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Why Story, Not Science, is Our Best Hope for Surviving 2020
The case for choosing fiction over data and identity politics
We know a lot of stuff. And there’s so much more stuff, continuously generated, some of it brilliant, some of it noise. We’re living in a zettabyte era (a zettabyte equals 1 sextillion bytes or 1000 exabytes — 1 billion billion bytes).
We also live in a culture that values knowing ourselves (nod to Socrates), and a need to know others, which gets sticky and even painful when people we think we know say and do things outside our expectations. How dare they?
The problem isn’t a lack of knowledge, it’s deeper than that.
Too often we conflate knowledge with insight. We mistake knowing more about someone — their age, their tastes and interests, their politics, gender, race, religion — with insight about the complex person they are.
Insight literally means looking inward, hard enough when it comes to self-examination. And impossible to transcend our own container of a self to look inside of another person.
The Internet in all its zettabyte glory cannot help us here.
We cannot — and may never — know what it’s like to experience life as someone else does. With virtual reality and AI in general, more…
