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.
