The Reconstruction of Context

How we will read old stones that cannot be deciphered

Social media increasingly reduces information into bite-size pieces of emotion. A movie is reduced to a fight scene; a career is destroyed by a regrettable but quickly deleted post; a dead young man is transformed into a living Muslim terrorist. When we have no surrounding narrative, we are driven to create our own. We construct theories of causation, speculate about motives, and weigh our fragment in the scales of morality. We give it meaning.

Humanity is not the thinking animal; we are the interpreting animal. A flatworm can remember the path with food and the path with electric shocks. It cannot tell stories about its journey through the maze. We cannot stop telling stories. Give us a crumb of information and we’ll soon turn it into a narrative. Afflict us with drought and we’ll turn the sun into a flaming chariot driving too close to the earth.

Sometimes we blame drought on a flaming chariot. Sometimes we blame it on the cranky old widow who lives down the lane. Those stories not only give us meaning; they also give us instructions. There’s very little we can do about a flying fiery cart. Cranky old widows can be hanged from trees and buried at crossroads to appease the offended gods. We tell ourselves these stories more often than we’d like to admit.

We will be telling stories long after the Internet is dismissed as an old wives’ tale. So long as humans live and breathe, there will be stories. The issue that faces us is making sure that we tell the right ones.

One piece of information is a story prompt. Multiple pieces of information are evidence. We have a shell; that can be the starting point for a myth, a poem, or an obscene joke about a man walking into a talent agent’s office with a seashell. We find a shell while walking along the seaside and discover this shell comes from halfway around the world. We now have a mystery. Did it arrive here on a ship; was it washed here by a current; does it threaten local fauna?

The more surrounding context we uncover, the more likely we are to solve our mystery. But our storytelling instinct begins weaving tales the minute something piques its interest. It’s also inclined to create the stories we want to hear. Finding out why your crop yields are low this year requires effort, and you may never figure out exactly what happened. Blaming it on the cranky old widow is quick, clean, and provides resolution. Everybody feels better except the widow.

Unfortunately, correlation does not equal causation. We can kill every widow in town without improving our crop yields. Or we can have a better yield next year, then decide that we need an annual widow sacrifice to stave off famine. After another bad harvest, we might decide to kill two or three. Then, when all the widows are dead or have left town, we might ask ourselves whom we should sacrifice now.

Another common attribution for suffering is divine punishment. God sent this epidemic to punish us for our sins. Or perhaps this is a trial that will sort out the unbelievers from the faithful. The idea of mass death sent by divinities can be oddly comforting. Deities acting out of anger still recognize our existence and give our world meaning. An indifferent bacillus that wipes out your family with neither pity nor malice is much more difficult to appease. It cares neither for prayers nor curses.

This same instinct drives many popular conspiracy theories. Our world is a complicated place, and crowned kings have largely been replaced by faceless bureaucrats. We are at the mercy of people we would not recognize in an elevator. Malevolent secret societies who want to herd us all into pods and feed us bugs are frightening, but at least they are aware of our existence. And if a collective of Satanic pedophile tycoons can rule the world, that means there may be another secret society working behind the scenes to save us if only we trust the plan.

Online mob attacks have become a hallmark of Internet culture. But the Internet did not create mobs. Long before the first computer flame war, crowds slaughtered Jews for spreading plagues and witches for causing stillbirths. Social media rewarded outrage as engagement, so we have seen a great deal of screaming, snarling, and profane accusations. That particular background noise will fade away in a post-Internet culture. But that new culture will be facing many real stressors and will frequently be tempted to seek out a scapegoat.

Myths may be the strongest walls we can build against that mob instinct. The Salem Witch Trials are an eternal reminder of what happens when we decide our neighbors are in league with the devil. McCarthyism and the Red Scare show us what happens when we think of our neighbors as spies and traitors. They are not just historical events; they are social movements that shaped the American collective psyche.

A true Myth may capture that emotion and resonate within the post-American psyche. Many contemporary Americans mistake lectures for myth. This is nothing new; for as long as there have been writers there have been heavy-handed treatises that sought to bludgeon us into good behavior. Anybody who complains about “woke Star Wars” should read a stack of Horatio Alger books. True Myth leaves room for interpretation.

Charles Dickens was not shy about framing his books around social issues like poverty and industrial cruelty. Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s work is profoundly ideological. But both writers were masters of characterization. Their characters were not billboards spouting slogans. They were fully realized, often contradictory, people dealing with real conflicts. You live their moral vision through the stories they created, not through finger-pointing and moralizing.

That said, there are also times when a Myth taps into a contemporary mythic structure with a force that does not necessarily resound beyond that era. Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin has enormous historical influence; it was a major catalyst toward the growth of the Abolitionist movement. Yet it has not had an equal literary influence. Today much of its rhetoric appears overly sentimental and scolding. Stowe trusted her readers far less than Dostoyevsky and Dickens trusted theirs, and her appeal is largely lost on readers in a post-slavery world.

Does that mean she failed? Hardly. The Myth she created erased the conditions that made it necessary. We find Uncle Tom’s Cabin overblown and moralistic because we take her premises for granted. But at the time she was writing, there was no universal agreement on slavery. Many considered it a necessary evil, or even the best choice for Africans who were incapable of governing themselves without a benevolent master. Today those claims seem shocking and horrible. Stowe’s work helped to make them that way.

A post-American world will have new national origin myths. They will grow organically out of important moments. Every region will have its battle of Lexington and Concord, its Gettysburg, its great triumph or its historic defeat. Each region will interpret the stories of surrounding regions differently. They might proudly celebrate its victory or nurse old grudges about their loss. There will be tales told on both sides of disputed borders. Their differing versions of the same event may be as divided as the stories we see on our curated algorithms.

That world will look back at us in much the same way we look at ancient Rome—a powerful empire brought down by its late-period decadence. That story, like our vision of Rome, will be partially right but misleading. Scholars will recognize that the American Empire’s boundaries became overextended and its trade routes grew unstable with the rise of new competitors. The masses will most likely remember us for “hookup culture” and how our population deflated due to contraception and the decline of family structures.

The 22^nd century may well see “hookup porn”—lurid tales of American excesses that serve the same role that Ottoman harems or Roman decadence served in the Victorian imagination. These stories will be as explicit as the culture’s mores allow, with titillation presented as a cautionary tale or a true historical account. Our culture will serve both as a warning against decadence, pornography, and narcissism and as masturbation fodder.

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.

T.S. Eliot[1]

Modern narratives are frequently wrong because they rely on incomplete information gathered through social media. The narratives of the post-Internet future will emerge more slowly. Where we must deal with an information glut, they will face information shortages. As with historical journalism, they will rely on secondhand information, news wires or radio reports, and editorial pressures that shape what information becomes public.

In a post-internet world, distribution of alternative news and information will become more challenging. But it will not be impossible. Americans in the 1970s through 1990s read zines while their Soviet comrades shared samizdat literature. The readership numbers will shrink, but those readers may be more dedicated than Internet followers who repeated the slogans but had little understanding of the underlying ideas.

People in a post-internet world will rely more on libraries and photocopied primary sources than downloaded PDFs. Their access to information will be more limited, but our greater access to data has not led to more profound information. They will work as scholars always have worked, with what information they can gather in their circumstances. Home libraries will grow as internet access becomes more expensive and limited.

The Internet may survive for decades, perhaps even centuries. But it will become less relevant to a greater population as its reach contracts and its cost rises. In a multipolar world, we might see regional internets that block out hostile regions. Declining trade routes and increased tariffs might make smartphones a status symbol and a sign of wealth. Social media might be enjoyed by the wealthy few while the masses socialize through pubs and snail mail.

The Internet may become an adjunct rather than primary source of research. Internet cafés flourished during the early years of online culture. You could rent a terminal and sip coffee while perusing bulletin boards and early web sites. This model may return as computers are priced out of many budgets. Online commerce may shrink as we rely more on catalogs and local stores. Scholars may rely on college internet access to find and download papers they can’t find in their school library or borrow through Interlibrary loan.

The Internet will likely remain a destination, research tool, and institutional archive even after it ceases to be the ambient fabric of daily life. That will change the way we engage with others online and offline. It will bring an end to some of the problems we face today in an always-connected culture. But it will not solve those problems that remain an integral part of the human condition. Those we will always have with us.

We will continue to seek context and to create it where it cannot be found. We will not stop interpreting, nor will we stop arguing about different interpretations. Emotionally satisfying, morally absolute interpretations will remain ongoing temptations. With humility, patience, and slow plodding work, we may create contexts that are large enough to contain reality and not merely our hopes and fears.

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[1] T.S. Eliot, “East Coker” from “Four Quartets” (1940)