Spiderman romance: When the archetype drives the avatar

I’d been thinking recently about my exchange with Petri Mähönen around mythical entrepreneurs when I came across a comment about successive pairs of leading actors in Spiderman films falling for each other in real life.

Tech & Mythology Project Snapshot – Nov 2021

It’s time to revisit what the Tech & Mythology project means for me. There were previous snapshots in July and October 2020, and most recently February 2021.

Andy Clark and extended minds

Mark Gross shared Larissa MacFarquhar’s 2018 New Yorker profile of philosopher Andy Clark with me. That prompted some thoughts about minds and embodiment.

Glitching the invisible

I’ve been trying to imagine the invisible world created by internet apps: something like a video that glitches, showing what lies behind; or visualizing what a dog’s nose “sees” (something I think I saw on the BBC decades ago).

O-gregores (aka orgregores): Perhaps the aliens are already here

If my speculation that some organizations are emergent, conscious entities in their own right, then super-intelligent aliens may have been among us for some time. 

Scious organizations

 Many things are said to take on a life of their own: corporations, movements, projects, urban legends, accusations, and so on. (For sample sentences, see The Free Dictionary, Longman, and Merriam-Webster.) I’m going to take this literally and assume that human enterprises – notably digital technologies – are not just alive but also conscious. In this way digital tech is a greater-than-human mythological force, that is, a god.

Journalism schools: An egregious egregore

I keep coming back to David Simon’s observation that postmodern institutions like the police department, drug economy, political structures, and school administrations, are today’s Olympian forces. The Wall Street Journal reported recently that US journalism schools leave graduates with hefty student loans; the schools seem to me to be an oblivious if not malevolent deity.

Facebook's character

 The Wall Street Journal is running a series of articles about Facebook. A couple of days ago Jeff Horwitz described a secret elite of celebrities, politicians and other high-profile users that get special treatment. This made me wonder: if Facebook were a character in a play, how would one describe it?

Poot stories

I’ve been asking people for their favorite stories, and Susan T recalled Tove Jansson's Moomin story in which "the smallest of the small creatures" was asked if it knew a story. At last it volunteered this: 

"There was a wood rat called Poot."

That’s about as elemental as a story gets, I think: it’s just character.

AI by any other name would not smell as sweet

Christopher Mims reports that some experts working on AI think that the moniker “fuels confusion and hype of the sort that led to past ‘AI winters’ of disappointment” (“Why Artificial Intelligence Isn’t Intelligent,” WSJ, July 31, 2021). I believe the terminology is responsible for the success as well as misperceptions of AI, and that winters are no bad thing.

When narratives aren't stories: Narratives of the Future Narratives Lab

The title of Daniel Stanley’s essay “The hidden power in the stories Big Tech sells us” promises narrative, but it’s really about ideology and rhetoric. (Stanley’s own ideology was more conspicuous than the narratives he ascribed to Big Tech.) It’s an excellent example of when stories aren’t stories but statements of belief.

Wrangling gods

We’re surrounded by (and permeated by) gods, defined as non-human forces that profoundly affect people. How should we manage them? Perhaps religious traditions dealing with gods can help us regulate technologies, the greater-than-human force I’m currently looking at.

Mosco and Myth

I’ve been reading Chapter 4 of Vincent Mosco’s 2017 book Becoming Digital: Toward a Post-Internet Society. I’ve been strongly influenced by his work, starting with The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace (2004). This piece made me wonder whether or how myths different from beliefs, and why so many tech myths are either utopian or apocalyptic.

Gartner’s Hype Cycle as myth

Most people in business know about Gartner’s hype cycle, many of them believe it, and some act on it, for example through corporate investment decisions and buying Gartner’s services. It’s a story (more accurately, a trope) that meets my know/believe/act criterion for myth. 

Dionysus on Wall Street

The GameStop saga was a big story in February 2021. It’s often told as David against Goliath, but I think there’s a deeper pattern that reflects the role of technology.

Research Questions for the Tech & Mythology Project

 My February project snapshot listed some of the questions the Tech & Mythology project is asking. S. V., a researcher I met through the ATLAS Institute, challenged me to document my research questions. After peeling several layers off the onion, here’s what I came up with.

Cyber-doom stories

Tobias Burgers alerted me to Sean Lawson’s 2013 paper “Beyond Cyber-Doom: Assessing the Limits of Hypothetical Scenarios in the Framing of Cyber-Threats” (DOI). Lawson’s article helped me further understand the servant/master narrative that seems to be a tropes of technology stories.

Tech & Mythology Project Snapshot – Feb 2021

 Here’s another update to the Tech & Mythology project outline. See previous snapshots from October and July 2020 for background.

Two 5G Stories

There are at least two 5G myths (that is, stories a community knows, most believe, and many act on): the industry hype, which I’ll call the 5G Vision, and the belief that 5G damages health, which I’ll call 5G EMF/Coronavirus. Technology is the protagonist in both – the hero in one, and the villain in the other. 

"Know, Believe, Act" Stories

Since “myth” has negative connotations for most of us (“stupid, false things other people believe”), I’ve started talking about socially significant stories instead – that is, stories that everyone in a group knows; that many believe; and that some act upon.

What Americans Fear

Technology is awesome – in the 16th century sense of arousing or inspiring awe, something that fills someone with reverential fear, wonder, or respect (OED). As I’ve argued in an earlier post, digital tech is powerful, pervasive and mysterious. So why aren’t people more afraid of it? Before trying to answer that question, here is some survey data about what Americans say they’re afraid of.