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Comment by unsrsly | Hacker News Reader

A rough summary: narratives are a form of lossy compression that enable us to make sense of events so that we can plan actions and coordinate with others. In the past, influential and powerful individuals would compress events into a Narrative (basically an authoritative version of history) which although it might have been "false" in some objective sense, and probably oppressed certain groups of people, nevertheless enabled social consensus. But today, much more of what happens is recorded (on video, on social media, etc) into what the author calls the Database. This makes it easy for anyone to point out the flaws in the Narrative. As a result, there is conflict over which of many narrative options should become the authoritative Narrative. This can play out in various ways like censorship (deleting/blocking entries from the Database), rejecting certain items from the Database as being not true, and even faking entries in the Database.

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"Lossy compression" is a succinct description. Humans, constrained by finite time and cognitive resources, cannot understand reality at its full resolution. Narratives are compact maps of the territory.

We're living in a second Gutenberg moment. I think that epistemic ecosystems, like biological ones, have information carrying capacities — the aggregate ability of its members to produce, exchange, and use information. We all live in one or more such ecosystems. Think: liberal university-educated Bay Area millennials in technology and the kind of information they produce and exchange within that ecosystem. When the information carrying capacity is exceeded, the ecosystem becomes unstable (Narrative collapse) and has to stabilise by splitting into smaller ecosystems that can support coherent, authoritative Narratives.

I think it's useful to look at the first Gutenberg moment. The mass production of books caused an information explosion that exceeded the information carrying capacity of the Catholic ecosystem and resulted in its fracture into smaller Catholic and Protestant ecosystems that can exert enough power to control Narratives (new capacities). We can see a similar scaled-up phenomenon today where countless novel virtual communities and ideological factions that don't conform to the traditional Left-Right dichotomy emerge and offer people various new, coherent maps to the vastly expanded information territory.

Thanks for the summary.

I don't think that availability of more data than what the mainstream narrative can handle in a coherent way is new, nor the existence of people having an inclination to find them and get into trouble due to their will to point to such incongruous "facts".

The main difference, to my mind, is that we now have more direct connections between people all around the world, so the laymen direct inter-influence is potentially greater – although mainstream propaganda also gained much power in width, depth and granularity in the same time.

Yes, there are a larger diversity of data easily accessible with the internet. It doesn't necessarily mean there is a proportionally larger interest in looking at them, let alone time to consult them, digest, and synthesize.

And yet, if efforts to curtail information would stop, a consensual narrative might form. It has happened before.

When?

I'm trying to think of some good historical examples of Narrative Collapse before and all I'm coming up with is the Gutenberg Bible and the Protestant Reformation. If that _is_ the pattern, then I really hope it doesn't take the %40+ death toll that the 30-years-war inflicted on Central Europe.

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