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.
The recent Tune Tech episode on Twenty Thousand Hertz covered the history of distortion in popular music. That got me thinking about the use of distortion in other media like UI design and film.
To many people, moral considerations apply to any sentient being, e.g., to animals. Ogregores probably aren’t sentient, but do they have moral status as moral agents or moral patients?[1] I’m skeptical that they’re moral agents but intrigued by the possibility that they might be moral patients.
