I love thinking about the power of storytelling on the world around us. Stories are how our realities are constructed, managed, and if you are fortunate, evolved. Stories are how we craft the future, maintain the present, and reshape the past to be what we want. Stories are how markets are made, torn down, and remade again. Stories have always been essential to how business gets done, but in a virtualized web based landscape, stories are how we allocate space, visualize what is happening, and capture the attention of the masses.
Storytelling is how technologists shape our vision of what is possible on the web. Releasing a sustained barrage of stories around how blockchain will transform every industry, artificial intelligence will shape our lives, and how the future will be completely automated. Storytelling is how technologists allocate memory space, until technology catches up to our visions of what the future will hold–real or perceived. We are constantly allocating space that may never become reality, and ever actually put to use, taking advantage of the short term, random access memory of the tech fanboys, and mainstream technophile. Repeatedly capturing their attention with what might be, could be, and occasionally what will be.
When I was growing up, a movie called the Neverending Story captured my imagination. In this movie the great evil was called the nothing, which was consuming everything, killing our imagination. I see market based, technological storytelling as the nothing most days. Capturing our imaginations with fictional stories that are delivered as truths, and when they allocate memory and begin burrowing, they begin digitizing our memories–reducing our attention span, encouraging memory reallocation, reprogramming, until everything is new, everything is wonderful, even though very little is ever fully realized. A technological nothing virus spread with the help fictional stories, sold to us as reality via marketing and advertising engines.
Storytelling isn’t bad. Believing in fantasies isn’t bad. It is when storytelling becomes digitized in the service of markets, and we can’t tell truth from fiction, that we begin to lose our way. It isn’t that artificial intelligence is bad, it is the lies, half truths, and fantasies that get told to us so that we can be sold AI voodoo, is when it becomes bad. Blockchain isn’t bad, it is the scams, smoke and mirrors, and hiding of our dark untrustworthy beliefs rooted in our financial system, that are dangerous. Automation isn’t bad, it is using automation to scare, hurt, and manipulate the masses when it comes to labor, surveillance, and digital exploitation, that it becomes so damaging. AI, Blockchain, automation, and other technological spectacles are being used to capture your attention, program your future, distract your present, and erase your past, through malicious storytelling.
90% of what you are being told about AI, Blockchain, and automation right now isn’t truthful. It is only meant allocate space in your imagination, so that at the right time you can be sold something, and distracted while your data, privacy, and security can be exploited, or straight up swindled out from under you. Many people who are pushing forward the technological nothing truly believe that AI, Blockchain, and automation can do what they are promising, and just want to allocate mindshare until reality catches up with their storytelling–with no accountability regarding if it is every truly delivered, because we’ll already have moved on to the next story, and the next allocation of memory for the the next nothing. A perpetual technological nothing, programming, and reprogramming itself in your imagination through storytelling. Getting more dreamlike with each cycle, eliminating our ability for critical thinking, to remember the past, and define your own future.
