I view technology as know-how that changes our relationship to the world, rather than as merely tools or human-made artefacts. This perspective is influenced by Heidegger, who claimed that modern technology makes us see everything as resources to be optimized and exploited. I’ve been wondering whether other technologies also change our perspectives, but not in that specific way.
Hesiod’s Theogony (pronounced with a hard “g” as in polygon) describes the origins and genealogies of the Greek gods. [1] By analogy, I’ll use the term technogonies for stories that describe the origins of technology. In traditional myths, technologies come from the gods, who are usually benefactors. In modern stories, tech comes from inside society, although the stories are complicated and sometimes contested.
Jokes about organizations shed light on how we think of them as entities, so I asked some LLMs. Here are the best. (I occasionally crossed out some LLM verbiage and replaced it with my own.)
I’m intrigued by the relationship between ogregores and individuals, such as between employee groups and leaders. The usual assumption is that the CEO directs employees, but I suspect employees can direct the CEO, too. That is, employees and CEOs can form a principal-agent loop.
A friend who owns a New York City apartment told me that he’s only responsible for maintenance “from the paint in.” I feel like the paint, squeezed between the physical and mental forces inside my body, and the social and physical forces outside.
Here’s my latest stab at a definition of myth: Myths are widely known stories that frame how groups of people think about, and act in, the world.
I want myths to include contemporary narratives and not just ancient tales, and this description does that. I’ll unpack the new definition and then give a list of stories that qualify as myths.
John Anderson's WSJ review of ‘Wyatt Earp and the Cowboy War’ on Netflix highlights the collective/corporate considerations behind the individualist mythologizing of the Old West.
In a profile of swing-state Wisconsin where affordable housing is a growing concern with voters, the Wall Street Journal quotes Kayla Lange, who’s struggling to make ends meet, saying, “It’s gotten out of control, and I blame the people in charge.” The story notes that voters ranked housing as their second biggest concern when it comes to high prices—behind only groceries—in a July WSJ poll. The trouble is that the people in charge don’t have much influence on the problem. Ogregores may be a better body to blame and try to affect.
Charles Fréger’s Yokainoshima: Island of Monsters and Phyllis Galembo’s Mexico Masks Rituals got me thinking about how people in different cultures represent the monstrous. Since Moderns don’t believe in ghosts and demons, so we demonize people. Non-humanoid monsters are relatively rare and examples, especially dire serpents, often live in the uncanny valley avoided by robot designers.
There has been non-stop coverage of President Biden’s frailties since the debate fiasco, examining the motives, actions, and opinions of Biden, people in his inner circle, party operatives, and donors. I’ve started trying to understand, instead, what the Democratic Party elite is up to. Collective agents are largely ignored in our obsession with individuals.
In Demons: Mediators between gods and humans, Egyptian mythology inspired me to think about entities that liaised between people and ogregores. But where do ogregores live?
There are often several versions of the same myth or legend. Although the characters are the same, their attributes and motives can vary. Sometimes a character is a hero, other times a villain. The plots can differ, too. It’s a reminder that stories, and perhaps the reality they reflect, depends on who’s telling the story.
My post Heroes not ogregores lamented that a top-tier newspaper’s coverage of Detroit focused on celebrities rather than systems—aka individuals not ogregores. However, a mythological approach also veers perilously close to personalization.
I had hoped that Ben Cohen’s recent WSJ story on the revitalization of Detroit would help me think about whether a city is an ogregore. Instead, as usual, it focused on people rather than institutions, and one person in particular. I imagine it’s easier to write a newspaper piece on deadline if you only have to interview a couple of people rather than digging into the subtle dynamics and complicated history of a complex system.
My inability to perceive big tech companies (and other ogregores) as potent presences worries me. They have godlike powers, and yet I don’t experience them as such. To understand the consequences, I asked GPT-4 and Gemini-1.5 Pro for examples from mythology and folklore of people who didn't see supernatural beings, to their detriment. The pickings were rather slim.
I watched the first Evangelion movie over the weekend. It tells of humans using giant robots (aka mechas; they’re called Evangelions, or Evas for short) to battle mysterious giant alien entities called Angels. Teenage children are needed to pilot the mechas. This symbiosis reminded me of being old, and corporations.
Paul Diduch has asked why I use the term ogregore rather than just calling a corporation a corporation, or an organization. He may be right. Most, though perhaps not all, things I call ogregores are organizations. I’ll argue that the categories of ogregore and organization overlap but are not the same. Paul suggested that an ogregore might be an organization with an eerie agent-like effect; it might also distinguished by being more powerful than run-of-the-mill organizations.
Thinking about what I might want to see in a tech & myth conference/workshop has led me to a goal formulation that also speaks to what I'm looking for personally.
Our dreams are different every night, but there are patterns (cf. Marie-Louise von Franz, endnote [1]). Similarly, while corporate PR spin—and other ogregore stories—is slightly different every time, there are perhaps patterns that reveal their deep motivations. In other words, PR could be a way to access an ogregore’s “psyche,” if it has one.
When the University of Colorado Boulder’s quantum computer came online recently, a diagnostic core dump revealed unexpected data. It seems to be fragments from the 2028 annual report of the so-called Boulder Ogregore Observatory (BOO), an institution that does not (yet?) exist.
Parts of the corpus are unintelligible and reconstruction is ongoing. Physicists speculate that the Observatory stored its data on a successor to the recently inaugurated Boulder quantum computer. Time-entangled qubits allowed the archives to worm their way back to the present.
The Martians in H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1898) resemble ad-funded social media companies in some ways.
