In common parlance, to call something a myth is to damn it as a pernicious false belief. A few dusty scholars might take myth to mean a traditional, transcendental story that made sense of the world to a specific group of people. I am interested in myth not because I care about debunking illusions, or studying cultural history, but because we live in a mythical world. This post outlines my current thinking about the Tech & Myth project.
The forces
High tech, and especially digital technology, is pervasive, powerful, and enigmatic. Pervasive: we can stay in touch with friends and breaking news anywhere we go; advertisements follow us around from a web site on one device to an app on another. Powerful: social media can destroy a career, or elect an outsider; on-line apps can keep life going through a pandemic, and put a billion people under state surveillance.
But despite being in our faces all the time, it’s enigmatic: It is very hard to grasp how it all works, why it’s being built, and how it’s changing society. We cannot see the marketplaces in which our attention – itself invisible – is bought and sold. The algorithms that determine the search results, news stories or advertisements we see are intangible, and the networks that deliver the immaterial bits that constitute them are themselves inconspicuous or imperceptible. Technology is easy to ignore – until it turns our lives upside down.
Digital technology is just one example of such greater-than-human forces (which I’ll call “the forces,” for short). Most high tech, such as the biotechnology that underpins modern medicine, the materials science that puts supercomputers in our palms, and the world-spanning energy industry, is similarly mysterious. And technology is just one element of even larger phenomena like capitalism and the modern state. However, I am limiting my attention to digital technology in order to make the problem less intractable.
Living in a mythical world
Pervasive, powerful, enigmatic: that sounds like the gods of ancient mythology. While no two people use “myth” to mean exactly the same thing, it has something to do with influential stories about things beyond ourselves. It is easy to find mythical themes in stories about technology, from Frankenstein to Star Wars to Ex Machina. It’s easy to see mythic archetypes in tech news: tricksters (Cambridge Analytica, Amazon and its vendors, Google’s search favoring its own services), questing heroes (Steve Jobs, Elon Musk), and scapegoats (Huawei in the U.S., les GAFA in Europe).
We are still living in a mythical world. By that I mean two things: (1) we are all subject to pervasive, powerful and enigmatic forces – the things that myths used to purport to explain; and (2) we all hold beliefs that profoundly shape our thought and behavior – aka myths, in the pejorative or positive sense.
We are not the same as the ancients, of course. For example, we use science rather than myths to explain hallucinations, thunder, the turning of the seasons, and the beginning of the universe. However, logic and empiricism fail to explain many things, such as why we should believe science in the first place, or how to make sense of society and our place in it. For that we turn to constructs variously called worldviews, ideologies, paradigms, or social imaginaries – what I will call the mythical.
The ancient Greeks sometimes distinguished between mythos and logos. By the time of Plato, mythos had come to mean not just “story” but also “unlikely story,” and logos had come to mean not just “account” but also “rational account” or even “theory.” For Aristotle, logos was one three modes of persuasion; the others were appeals to pathos (emotions, feelings) and ethos (authority, credibility). In Christian tradition, one finds logos contrasted, and combined, with sophia (wisdom).
I am asserting that logos (logic, rationality, reason, science, …) is not sufficient for describing or living in the modern world. Subjectivity, emotion, feeling, and intuition are just as important. This bears saying, since most if not all scholarship and expert management tries to turn problems into -ologies, that is, tries to treat them in terms of reason. Science does not help in resolving ethical dilemmas – moral questions are deeply subjective, with stark differences between cultures. Indeed, technology has a knack for creating dilemmas; for example, encryption protects privacy, but complicates law enforcement.
Mythic narratives have at least two important functions: To name the forces that people feel they are subject to; and to illustrate the nature of these forces through stories about how they interact with each other, and with us. A third possible function is to give meaning to our lives in the presence of these forces.
Myths help us think. They can pull us away from real-world particularities and personalities so that we can see the bigger patterns. They are a form of abstraction, just like scientific models, but they complement scientific rationality by using unconscious mental patterns.
Research Questions
Two avenues of enquiry open up:
- What are our myths? In other words, are there contemporary stories about technology that have the same power for us as Prometheus stealing fire, Hephaestus and his automata, or Loki and the treasures of the gods, had for the ancients? Are there modern folktales as powerful as those about tricksters like Reynard and Coyote, or magical mills like the Sampo?
- How do we (can we, should we) operate in a mythical world? Narrowed down to my chosen scope, this becomes: Can taking a mythological view can help us to understand and govern digital technology better?
I'll close with a few thoughts about each area.
1. Contemporary myths?
My work with Rachel Anderson so far suggests that contemporary mythical stories (in the sense of stories that make sense of the world, not widespread false beliefs) are hard to find. Most “technology myth” articles debunk false beliefs – influential beliefs, certainly, otherwise an exposé would not be needed, but not explanatory narratives. Some anecdotes are widespread enough to be used as touchstones and morality tales, like the Cambridge Analytica saga, and “Target and the pregnant teen,” but they don’t have aura of transcendence that I associate with myth.
I suspect that our secular age not only discounts religion, but mythos in general; logos reigns supreme. Our culture, or at least its managerial class, is very uncomfortable with emotion-driven explanation. For example, while there are news stories with emotive headlines (“Will robots take our jobs?”), the accompanying body text is dispassionate and analytical. Even passionately held beliefs about harmful technology, such as electromagnetic radiation, are conveyed using scientific language and justified by invoking academic research.
2. Governing in a mythical world?
An obvious approach is to use the images of mythology (such as tricksters and heroes), and the techniques of myth-influenced psychology (such as archetypes) to analyze the forces at play. Mythical prototypes offer paradigms for how cultures have experienced and made sense of forces in the past, and thus offer clues of how we can or will respond to the forces in our own times.
Cultures change, of course, but human nature changes less. Therefore, a psychological approach (which is essentially an argument by analogy, i.e. we can see the forces acting on us in the same way we experience psychological forces operating inside us) can help us understand and predict how publics and leaders will respond to technologies. Such an approach would look at narrative tropes and powerful images rather than fact patterns or data. It would seek underlying patterns, and not worry too much about different levels of resolution, like technologies, industries, companies, and individuals. Archetypes are likely to be useful. As mental images found across cultures, they seem to reflect widely shared ways of being, and of understanding the world. Examples include the hero, caregiver, and scapegoat; tricksters seem particularly relevant to technology, given their smarts, amorality, and social ambiguity.
More generally, one could explore how cultures have used myth to cope with technological change. In some cases, change has occurred inside the culture, e.g. the Industrial Revolution in Europe, and the decay of the elites’ information monopolies around the world in recent decades. In other cases, the change has been imposed as part of colonial expansion, such as in Africa, Asia, and the American West. Drilling down to a particular sub-culture, one could also investigate how stories have influenced technology policy. In spectrum, the garage door saga is often a subtext of U.S. government attitudes to unlicensed devices; the failed prosecution of David LaMacchia led to the NET Act; Edward Snowden’s revelations may have influenced European attitudes to information privacy; and the FBI’s attempts to unlock an Apple iPhone recovered from a terrorist shooter has figured in debates about device encryption.
Update, October 19, 202: posted an updated snapshot
References
Awad, E., Dsouza, S., Kim, R., Schulz, J., Henrich, J., Shariff, A., Bonnefon, J.-F., & Rahwan, I. (2018). The Moral Machine experiment. Nature, 563(7729), 59–64. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-018-0637-6
Chappell, S. G. (2009). Logos and mythos in Plato. In C. Emlyn-Hughes (Ed.), Myth in The Greek and Roman World (A330), pp. 249–259. Open University Press. https://www.academia.edu/10450689/_Mythos_and_Logos_in_Plato_
Finley, K. (2015, October 7). Thank (Or Blame) Snowden for Europe’s Big Privacy Ruling. Wired. https://www.wired.com/2015/10/tech-companies-can-blame-snowden-data-privacy-decision/
Frequencies conflict with garage openers. (2013, June 21). Www.Army.Mil. https://www.army.mil/article/106123/frequencies_conflict_with_garage_openers
No Electronic Theft Act. (n.d.). Wikipedia. Retrieved July 12, 2020, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Electronic_Theft_Act
Partenie, C. (2018). Plato’s Myths. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2018). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2018/entries/plato-myths/
Trope. (n.d.). TV Tropes. Retrieved July 12, 2020, from https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TROPE
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