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.
The Essay
The essay is a report on the online event “Escape from Humanity: the narratives behind Big Tech” (video) organized by the Future Narratives Lab, which Stanley runs.
The first few paragraphs establish the essentially non-narrative definition of story used in the piece:
- “the companies aspire to present themselves”
- “the ideas they propagate”
- “origin stories of founders in garages”
- “cultural narratives and ideologies”
- “public narratives they deploy”
Thus, narrative is used here in the sense of Merriam-Webster’s definition 1b, “a way of presenting or understanding a situation or series of events that reflects and promotes a particular point of view or set of values,” rather than definition 1a, “something that is narrated : story, account.” This parallels a similar pair of meanings for story: Merriam-Webster’s 1b is “a statement regarding the facts pertinent to a situation in question,” while 1a is “an account of incidents or events.”
The narrative attributed to Big Tech companies portrays them as claiming that they are future-oriented; that they bring clean, beneficial progress; are enablers rather than principals; and shouldn’t be burdened with regulation. They propose that individuals rather than the state should take responsibility for personal wellbeing. Technological progress is framed as inevitable.
The absence of stories (i.e., characters experiencing events unfolding in a setting) is striking. No stories are told in the piece. A few are alluded to briefly: garage start-ups, the Wild West, and the San Francisco gold rush. In the video at timecode 10:00, Kanta Dihal, one of the event speakers, talks about “the themes of the robot rebellion, so the Terminator narrative,” as if everyone knows and agrees what it is (they are?), and what it means.
Daniel Stanley’s own narrative is implied by his antagonistic depiction of Big Tech. He sees himself as a warrior in a struggle between good and evil, with Big Tech companies as the forces of darkness. Big Tech is greedy, manipulative, shady, deceitful, unaccountable, and a threat to our collective well-being. The essay seems to be informed by critical theory; the approach is normative rather than descriptive, and the goal is to “provide the basis for building critiques and arguments” against Big Tech. Since stories are effective tools of persuasion, I was surprised by their absence.
Stories and belief
Telling stories, or just alluding to them, give us some reassurance that our beliefs are correct. Their content gives an observer access to what somebody’s beliefs are and how they are supported. They are important to me since they provide evidence for imaginaries, beliefs, and ideologies. [1]
Social studies papers sometimes mention but rarely discuss stories.[2] Terms like discourse, narrative, ideology, and imaginary are the preferred terms to describe and explain societal (and individual) beliefs. In my experience, however, scholars assert what an ideology or imaginary is without providing much evidence beyond their own wisdom and the claims of of other scholars. Stories (and surveys) are third party evidence – hence my fondness for mythographers, folklorists, and anthropologists (and quant sociologists).
Telling stories indicates that the author feels the need to bolster their claims. The absence of stories suggests an absence of doubt. When stories aren’t explicitly used to support an ideology, the speaker has no doubt that something is the case. They don’t feel the need to explain what something is and how it came about. Hence, they don’t have to tell a story about it.
Stories themselves function in paradoxical ways (h/t William Kuskin): they help produce clear meanings when there’s uncertainly (“the moral of the story is”), but they also undermine certainty and acknowledge ambiguity.
If there are stories, a belief system is alive. Stories are a sign of flux, ambiguity, doubt – the possibility of multiple interpretations. Living, growing stories are common in conspiracy thinking; examples of still-evolving narratives include “satanic pedophile left-wing elites,” “unexplained sightings are alien spacecraft,” and “vaccines cause disease, and the pharma-medical establishment knows this.”
If stories are referred to but not told, they still have some animating role, be it as explanation or exhortation. Examples in current US political discourse are “George Floyd” and “stolen election”. However, merely referring to stories rather than telling them obscures the fact that a story can be understood in many ways. Just pointing to a story is a way of hiding ambiguity, or perhaps a sign that for the speaker and their community, there no longer is any ambiguity.
I believe that when stories are no longer told, a belief system has ossified. Everything’s been fixed and decided, everyone agrees, nobody doubts.
There are stories (alive, dead, or zombies) in the digital tech space, too, of course. “Big Tech is watching you to make more money by manipulating your mind” is still evolving, as is “Big Tech hates conservatives and silences them.” The “hackers are out to get you” story keeps being told in new ways, though it tends to be limited to the expert sub-culture; same for “tech companies undermine your privacy.” The stories that underlie claims that companies are like railroad monopolies, or liberals are communist conspirators, are lifeless. “Network neutrality,” a pointer to the claim that large companies want to filter internet content to make more money, or that big-government liberals want to stifle innovation, is still stumbling around moaning unhappily but nobody’s destroyed its brain yet.
Notes
[1] William Kuskin alerted me to Louis Althusser’s definition of ideology in "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" (1970): “Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.” In A Secular Age (2007), Charles Taylor describes a social imaginary as “the ways in which [people] imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations which are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images which underlie these expectations.”
[2] For example, Charles Taylor notes in A Secular Age that he uses the term “imaginary” since the way ordinary people imagine their social surroundings “is often not expressed in theoretical terms, it is carried in images, stories, legends, etc.” However, he gives few if any stories.
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