I’ve been grousing that I can't find contemporary myths that seem to explain how technology operates. Petri Mähönen and Pam Heath independently encouraged me to come up with my own. Here’s a first attempt.
Trickster sold people stuff. He would go around hawking his wares, trying to guess who would like what so that he could fine tune his sales pitch.
One day he figured out how to clone his eyes. He made billions of them and threw them up into the clouds. They drifted down like cottonwood seeds. Now he could watch what everyone was doing and figure out what they liked – sometimes even before they knew themselves.
When a couple who had just got married came by, he could talk about an expensive new type of coffee they wouldn’t have considered before. When they bought an apartment, he’d tell them all about appliances. When they got divorced, he’d have just the right brandy or ice cream ready.
One day a girl passed by, and he showed her lots of cute baby things. Her father was indignant: was Trickster trying to put ideas in her head? She was an innocent young girl, just a child; he should know, she was still living at home. It turned out, however, that Trickster knew more about her habits than her father did…
Some people started getting spooked by Trickster’s uncanny ability to know things about them they didn’t think he should. He apologized profusely and said it wouldn’t happen again. It didn’t: Trickster stopped talking about just the specific things someone would want. Instead he mentioned the things he knew they wanted, mixed in with among other things he was selling, seemingly at random. That worked even better.
Folks knew that Trickster was probably still up to no good, but they tried not to think about it. They loved the great deals they got from him and kept coming back.
Inspiration: Duhigg, C. (2012, February 15). How Companies Learn Your Secrets. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html
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