Techies & Myth Part 2: Mythical entrepreneurs

In the second part of the series of posts about mythology and the tech industry, based on an email exchange with Petri Mähönen, I reflect on Apollo-Dionysus dynamics in tech entrepreneurs and their companies.

Techies & Myth Part 1: Apollo, Dionysus, and the Entrepreneurs

This post, and three more to come, aim to document a fascinating informal email discussion with Petri Mähönen in September 2020 about mythological ways of thinking about tech entrepreneurs and their companies. This was part of the on-going Tech & Myth project (see e.g. tech gods: Dec 2018, Jan 2019; project summaries: Jul 2020, Oct 2020). Massive thanks to Petri, and apologies for places where my paraphrases misunderstood or misrepresented him.

In the first post, I look at American digital entrepreneurs in the light of Nietzsche’s Apollo-Dionysus axis.

Elon Musk as Dionysus

I’ve been searching for tech entrepreneurs that channel the Trickster archetype. Some, like Elizabeth Holmes, resonated really well; others, like Elon Musk, fit at first, but I’ve had growing doubts. Once I started thinking about Apollo and Dionysus, though (cf. Tech Policy as Theater), Musk started making more sense.

Tech Policy as Theater

I’ve been using myth to think about tech, but Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy has inspired me to think about public policy as theater.

Categories as tentpoles

We love to think in dichotomies: us & them, up & down, good & bad, etc. They’re part of our cultural and cognitive furniture. I'm particularly susceptible to them. The problem is that binaries, and categorization in general, are often more distracting than useful. I’ve been trying to focus on what’s between the categories, and that got me thinking about tentpoles. 

Tech/Myth Project Snapshot: July 2020

In common parlance, to call something a myth is to damn it as a pernicious false belief. A few dusty scholars might take myth to mean a traditional, transcendental story that made sense of the world to a specific group of people. I am interested in myth not because I care about debunking illusions, or studying cultural history, but because we live in a mythical world. This post outlines my current thinking about the Tech & Myth project. 

A layer model of myth

Myth is part of a cloud of related concepts, each with a huge academic literature. As a first approximation, I think of them as arranged in two fuzzy and intersecting layers, with the lower-level concepts aggregating into the higher-level ones.

War historians debate myths

John Mosier's essay War Myths (2005) contends that myths "are believed because they provide us with coherent and convincing explanations of complex events." His paper is the opening volley in a debate with several colleagues that has helped me think further about the definition of myth, and the roles of logos, mythos and pathos in argumentation.

Objectivity, subjectivity and myth

In my recent post Counterparts to logos, I wrestled with the characteristics of logos and mythos-pathos: empiricism and logical proof vs. intuition, feelings, and experience. It occurs to me that the logos/mythos axis might align with the objective/subjective binary.

Counterparts to logos

A Talking Politics podcast about the challenges of political journalism in a deeply polarized age (“Facts vs Opinions,” June 4, 2020) increased my confusion about logos (reason, rationality) vs. mythos. While I’ve been puzzling over how profoundly logos-inflected tech reporting and policymaking seem to be, current events are swamping logos-based journalism with pathos (passion, emotion, sentiment). This post is groping towards ways of thinking about what’s going on today.

"Myth" in tech journalism

I think of myths as widely shared stories that societies use to make sense of the world, but for most people, most of the time, myth means a widely held but false belief (Oxford, sense 2). Over the week-end I made a quick inventory of what counts as tech myths on the internet, and the results helped me think about the semantics of the term.

Another Trickster Story

Here’s another technology-trickster story; the first one is here.

Trickster was very good at entertaining people. It was a great gig: he arranged for people to entertain each other, and they gave him credit for it.

Technology, conspiracies, and control

Kaitlyn Tiffany has a nice piece about “the great 5G conspiracy” in The Atlantic. I was intrigued by the link between feelings about technology and feelings of powerlessness.

A Trickster Story

I’ve been grousing that I can't find contemporary myths that seem to explain how technology operates. Petri Mähönen and Pam Heath independently encouraged me to come up with my own. Here’s a first attempt.

#5Gcorona: Pathos vs. Logos

It’s clear – as Martin Sims argued in a recent PolicyTracker editorial – that the cellular industry and its associated regulators and scientists have made a pig’s ear of the 5G/radiation issue. However, the 5G/COVID concern (e.g.  #5Gcorona) is just the latest installment in a long tale.