On metanarratives ⊗ Do not resign from life

On metanarratives—or, how we transform our cultural mythology

Readers of this newsletter are familiar with the argument that articulating and living a desired future is a political act. Dr Sharon Blackie, “internationally bestselling author, psychologist and mythologist,” whom I’m discovering for the first time, assembles an old interview and a book chapter to explain metanarratives. They operate, as the name implies, at a larger scale, and Blackie examines how they organise entire civilisations, how they actually form, and how they might change. Her core argument is that metanarratives aren’t designed; they accrete. They grow from lived experience, get reinforced by events in the world, and embed themselves so deeply over generations that they stop feeling like stories and start feeling like facts. The dominant Western metanarrative—progress, growth, human superiority over nature—took centuries to harden. The idea that a workshop or a movement could replace it by deciding on a better story mistakes the nature of the problem entirely.

What makes the piece more than a methodological overview or debate, is Blackie’s account of how metanarratives actually shift. Change begins at the individual level, through what she calls personal mythmaking, reauthoring one’s own story with more accurate and generative material, basically what we are used to promoting about expressing desired futures. When enough individuals do this, and begin living differently, new collective stories start to emerge. The old European fairy tales and myths she draws on—the Grail legends, the selkie tales, the Irish cow of plenty—aren’t offered as ready-made replacements, but as evidence that other ways of framing the human relationship to the natural world have always existed within Western culture, waiting to be recovered and reactivated.

The distinction Blackie keeps returning to is between fabrication and emergence. A story with real transformative weight can’t be conjured; it has to pass, as scholar Sean Kane puts it, through the test of narrative art and then through the accumulated mythological experience of a society. What she is describing is closer to an ecological process than a design problem, one where the people already living differently are not outliers but early signs of a shift already underway. The work is not to invent a new story from scratch but to recognise, tell, and retell the ones already being lived.

Note → A couple of years ago I saw a talk (sorry, no link) by Jonathan Rowson where he spoke about the Axial Age (a piece on Big Think). “From roughly 800 BCE to 200 BCE, all of the major civilizations produced incredible people with incredible ideas. … In Greece, we saw the likes of Socrates, Archimedes, Hippocrates, Plato, and Aristotle. In the Middle East, we got Jewish prophets like Isiah and Ezekiel, as well as Zoroaster in Persia. In India, we got the Buddha and the writing of the Hindu Upanishads. And in China, Confucianism and Daoism came into their own, as well as the famous Sun Tzu.” For now I’m just pointing you to an age/concept I find fascinating, which seems like it might have been the last big flip of the metanarrative, but don’t take my word for it. I need to explore this further, at some point.

For Native Americans like Silko, a story is an intricate part of a web that cradles all the past, present and future events, ceremonies, beliefs and traditions of their culture. In the centre of this web is the land. Each story is part of another story which is linked to yet another one, and all these stories are connected back to the very origin of creation. […]

A curious mixture of magic and alchemy is required to create a story – with all its depths of symbols and its archetypal imagery – that buries its way into a person’s heart, and then the heart of a community, and then the heart of a whole culture. […]

Just as important, they also determine the narratives which are not presented to us. Equally fascinating is that they do not present their offerings as stories at all – and certainly never as the foundational myths of our culture – but as definitive and unassailable explanations of how the world simply is. […]

In Ragnarök, A.S. Byatt offers up a twenty-first-century retelling of the old Norse myth about the end of the world and the death of the gods. These gods deserve to die, Byatt suggests in her Afterword, for they are just like we are now. They have abandoned the Earth. They are ‘limited and stupid . . .They are greedy and enjoy fighting and playing games … They know Ragnarök is coming but are incapable of imagining any way to fend it off, or change the story.’ Our story needs to change, and it needs to change before it’s too late – before we perpetrate our own, rather less picturesque, version of Ragnorök. There’ll be no happy ending possible in that story – neither for us, nor the Earth.

Do not resign from life

One thing that keeps popping up around AI is the question of “where will people find meaning without work?” Besides the fact that this greatly exaggerates the possibilities of AI, I’m always nonplussed at how people can lose their meaning alongside their job. But it always comes to mind as a critique, which is not very nice. In this piece, L. M. Sacasas has a more pro-human way of thinking about the issue. Drawing on observations from educators at NYU and elsewhere, he notes a growing sadness among students and faculty, one that doesn’t require personal AI use to take hold. It seems that simply existing in an environment saturated with AI is enough to corrode a sense of purpose, raising the question of why should one bother developing a skill that a machine can replicate?

Sacasas thinks this framing is the wrong one. The anxiety, he argues, stems from tying human dignity to species exceptionalism, the assumption that our worth depends on being uniquely capable of doing x, y, or z. A faster aircraft doesn’t diminish the swallow-tailed kite; the kite flies because flying is what it does, not to prove a point. The same logic applies to human thinking, writing, and judgment. The question isn’t whether a machine can simulate these activities but whether they bring us purpose and connection—and they do, regardless of what else in the world can perform them.

He closes the piece with a call to resist what he frames as a quiet resignation. Other people can deploy machines against us, that’s a genuine political problem, but the inner abandonment of meaningful activity is a different failure, one we inflict on ourselves. The rallying cry he reaches for comes from the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno: “I will not resign from life; I must be dismissed.” The point is not to defend human uniqueness but to keep doing what is ours to do because it is good for us to do it.

Notes → Species exceptionalism is part of the great myths discussed in the first article. ⊗ I’m not trying to downplay what people feel about AI, but on reading about “sadness” or questions like “what is the point anymore?” I’m also kind of wondering if it’s not the proverbial straw breaking the camel’s back. I.e. the reaction also has a lot to do with everything happening so much “and now this.”

Oddly enough, it turns out that loudly and frequently touting your product as a potential threat of world-historical proportions to human well-being was a bad marketing strategy. Human beings, after all, have no particular obligation to cheerfully cooperate with our own purported immiseration. […]

It seems to me that we would be better off if we were less preoccupied with the question of human uniqueness, if we took for granted that we are creatures of certain sort making their way in the world with a distinct set of capabilities and potentialities and that we ought to exercise these capabilities and develop these potentialities not because they make us special but because they make us happy. […]

Why should this mean that I ought not to think for myself and with others? Why should I cease from inhabiting the playground of language because a machine can pretend to play in it as well? Why should I abandon the exercise of judgment or the pursuit of knowledge? We must pursue these things not because the dignity of our humanity is on the line, but because our joy is.

Futures, Fictions & Fabulations

• Sensing the third horizon. “Drawing on our interviews with practitioners and the original creators of the frameworks, we asked: what other elements would we make more explicit in some important systems change frameworks? Taking the Three Horizons, the Berkana Two Loops, and Deep Transitions, we considered the conditions and capacities that might be layered on, amplified, or made more explicit.”
• The Butlerian Jihad has begun. “It is rare for 42-page Papal Encyclicals to capture the imagination of chronically online Leftists, but this case was special. Users immediately leaped at the opportunity to describe this as a kind of anti-AI manifesto, and announce that the Pope had, with Magnifica Humanitas, finally declared the ‘Butlerian Jihad.’”
• Megatrends 2026 and beyond. Not sure we needed another acronym though. “Welcome to the NAVI world — where change is increasingly nonlinear, accelerated, volatile and interconnected. When faced with disruptive complexity, traditional responses are insufficient; thriving requires a radical shift in how we think and how we operate.”

Algorithms, Automations & Augmentations

• The public should own half of the big AI companies. Senator Bernie Sanders: “That is why I will soon be introducing the American A.I. Sovereign Wealth Fund Act. This legislation would give the public a direct ownership stake in the largest A.I. companies in our country. How? It would create a sovereign wealth fund through a one-time 50 percent tax — not on the profits of OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI and other companies, but paid with something far more valuable than that: the stock.”
• Analysis finds that Google’s AI overviews are providing misinformation at a scale possibly unprecedented in the history of human civilization. “The AI-generated summaries, which appear above Google search results, are accurate around 91 percent of the time. … In a sense, that may sound like an impressive figure. But here’s an even more impressive one: five trillion. That’s roughly the number of search queries that Google processes every year, translating to tens of millions of wrong answers that the AI Overviews are providing every hour — and hundreds of thousands every minute, the analysis calculated.”
• Is AI profitable yet? (no). “The site includes both, big tech infrastructure spend and pure lab spending, hence why companies like Amazon and Google have huge spend figures compared to the pure labs like OpenAI or Anthropic (big AI investments, not much direct AI revenue yet). It's important to note that the site tracks whether AI investment specifically has broken even yet, not company-wide profitability, hence why companies such as Amazon and Google look so far in the red despite being hugely profitable companies as a whole.” And The impossible maths of the AI boom. “The IPO of big sector companies is probably nothing more than a transfer of investment risk to retail investors.”

Built, Biosphere & Breakthroughs

• How US cities lost the economic development plot. “Cities that once had diverse, locally robust industrial bases gave way to a relatively small professional class and a much larger stratum of service workers whose wages have not kept pace with housing costs in any American metropolitan area for at least 20 years. In city after city, what took hold was a theory of economic development that Jacobs would have recognized immediately as the urban renewal mistake in a nicer suit. The logical extreme of efficiency is monopoly.”
• Six women win 2026 Goldman prize, world’s top environmental award. “‘While we continue to fight uphill to protect the environment and implement lifesaving climate policies – in the US and globally – it is clear that true leaders can be found all around us,’ said John Goldman, vice president of the Goldman Environmental Foundation.”
• Québec City designated a UNESCO Biosphere Region: An exceptional international recognition for an urban area. Please allow this little provincial pride moment ;-). “This designation highlights the concrete commitment of all partners to making biodiversity a central asset in the region’s development. Achieving this designation is the result of a broad-based effort involving some sixty partners from institutional, Indigenous, scientific, business, and community groups since 2023.”

Asides

• Demand is booming for new no tech, repairable tractor. “The secondary market for decades old, low-tech John Deere tractors has been booming for years as farmers have sought reliable tractors that they can actually fix without having to deal with John Deere’s repair monopoly. A Canadian company has seen that demand and came up with a radical thought: What if they made a new, repairable, ‘no-tech’ tractor to solve what has become a gigantic pain point for farmers?”
• The illuminated windows of NYC. “For his project Windows, Dave Krugman took photos of hundreds of NYC apartment windows at night and stitched them together into ever-shifting typologies. What’s going on in each of those apartments?”
• Cancer jab can eradicate entire tumours in patients, trial shows. “The jab, called amivantamab, shrank the tumours of more than a third of patients, with dramatic changes seen within weeks. In 15 of them, doctors found the drug had melted away their tumours altogether.”