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.
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.
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.
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.
