[21] Stories: The Original Human Innovation
Dear Readers,
Hope you had a great weekend!
This week, we spent a lot of time reflecting on how we take certain things in society as truths. Many things in our daily lives we don’t ever think to question. This brought us to the idea that at the end of the day, stories matter.
Check out: Life in Color Twitter for summary threads of our our pieces there. 🧵🪡
If you enjoy reading, please share the Life in Color Substack with others and ask them to subscribe!
Thanks for the continued support!
One of the things that makes humans special is the ability to organize around stories.
An over-said comment, but nonetheless true in that this is our species’ true superpower.
Stories connect us and upon them we build systems, and systems become societies, so on and so forth.
The most powerful stories in the world were validated or brought into existence many generations ago. Those “super stories” have become extremely hard to challenge because by and large, society has taken it as a “given” or “fundamental” truth for so long.
Let’s get back to the basics: why do we, as a group of people of any size, believe in anything and/or accept anything to be true?
On some level, it’s because enough people believe in it until it becomes validated.
We can start really macro and take a system like money.
Why does money have value?
Because everyone in society has bought into the idea that money has value and therefore (implicitly) we have all agreed to find utility in it.
Why do employees respect the authority of a certain figure in a corporation? Because enough people (at scale) respect the authority of a certain figure.
This line of thinking shows up time and time again in history and everywhere in our lives.
The idea of change works the same way — enough people buy into the story that the status quo is no longer good enough, and once you have enough people, you hit a tipping point… and then things actually start to change.
We won’t go into too much other detail, but just ask yourself the question: Why do certain groups of people believe in System X over System Y?
At some point, you can reason back to the idea that because enough people believe in it, and they, therefore, choose to organize around it.
Powerful stories: the ultimate form of network effects
You can debate what is fact, what is opinion, but at the end of the day, the way life works is one of scale and network effects (the more people buy into something, the more it’s true)…
Once you buy into it, and your friends buy into it, and everyone who looks like you buys into it, and then everyone in a certain geography buys into it, it has gotten so powerful that regardless of whether it is fact or opinion… does it even matter what is fact or opinion at that point?
Because how can you tell a large mass of people that their chosen truth is wrong but you are right? The forces and network effects are just too powerful for a new or counter-perspective to fight.
See Sapiens, see The Matrix, see our essay on Conformity.
Okay, so what?
Well on the Internet, the above is similar in spirit, but with the Internet, the dynamics have evolved.
The internet has significantly lowered costs for people to find each other, to connect with each other and to organize… which means a smaller group of people (i.e. a number less than the masses) can buy into a certain perspective without really needing others to really buy into it.
The internet has also lowered the costs to distribute information, which has led to the growth of niches and sub-cultures (i.e. micro-stories we subscribe to).
Example: If you have a random interest in collecting rare pens, in the pre-web era, it was extremely expensive to find others who were also interested in collecting rare pens. Chances are, if they didn’t live in your town or neighborhood, it was impossible to find them. It’s not that other people who are interested in rare pens don’t exist, they certainly do and probably exist all over the world, but they couldn’t find each other.
In other words, it was hard to come together and organize.
In the pre-web world, only super stories or mega systems were allowed to propagate at a national and global scale. And they were usually propagated through larger structures like institutions or systems that have achieved some level of scale.
A mega system like the world’s reserve currency is one such example. So many people have bought into it (explicitly at first, and then implicitly).
Meaning, you don’t hold a dollar and sit there wondering who is the next person that you can transact with… you just go transact.
You don’t even question it.
But with the internet and the hyper-connected world we live in, the propagation of (new) stories adds an interesting dynamic to the mix. The speed at which information can travel and the scale that stories can reach through the information super highway give even more importance to stories and narratives.
So this brings us to an interesting question: when new paradigms surface, what role do stories and narrative play in their success?
Web 3 is a new paradigm
Web 3 in many ways is about questioning and revisiting the biggest stories and systems that we’ve bought into (or rather, that generations before us have bought into that we, the current generation, no longer question).
So when a new paradigm surfaces, the crowd is highly resistant to it.
Often, the reservation people have with Web 3 is questioning all the “new” models of doing things.
Some fundamental questions that are often asked are:
Why do tokens have value?
Why does decentralization matter?
Now each of the questions above does have a specific answer, an academic answer and an answer that largely depends on the discipline you choose to view them through.
For example… there is an answer to "why do tokens have value?” rooted in economics, finance, etc. etc.
Those answers are of course important… but that is not the point here.
The point here is something more meta, philosophical and fundamental to us as humans.
The answer to any of the above questions and to any of the big / fundamental questions in Web 3 is…
Because we as a species, society and as a group of humans agree and buy into the story.
Why do tokens have value? Because we believe they have value.
Why does decentralization matter? Because we believe it matters.
If we go back to why our species is special, it’s our ability to organize and buy into stories.
It’s important to note in 2022 and onward, the internet has given us the ability to tell stories and organize with almost zero marginal costs. If people without shared language and systems can come together and organize to start something like the Agricultural Revolution… imagine what people can organize under a paradigm where they can freely communicate across the world.
Web 3 has a lot of details to figure out… that is true and not questioning that.
But at the most fundamental level, it comes down to: do we, as a population, agree to, and support, the ideas in Web 3?
Buying into a new super story is ultimately an adoption question.
These days we talk a lot about tech innovation, but our ability to organize around stories is the original human innovation.
Web 3 is often painted as only technology innovation, but the innovation in Web 3 is also a human one. (H/T Yat Siu)
Stories matter.
It may be the only thing that ever has.