The Interfaces of Mythology <> Communication & Collaboration
The storytelling species, how stories manifest, and the relationship between communication and collaboration
Thoughts on the interfaces of human mythology
Yuval Harari's book Sapiens communicated something complex to people about themselves that is beautifully simple.
He asked, "why is it that homo sapiens are the most dominant species on Earth?"
The answer he posited contained two primary layers.
First, homo sapiens are more dominant than all other species because they are the only species capable of collaborating with flexibility and in large numbers.
How animals collaborate
But what allowed homo sapiens to collaborate, both flexibly and in large numbers?
The second layer of Harari's answer to the original question at hand is that our unique collaboration capability is a function of our unique capacity for language. We are capable of language that is subjective, rather than objective.
What's he getting at here; why is subjective language so differentiating?
The main difference between objective language and subjective language is that the capacity for subjectivity introduces an exceptionally powerful social dynamic: the ability to tell a story...which also means the ability to disagree, the ability to only partially agree, the ability to lie, gossip, and ultimately, the ability to mythologize stories and ideas over time. It is this ability to tell stories that serves as the underlying software of an exceptionally social creature.
Harari might agree with the simplification that homo sapien is the storytelling species, and it is through our stories and myths that we derive our ability to collaborate flexibly and in large numbers.
To make this more concrete, Harari asks readers to think about the mythologies that appear self-evident in our lives, but without which, life as we know it would break down. For example, a nation like the United States is a story, a constitution, that became mythologized over time because people were consistently willing to die for the story's continuation.
What does Harari believe to be the most powerful mythology of all?
Money, which in a vacuum is nothing more than a way for people to exchange goods, but that was eventually mythologized and now serves as the primary transactional instrument through which other subordinate mythologies (e.g. nations, economies, corporations, and religions) are mediated and preserved.
Simplifying this, Harari's argument is two-fold:
homo sapiens are the most dominant species because we can collaborate in large numbers, while maintaining a high degree of flexibility.
homo sapiens are able to collaborate in this unique way because our language is subjective. Subjective language allows us to construct mythologies, such as religions, nations, organizations, and it is these mythologies that serve as the infrastructure for our perpetual collaboration.
Mythology as the infrastructure of both collaboration and communication
If mythology underlies all collaboration and communication, then mythology is the infrastructure layer on top of which all collaboration and communication applications are constructed:
The Collaboration & Communication Layers end up being divided into two interfaces, one physical, the other digital.
Interestingly, the technologies achieving the greatest market power are almost never isolated to collaboration alone, or communication alone. The categorical applications that serve as the interfaces of our communication and collaboration are unique, but ultimately inseparable. For example, an office serves as a physical application to facilitate collaboration (e.g. the solving of some market problem), but without written or oral language, the office is rendered useless.
This inseparability is clearest in the context of the technologies facilitating and empowering our digital collaboration and communication. The tools that have achieved the most market power fluidly serve the needs of communication and collaboration.
Are collaboration and communication applications ever separable?
Yes, and the distinction is a function of communication's further division into three component parts and the unique type of message each component is charged with conveying.
Many questions emerge for me after having tried to wrestle with my observations of communication and collaboration.
What are new opportunities in the realm of communication/collaboration technology?
Communication is also stylistic. How would communication styles be categorized (e.g. aggressive, empathetic, etc)?
If mythology is the infrastructure on top of which collaboration and communication applications are constructed, then these applications are interfaces with mythologies. But what is the role of power in formation of both the myth and the interfaces?