In need of stories

I loved this recent post by @ashleymayer on how we need better stories about the future in tech – and small companies should be the ones to step up to tell them.

Just because capital is concentrated in a few of the biggest startups (nearly all AI companies) doesn’t mean they get to be the only ones to tell the big stories and use their larger megaphones. They keep telling stories about which model is the best, which one is growing the fastest, who has the most Github stars and so on.

There are all sorts of great insights in her post, but one in particular stood out the most to me:

Many of this technology wave’s most impressive companies have also made what I believe is a profound narrative error. They’ve cast themselves as the heroes in their own stories, and in doing so, risk becoming the villain in everyone else’s.

Historically, the best brands have made someone else the hero of their story. Apple was in service of the creative misfit, Nike celebrated the everyday athlete. When you build a story around your company as the hero, you risk turning your customers or users into NPCs. It signals an inherently transactional relationship, or worse, predatory (in the case of AI or robotics: we’ll replace you, just give us time).

The best brands make someone else the protagonist. Somewhere, tech (and, sometimes, those that write about tech) have lost that idea.

Additionally, the AI wave right now is perhaps in need of the same type of storytelling that the climate wants:

Telling this story requires a different way to tell a story […] As Wallace-Wells writes, we need an alternative: many problems we face now aren’t just one person’s problems where they go out into the world, selfishly solve it for themselves and come back home victorious. Most big problems are hard to define and hard to tell stories about. Global climate change, in particular, is known as a super wicked problem. We just may need some super wicked stories.

We all want to know what comes next: what happens to our jobs, what will we be doing, what does a new kind of information abundance mean, how does creativity, taste and the human side of things fit into it?