the day is gone. But it cannot explain why childhood summers felt endless, why grief can stop a…
Information
Information is the trace change leaves behind: a domino fallen, a cup cooling, a footprint pressed into mud, a signal crossing space. Living things survive by learning how to read those traces. But in a world…
A Job Is Not Security
Why economic security depends on more than employment