Fire and Earth: The Doomed Union of Nex and Daim

Another ogregore story, this time about a failed romance. Not a trickster story, like MoeV Unmasked or Wezl's Ghosts.

MoeV Unmasked: An ogregore story

Here’s the second installment of ogregore stories, this one about deception and regulatory capture. It’s another trickster story, just like the first one about Wezl’s Ghosts.

Wezl’s Ghosts: An ogregore story

 Marissa Grunes has encouraged me to develop mythic stories about ogregores. Here’s my first attempt, about a trickster who used ghosts to fool their ruler.

Ogregore fairy tales

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.

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. 

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.

Coronavirus stories

COVID-19 is a convenient source of widely shared stories that people are using to make sense of something important. They've help me think about what I mean by 'stories'.

Frankenstein at the FCC

A full-text search for “Frankenstein” on ECFS (the repository for official records in the FCC's docketed proceedings from 1992 to the present) on 22 Feb 2020 returned 91 results. I was surprised the number was that small.

A little political history story

From the Talking Politics podcast episode Are We Losing Faith in Democracy? (Jan 29, 2020), here’s a nice little example of how stories are told in political economics.

Narrative in economics: Shiller’s stories

I was excited by the title of Robert Shiller’s new book Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events (2019), but disappointed to find that he defines “narrative” much more widely than the stories I'm looking for, and was hoping to find. Overall, though, I think his meaning is close to my interest in myths: stories spread by word-of-mouth that shape how society imagines itself.