CONCEPT
Sequestration of Experience
Giddens's term for the systematic removal of existentially troubling experiences — death, illness, madness, meaning-loss — from the texture of everyday life, confining them to specialized institutions designed to contain their disruptive potential.
Modernity organizes itself through the sequestration of experiences that threaten ontological security. Hospitals contain illness; prisons contain deviance; psychiatric institutions contain madness; funeral homes contain death. The sequestration enables the smooth conduct of ordinary life by removing from view the experiences that would destabilize its ongoing reproduction. The AI transition has produced its own characteristic sequestration: the existentially troubling dimensions — the vertigo, the loss of professional identity, the question of what humans are for — are systematically removed from institutional discourse and replaced with manageable problems framed as skills, policies, and tools. The sequestration is invisible to the institutions that perform it because the institutional lens is not ground to resolve the dimension being removed.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The concept appears most fully developed in Modernity and Self-Identity (1991), where Giddens analyzed sequestration as a structural feature of modern institutional life rather than a conspiracy or a failure. Modern institutions are designed to