The Speed of Digital Myth
Can We Keep Pace With A Race That Never Ends?
A quote is making the rounds on social media: “The correct response to uncertainty is mythmaking.” This idea, now amplified in the digital age, is as essential in our accelerated, virtual world as it likely was around a campfire 20,000 years ago. But a few things have changed. Bear with me a minute…
“THE CORRECT RESPONSE to uncertainty is mythmaking. It always was. Not punditry, allegory, or mandate, but mythmaking. The creation of stories. We are tuned to do so, right down to our bones. The bewilderment, vivacity, and downright slog of life requires it. And such emerging art forms are not to cure or even resolve uncertainty but to deepen into it. There’s no solving uncertainty. Mythmaking is an imaginative labor not a frantic attempt to shift the mood to steadier ground. There isn’t any.” —Navigating the Mysteries, Martin Shaw
Those familiar with my work might understand why this quote resonated. This is the less obvious link between the philosophy/non-fiction and fiction writing I’ve done over the past twenty years.
But stories are just stories after all, why make such a big deal? Next time you react to a “jump-scare” caused by patterns of light on a screen, check your pulse and ask yourself why you’re responding as if there’s a physical threat. Storytelling is a form of hypnosis. We constantly narrate our lives. We exist in a trance of imagined sensations, images, and symbols.
There’s nevertheless a key difference between a narrative experienced and a car barreling towards you on the highway. We might interpret it as a narrative, be unable to escape our narrative assumptions, or the structure of our language itself, but it happens regardless. It’s like when a jab is thrown — there’s no time to narrate, only to react.
Technical differences aside, the process of writing fiction and non-fiction are two sides of the same coin, so far as I’m concerned, because both are composed of the same “stuff”. As for the world happening out there, in the dark — that’s a story that can’t be told, without telling a story. In essence, myth/narrative is always retroactive, observed in hindsight. But, as the sages wrote, “Shit happens.”
Maybe it is more of a “beyond the looking” glass sort of situation — the narratives we create, the stories we tell ourselves and each other, serve as a mirror, revealing glimpses of a collective psyche. They are reflections of our understanding of ourselves and the world, a reflection that is self-perpetuating, and yet does not in fact exist in a singular form within the world. A reflection which can also breed dangerous illusions.
Here are a couple of snippets from Narrative Machines (2017) to get us started:
“The absolutely central role of myth in our lives shouldn’t need explanation or qualification. And yet it does, now more than ever. It will quickly become apparent why this is so.” — Myths are Strange Attractor: What is a Modern Myth, Anyway?
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“All of our retained history is recalled as narrative. The value that myth provides is demonstrated in the fact that we have history at all, and not only in the historic record of stone figurines and arrangements of cave bear bones. The history of civilization is, at one and the same time, myth. It is not a singular, universal and static truth that myths represent, but instead an ever shifting mirage of order, coherence and meaning, shared stories that in aggregate comprise a culture. …
Our history is reflected in these narratives that we construct of ourselves and one another. This history forms a patchwork, a collective memory only partially remembered. The art and religions of antiquity sprung into existence together, and were a way for us to relate to one another as populations grew beyond small wandering tribes. The earliest artistic artifacts are religious, or is it the other way around? It is hard to say.” — Myth Is Dead, Long Live Myth
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“We should look back to consideration of memes and how myths spread. Within the context of modern markets, we are taught to think of the media (articles and editorials, podcasts, books, movies, music, etc) not much different than the sale of a sandwich, or any other commodity. This misses the function of media — it is primarily fungible socially. Memes are produced through exposure to a medium, rather than the container or vessel that merely serves to propagate the content in a material world. We may need to reconsider “the medium is the message” in this light. … a better metaphor than those following from ideas of consumption and commodity might be found in the relationship of flowering plants and the insects that help them spread. Imagine that pollen is cultural information. Flowers generate pollen and passively make themselves attractive to the insects that lap up the nectar, in the process carrying pollen from one flower to the next…” — “We Can Weaponize Fiction But How Do We Monetize Truth?”
In summary, we experience the world as a tapestry of narratives, faux-collectivized through the myths we share. We may be alone in our inner thoughts and experiences, but we are united in our stories. I mean this in terms of “story” as an active process that shapes our understanding of the world and our place in it.
“Reality,” as we know it, is molded by this as much as by the sensory input our organs provide. These myths (collectivized stories) form our cultural identity, offering order, coherence, and meaning in a chaotic world that might otherwise be beyond comprehension. Despite advances in technology, humans haven’t changed much in the past 100 years.
The constant churn of information, the relentless barrage of news stories and the counter-narratives they spawn offers a fertile ground for understanding the mechanics of myth-making, although it can quickly become a compulsive habit (at least if you’re composed as I am).
My goal has never been to sift for bedrock “truth” when tracing narrative to counternarrative and back. That would be both futile and maddening. Instead, it’s about uncovering a network of signals, and understanding the heuristics others use to distinguish misinformation from disinformation within that network, and how ideological and experiential lenses reconstruct our perceptions. Why does someone form a pattern from disparate dots with one picture/narrative, while another sees something else? It’s not completely pattern-less, like a Rorschach test, but in contextually contracted spaces like Twitter, it’s often pretty close.
As much as some things have stayed constant — humans are still humans, and mythos is still spread from mouth to ear to mouth in an endless chain — other things have changed. The speed of myth has received a serious upgrade, but it hasn’t endowed us with the epistemic or heuristic tools to cope. This is despite the internet, where narratives bloom and spread like mycelium. This rapidity partly explains why it has had significant cultural and political effects that we, as a society or even individuals, are still struggling to understand and manage.
Managing this exponentializing (if not truly exponential) force-multiplier has been a challenge for society at its current level of “maturity,” especially considering we’re only decades into this accelerative age. Modern man is an ape with a rocket launcher, having an epistemic crisis.
A conversation on cultural memory and the potential catastrophe of the digital age with Charles Henry, President of the Council on Library and Information Resources, on Parallax Views podcast.
In any case, the signal strength of any given node in the network is not determined by “truth.” This is by design, so far as “the algorithm” is concerned, but it simply builds upon our ingrained tendencies. The memetic response to events occurs in seconds in this medium. Soon after, it appears through a so-called news media that has been gradually gutted over decades in pursuit of “eyeballs,” and which now mostly seems to try to keep up with Twitter… which has maintained the veneer of the the center of the journalistic world even since Elon Musk decided that what the world really lacks is another platform prioritizing immature, insecure white men.
This doesn’t bode well for the future of journalism or possibly Twitter, but that’s a topic for another day.
In a somewhat roundabout way, this acceleration is why I am writing this post. I first discovered that Prigozhin had turned his troops around from (ostensibly) invading Moscow, not from the BBC or CNN, but from a Simpsons Shitposting forum on Reddit, which scooped most of the major outlets by minutes or, in some cases, hours. Most of Western media had Wagner marching on Moscow as part of a coup, with a supposed deal brokered via Belarus, a typical 2023 “slow news day.” The so-called meme-o-sphere has become the tip of the spear for breaking news, although it goes without saying that none of it should be taken at face value.
Well, “somewhat roundabout” is my default. Around and around we go…
News and social media aren’t the only places where “the narrative machine” is at work. If diving into that variety of nonsense isn’t your thing, you’ll be pleased to know you can do much the same by examining the narratives constructed to critique or “understand” fictional works, a.k.a. Metanarratives.
Academic lit theory has its own idiosyncrasies and failures, but it benefits from being low interest so far as “mainstream” attention goes, and so major financial interests rarely try to fabricate disinformation about, say, interpretations of T.S. Eliot’s poetry. At least, not since the Cold War drove the CIA to such madness as to invest in art. This is a key distinction between “news” analysis and literary analysis, especially when it’s clear that both are different forms of fiction.
However, narrative heuristics and ideology are equally at play whether the analysis is being done by a professor or some “rando” on social media. There’s generally more signal to noise when it’s being done by someone who actually knows their stuff. If you’ve ever seen some of the “bad lit takes” and “bad movie takes” on Twitter, you’ll know what I mean. On the other hand, those individuals often excel at hiding their own biases.
Regardless, it’s not the story itself, but the assumptions and methods used in its analysis that can shed light on how that person is trying to peek around corners. I’m interested not just in the stories themselves, but in the underlying assumptions and methods used in their creation. “Theory of Mind” — we ascribe states to others to understand them — and these assumptions about the minds of others form the basis for improving your “heuristic” by engaging with as many narratives as you can.
How can we understand minds which are, in truth, entirely alien to our own experience, whatever the significant biological and structural similarities may be? With the stories people use to try to understand the world. Most of all, in the blind spots that those stories reveal. That is why I create — to drop the message into a bottle and cast it out into the ocean, in the hopes it reaches another shore.
That’s all for now. Time to refuel on coffee and check the day’s chaos. If there’s anything to take away from this, it’s to remember that all we have to explicate the world are stories, none of which are ever able to contain the truth. At best they might resemble it, for a time, when viewed under the right light…
