A History of Narrative Environments

The narrative environments described have only been inhabited because they have been useful to their inhabitants. Fluency in the mass media enables the fluent to better convey social signals amongst each other, etc.

Each of these prior narrative environments has featured some abstraction to mask the role of wealth and power in shaping small scale, mundane events (e.g. per interpersonal transaction, per call-response joke).

Any new narrative layer involving person-AI interactions will probably need to find a suitable mask to overlay the basic financial elements to get takeup outside of futurists and the tech-savvy. Lacking such a mask is why web 2.0 forum and wiki models had to settle on an overtly non-commercial paradigm.