The term "framing" has long since replaced Antonio Gramsci's good old "hegemony" in political discourse.

In internet-based everyday life, colloquially it usually means that the social media and influencer troops of a party or organization have managed to impose a certain view of a new phenomenon and to solidify this perspective in the debate - or to turn it in their favor at lightning speed relocate if it no longer works.

Social scientists would refer to the work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Twersky on the subject of framing: Exposing subjects to different representations of the same object will determine how one behaves towards the subject.

The term framing currently has a rather bad reputation, being reminiscent of trickstership and manipulation.

The authors of this book, the journalist Kenneth Cukier, the Austrian lawyer Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and the French computer scientist Francis de Véricourt, want to change that.

For her, “framing” is a creative method of problem solving: “As we understand it, framing is not the light in which something appears,” says Kahneman and Twersky, “for us, 'framing' rather stands for the conscious use of mental models ,

Populist "Emotionalists" of the Trump School

The authors are concerned with playing with perspectives.

In this way they set up a set of rules, which, however, is not committed to creativity as an end in itself, such as the seemingly senseless instructions from rule-based avant-garde art groups such as Oulipo or Fluxus.

Real problems in research, planning and administration should be able to be managed by the "framers".

They allow “counterfactual thinking”, i.e. imagination, to play an important role in their process, but this should be balanced by conditions such as consistency in perception and action and a precise awareness of causalities.

According to the authors, thinking “out of the box” is not enough; it is much more important to make the actually existing limitations productive.

But it is just as important to secure the material and political conditions for creative work.

The work of the "Framers" is currently being threatened by populist "emotionalists" of the Trump school as well as by representatives of misunderstood "artificial intelligence" who want to hand over power to computers.

First of all, a management book

The ability to make decisions is a basic human quality that should be strengthened by the framing proposals for action.

Cukier and his colleagues cannot be accused of any hostility to technology.

Many examples of competent problem solving through framing have a technical component, one case describes the use of machine learning in drug production.

The technology in "Framers" is more like power steering than autopilot, the person is always behind the wheel and sets the direction.

"Framers" is first and foremost a management book, but also a kind of manifesto of a threatened social center and liberal pluralism.

The authors' last suggestion is: "Reject everything that acts as the only valid frame for capturing all of reality." The authors underline the closeness of their thinking to that of the American political scientist Judith Shklar: People should be able to make decisions and act without fear.

The problem with "Framers" is not the content, but the title and terminology.

“Framing” is already a prominent term in the social sciences, and anyone looking for the perceptual-psychological concept of Kahneman and Twersky will be rather disappointed with the present work.

The authors certainly draw on Kahneman's work, but expand the meaning of the term framing in several dimensions, so that it would have been wiser to invent another for the new "framing" as an extended decision-making technique, to sort of reframe the whole thing.

Kenneth Cukier, Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger and Francis de Véricourt: "Framers".

How we make better decisions and why machines will always envy us for this strength.

Redline Verlag, Munich 2022. 272 ​​p., hardcover, €25.#