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The New Myth-Making: From Campfires to Algorithms
The collision between our Stone Age brains and digital-speed mythology. And how we will survive.
At a summer BBQ the other night, a Canadian ritual deeply rooted in society, a fella was explaining in great detail why putting a wet phone in rice will fix it. It doesn’t. It’s just a myth we collectively decided is true. Because we feel it should work. Then he showed me a video short about how eating ice cubes burns calories. That doesn’t work either.
What it made me think about is how we’re in the fasted time of myth-making in human history. Where a single tweet or viral video can become a gospel truth faster than it can be fact-checked. And myth-making is one of the most important ways all humans use to make sense of the world and the realities we create.
It is the same cognitive machinery our ancestors used hundreds of thousands of years ago to survive by creating myths and around creation stories and protective spirits. And we had time to digest those myths and build on them. Not anymore.
Today, our ancient brain systems are trying to make sense of hallucinations from LLMs (ChatGPT, Claude etc.), algorithmic feeds designed to smack our brains with fight/flight responses, deepfakes and conspiracy theories. We are…
