Narratives are a powerful tool.
When they’re well crafted, they take a messy, chaotic dough of inedible context and bake it into the sweet bread of a consumable story. A good narrative is understandable, relatable, and transferable. The listener comprehends, believes, and wants to tell others.
The world (and particularly Silicon Valley) seems to be increasingly driven by narratives. The simpler and the grander the better. Big, bold, and beautiful. Death to nuance. Shades of grey are an insidious blight that threaten the orderly partitioning of the world between believers and those poor lost souls that just don’t get it. You’re either about to change the world with us or you’re an archaic luddite that hates progress.
As far as I can tell, the ideal narrative for the modern age is one that:
Proposes a radical re-ordering of society
Forces a clean division between the initiated and the scorned
Can be expressed in 280 characters (though 1000 may soon be acceptable)
This structure is desirable because it enables the storyteller to gain the greatest amount of traction among the broadest group of people and turn them into zealots quickly. Conversion. Radical narratives stand out from the crowd. Particularly when they appeal to commonly held grievance. The breadth of the vision and the forcefulness of its delivery is directly correlated with the tightness of the community that can develop around it. There’s a reason there’s not a lot of scale influencers with moderate positions.
The downside of this structure is that the narrative it produces tends to be brittle. It lacks the nuance to withstand scrutiny. Thankfully, that’s not much of a problem since one side is rarely considering the points of the other side. The world is so polarized by believers and non-believers that the pragmatic middle ground is a nuclear wasteland between the entrenched positions. The wise moderate bunkers up. Poking your head out is liable to get you nuked from both sides.
Narrative wars are a zero sum game. There can be no neutral parties. Can be no thoughtful interlocutors. No mediation. No peace.
There are many narrative wars being waged at any given time, but this post is just about one: World War Web3.