Talking Tools Talk Back

Living Make-Belief, Chapter 4

I’m spending the next few months analyzing the ideas in Jim Dator’s new book Living Make-Belief, along with related works. The introduction to this project can be found here. All entries are listed here.

Dator’s fourth chapter is of particular interest to me (and all fans of social change) because it’s where he articulates his own theory of change. This is a critical opportunity to contrast with different theories of change in general, and with Jensen and Hines in particular. His basic thesis is that the technologies humans use to communicate drive much of the change in societies, and are specifically responsible for the macro social forms we’ve been discussing¹. This is basically a more specific version of Dator’s third law - “we shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us”². Let’s dig into how this theory explains critical junctures in human history.

Origins (or, Snakes on a Brain?)

The first critical shift in human history is when our ancestors went from being clever animals to something markedly different. This doesn’t seem to be the emergence of thought; rather, Dator ties this to the development of language, specifically abstract/conceptual identification and the development of phonemes. Whatever the specific cognitive catalyst, it enabled

Ok I know the convention is to use this for quotes but this is the mystical/metaphysical Tristan breaking through the digital page to interrupt the much more straight-laced and academic persona he usually presents to the world (I'm much more likely to show up in late-night conversation). Dator’s comment about all life having thought immediately snapped my mind to this bananas mega-article. Read it when you have a few hours, but the basic premise: what if recursive thought³ / sense of self / the soul emerged when a woman was bitten by a snake but didn't die (similar to the Stoned Ape theory), then was spread over generations by rituals administered by a cult of snake venom priestesses, especially to men who took a few thousand years to catch on? What if, further, the Garden of Eden story in Genesis represents a particularly faithful social memory of this time when consciousness was spreading throughout humanity (or the Eleusinian mysteries, if that’s more your flavor)? This is pretty far on the fringe but also feels like a key to all of history. More to the point, it’s oh no he found me act natural

the development of bands of humans that still hunt and gather for food but also develop culture including ritual, storytelling, and oral tradition.

Writing and Agriculture

Over the last 10,000 years, the development and diffusion of writing has enabled enormous changes in society. Even a small literate class of people, writing down a thought or intention allows it to scale across vast differences and be preserved throughout time (with effort). This enables laws, bureaucracy, scriptural/organized religion, armies, and persistent ownership of land and property (and people, unfortunately). These are the prerequisites for an Agricultural Society, where vast geographic empires are built on slavery and agriculture supporting cities housing the elites. The internal logic of writing (immutable, linear, and separate from the speaker) also created new patterns of thought, as well as the ability to abstract words further from their immediate referents, allowing things like philosophy to emerge. However, the effort required to preserve and transmit writing means that literacy, while a key to organizing society, is de facto an elite activity.

Printing and the Creation of the Modern World

The invention of the printing press (especially movable type) dramatically upended this arrangement by turning the written word from a luxury to a commodity, and by reducing the number of transmission errors in copies of text to near zero⁴. By reducing the friction or cost for an idea to replicate, Europe was awash in new ideas⁵: science and the Enlightenment, but also new religious ideas leading to the Protestant Reformation and centuries of religious conflict⁶, conspiracy theories about Satanic child-eating cabals exercising power from the shadows⁷, and so on. The explosion in the number of words available spread literacy (and the emergence of writing about writing), but also the organizing metaphor of replicable mechanical processes that made the Industrial Revolution possible⁸, representing the mature version of modernity. Dator also points out that his theory of change does allow for some agency: China invented the printing press⁹, and the Arab world was exposed to it as well, and both remained Agricultural Societies for centuries, largely because the existing authorities controlled and restricted the use of the press.

Comparison

In The Dream Society, Jensen tells a similar historical story, but focused purely on description and not on causation. In his discussion of hunter-gatherer bands, he emphasizes the centrality of myth, stories, and ritual for maintaining social cohesion and continuity. From agriculture, this shifts to experience and successfully navigating the changing seasons. From industrial society, we get the idea of progress and urban sharing of ideas leading to ideologies. From the information society (Dator will cover this in the next chapter), we get a rigidity of focus on quantifiable data and logic. His contention is that the dream society, in many ways, is a return to the emphasis on myth and story-telling from hunter-gatherer times. This is interesting because it suggests a cyclical element — one more reminder that we need to have a deep dive into Spiral Dynamics as part of this series.

Andy Hine’s ConsumerShift focuses on values as the central part of the story, and ties the dominance of sets of values to the economic development of society. Hines is not interested in presenting a grand sweep of human history, so his story starts with Traditional values as the set emerging from a pre-industrial society (ie agriculture), and Modern values linked to industrialization. Postmodern values come from mature industrial societies where the cost of further development and growth become obvious and no longer outweigh the benefits.

So if these are compatible, the composite change theory is something like: communication technology (development but also adoption) → social forms and metaphors → development/wealth → values → consumer behavior. Using Noble’s classification, this theory posits change as mostly exogenous (reactive to a change in communication technology), mostly contingent (because the communication technology could have been different), sociologically realist, mostly materialist (because it starts with technology, though it quickly gets inside our heads after that), objective, and pretty well balanced between rational and empirical (it’s seeking of a grand theory, but reasonable well-rooted in the historical record).

1. This argument is explored in full-book format in his 2015 work with Aubrey Yee and friend of the newsletter John Sweeney, Mutative Media.

2. This quote, as I’ve mentioned before in the context of religious innovation, is at least McLuhan-adjacent.

3. Having a model of yourself inside yourself is the analog version of the simulation problem that lies at the heart of Devs.

4. When copying errors become newsworthy, it’s clear that something major has shifted.

5. Much of this overlays with the fourth chapter of Roman Krznaric’s History for Tomorrow, which I wrote about last semester. Krznaric has a few additional points worth considering: printing enabled the spread of information-orientation beyond the elite, and by doing so created ideas of socially-constructed knowledge: he lists the “public sphere” as one of these, and I suspect the modern meaning of “common sense” also belongs here. This may need to be revisited.

6. Glibly, if writing enabled the rise of organized religion, printing allowed the rise of disorganized religion.

7. As the teacher says, there is nothing new under the sun.

8. In many ways, the scientific revolution was the same thing applied to ideas: doing the same thing in the same way should lead to the same results regardless of the experimenter.

9. Imagine me waving my hand here at whatever distinction your mind brings up.