Originally Published April 4, 2024

“We shrank our ideas to fit on pages sewn in a sequence that was then glued between cardboard stops. Books are good at telling stories and bad at guiding us through knowledge that bursts out in every conceivable direction, as all knowledge does when we let it. But now the medium of our daily experiences—the internet—has the capacity, the connections, and the engine needed to express the richly chaotic nature of the world.”

David Weinberger quoted in Jarvis, Jeff. The Gutenberg Parenthesis (p. 231). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how technology has transformed my writing. When I refer to “my writing,” I’m talking about constructing linear narratives like this one that are the product of print age thinking. Today I want to consider the possibility that this method of expression does not capture the world of ideas and knowledge exposed by the internet.

I just finished reading Jeff Jarvis‘s excellent Gutenberg Parenthesis. In it, he relates the story of how print shapes societies, and how this is ending. One of the key points at the end that he makes going off of Psychologist Alex Rosenberg’s research is that we have a natural disposition toward linear storytelling. “Humans became proficient at predicting the immediate behavior of other animals and humans, which led their literate descendants to believe they could not only predict behavior in the present and future but also explain it in the past, in history. (p. 229). Print reinforces the narrative of the hero’s journey.

We are all on our own hero’s journey in our own minds. Humans are biologically predisposed to believe in pathways. School reinforces this tendency. We talk about learning pathways, career pathways, and life journeys, as if they have a beginning, middle, and end. The teleology of our lives does invariably end in death, but that doesn’t mean there is any logic to what happens before then.

Print segments those journeys into chapters, and, like military promotion, there is an expectation of an upward trend. Marketing reinforces this through endless advertising promising a route to the good life. We condemn political leaders for a lack of progress (although we often struggle to define the term). The stock market punishes CEOs when companies do not grow at a predicted rate.

Attempts to marry this with educational progress have often been disastrous. Education is particularly guilty of chaptering itself. The whole point of K-12 education is to advance to the next chapter, which is higher education. The whole point of higher education is to get a degree to advance to the next chapter of employment. Skipping chapters results in punishment. You are not qualified for a job, because you do not have the appropriate piece of paper that shows you completed the requisite chapter. Life is far from a Choose Your Own Adventure Book.

Once you have a job or, better yet, a career, your goal is to advance within that career along a predictable path. Employers and HR departments trying to understand your story view interruptions or side journeys with suspicion. Everyone needs to advance from employee to manager to senior manager to director to executive director, etc. if they hope to get to the presidency.

Learning has a beginning, middle, and end. Money drives this, and so do accountability paradigms. When we write history, as Jarvis points out, we want to turn it into a coherent narrative instead of a chaotic series of events. When we write our own history, we feel compelled to do the same.

I am well-versed in storytelling. As a writer, you’re forced into linear models of storytelling. The expectations are the same if you are teaching. Photography is different. It’s storytelling all about taking the complexity of the world and simplifying it.

Right now, we’re looking for AI to tell stories as well. When the chaos of reality creates “hallucinations,” we look at that as a storytelling failure, but humans also routinely hallucinate stories that only make sense to them. The only actual difference is that AI is still struggling to make sense of the world we’ve long since “rationalized.” We’ve created the illusion of sense in our efforts to create stories that the current crop of generative large language models cannot match. I’m not sure they’ll ever get there.

Therefore, we should not push them in that direction. That is not a good use of their capabilities. Instead of trying to force them to teach us new, coherent stories, we should use them to better understand the chaotic nature of our own stories.

Large language models have exposed the inadequacy of our storytelling capabilities by shining a mirror on ourselves. We just haven’t realized that yet.

My story is a good example of a nonlinear pathway. Over the last few years, I have struggled to define myself. I don’t fit neatly into any pathway. My story encompasses technology, teaching, creating learning spaces, designing educational pathways, mapping knowledge, and creative expression.

Deep crosscurrents of visualization, communication, project management, and creative problem-solving cut across all these pathways. One of these pathways by itself would make sense to a person focused on a linear career path. (As an experiment, I asked ChatGPT to write bios of me using just the information on the About Me page on ideaspaces.net.)

My career forms a scatter diagram of data points and many linear pathways. I’ve tried to get around this by creating a conceptual map of my career and work, but that doesn’t seem to register with people used to looking for a linear pathway, represented by a standard CV or resumé.

I know many people who climbed a more traditional career ladder but found themselves stuck in a pathway that may not make sense to them anymore. That’s because life is a scatter diagram of experiences, not a set of rails. It is only our narratives that make it seem linear.

As Jarvis points out in his book, this tension between the end of the book and the start of distributed knowledge threatens a whole range of institutions. Education is close to the top of that list, but the world of work will also become far more unpredictable as time goes on. The tyranny of the linear story will hurt more and more people as their pathways become disrupted by the realities of the world.

As humans, we crave certainty. In a world of uncertainty, characterized by a massive flow of information, we are led astray by those promising a level of certainty that they are incapable of delivering. This tendency is dangerous to a democracy because it leads to demagoguery based on faith. Democracy depends on recognizing complexity and coming to terms with competing narratives.

We need to embrace chaos instead of ignoring it or trying to shove it into linear stories. Linear stories will always have their place because they conform to deep-rooted human psychological traits. Our rational minds, however, must recognize the irrationality of this approach to organizing knowledge.

A good first step to this would be through the creation of knowledge maps. AI has been pretty good at illuminating the shortcomings of our mental approaches to the complexity of the world. Instead of expecting to turn that teleological construct into something linear, we should instead lean into its capabilities to strip away preconceptions and false pathways.

We can build augmented intelligence tools to help us map connections between human narratives instead of trying to force it to create even more artificial narratives. In this role, it becomes a partner in our storytelling and not a potential replacement. It augments our intelligence instead of artificializing it. It makes us stronger, not weaker.