The Ogregods: An Ogregore Pantheon

I’ve invented a pantheon that represents collective social agents, i.e., ogregores—the “ogregods.” 

Loki as Fixer

I’ve come to to doubt the universal description of the Norse god Loki as a trickster. Perhaps “fixer” would fit him just as well, or better.

Technogonies

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.

Myth definitions

This post is a rolling inventory of definitions and descriptions of myth – mine, and those of others. The date on which an item is added to the list is given in italics, in parentheses. I’ll move it to the top of the blog every time I update it.

Myths: widely known framing stories

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.

Polymorphic Myths

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.

Demons: Mediators between gods and humans

The demons of ancient Egypt, I learned today, were liminal figures that mediated between gods and humans. It got me wondering about entities that liaised between people and ogregores.

Myth’s anthropomorphic heel

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.

Not seeing gods

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.

Animism & Ogregores

A recent conversation about whether there are AI gods prompted thoughts of animism, defined by Britannica as “belief in innumerable spiritual beings concerned with human affairs and capable of helping or harming human interests.” Perhaps, I thought, it’s better to think of ogregores as nature sprits than gods.

Do egregores play?

Applying Betteridge's law of headlines to this blog’s title, it’s a fair bet that egregores (distinct non-physical entities that arise from a groups of people with shared motivations) do not play. And yet…

Bubble Inc's Dream

We watched the animated movie Ron’s Gone Wrong (IMDb, Wikipedia) over the weekend. It occurred to me that one could read it as a dream in the mind of Bubble, the mega-company that makes Ron and all the other B-bots.

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.

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. 

Gods talking past each other

I’ve been analyzing the recent GAFA hearing in Congress (Online Platforms and Market Power, Part 6: Examining the Dominance of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google), hoping to find evidence for my theory that one can treat technologies and other social forces mythologically.