The New Myth-Making: From Campfires to Algorithms
The collision between our Stone Age brains and digital-speed mythology. And how we will survive.
At a summer BBQ the other night, a Canadian ritual deeply rooted in society, a fella was explaining in great detail why putting a wet phone in rice will fix it. It doesn’t. It’s just a myth we collectively decided is true. Because we feel it should work. Then he showed me a video short about how eating ice cubes burns calories. That doesn’t work either.
What it made me think about is how we’re in the fasted time of myth-making in human history. Where a single tweet or viral video can become a gospel truth faster than it can be fact-checked. And myth-making is one of the most important ways all humans use to make sense of the world and the realities we create.
It is the same cognitive machinery our ancestors used hundreds of thousands of years ago to survive by creating myths and around creation stories and protective spirits. And we had time to digest those myths and build on them. Not anymore.
Today, our ancient brain systems are trying to make sense of hallucinations from LLMs (ChatGPT, Claude etc.), algorithmic feeds designed to smack our brains with fight/flight responses, deepfakes and conspiracy theories. We are mass-producing myths at digital speed and without realising it, often choosing the story over the facts.
So why is this important to understand and what does it portend for our immediate and perhaps longer future?
I think we have entered a time where we are nearing what I call “peak synthetic myth-making”, a period where the boundary between human and AI driven storytelling becomes essentially invisible. It’s like a phase transition where water becomes steam.
So why is myth-making so important in human societies and cultures? Creating myths is an ancient human cognitive tool. Making myths, as anthropologist Claude Lévis-Strauss observed helps us resolve cultural contradictions and make sense of the paradoxes inherent in human existence.
What’s different today is that AI tools and humans can create myths in mere minutes or seconds (think of video shorts and memes), compressing mythogenesis timescales dramatically. Where traditional myths might take years or even generations to crystallise, digitally made myths can zip around the globe in mere hours. Sometimes even becoming news stories. The “first story” can become the dominant myth not because it’s true, but because at arrived first in the attention economy of today.
Another difference today is that myths used to move through a culture in a more vertical fashion. A shaman or priest/priestess might create a myth to make sense of something that happened, like a volcanic eruption. That myth then filtered downwards through the culture.
That process still exists, but it must co-exist where myths (codes) can be instantly created and spread horizontally across peer networks faster than they can possibly be validated by institutional knowledge. It’s why conspiracy theories move so fast today.
These codes (or myths) create what we might call “synthetic codes” or myths, shared systems of meaning based on mediated rather than lived experience.
This becomes more dangerous when LLMs (ChatGPT, Claude etc.) have hallucinations. They’re not just making errors, they’re engaging in a form of computational myth-making. And if you don’t have the critical thinking skills and knowledge to know an LLM is hallucinating, you may share the output and others, if you’re an influencer say, will believe it. It happens every day.
The danger then isn’t the hallucination of the LLM itself, but rather than these synthetic narratives, myths, achieve the cultural weight of established and accepted truth.
Myth-making isn’t a bug in human minds and cognition, it’s a feature. Humans are pattern-seeking animals. We need narratives, myths, stories in order to function as a society. Money only exists because we all agree that it does. Religions exist because people believe the story being told. Countries exist because we believe the stories about the country we live in.
We use myths to structure our world and how we view it, what we think is reality. We transform our chaotic experiences into structured narratives that make both emotional and social sense. When the Ojibwa claim they are descended from bears, they aren’t making a biological claim, they’re creating a meaning-making story about their relationship with their culture and nature. This helps them organise social roles, hunting practices and spiritual beliefs in ways that facts never could.
In anthropology, this is known as bricolage. Where we use whatever cultural materials are around us to construct these meaningful narratives. The cultural myth around Steve Jobs inventing the iPhone is another example. He didn’t invent it, he just showcased it. But the myth gives us a narrative about innovation, individual genius and progress that’s for more interesting.
Myths persist because they resolve the logical contradictions in all cultures. In the digital world, for example, tech billionaires are simultaneously celebrated as innovators and criticised as monopolists. So rather than holding both truths at the same time, we choose the story that aligns with our version of reality.
The danger isn’t that machines are lying to us, but that our ancient myth-making minds can’t distinguish between human-generated cultural narratives and algorithmically-produced ones.
Our brains evolved to create and believe stories that helped small tribes survive. And they haven’t changed. They’ve not evolved and scaled with today’s technologies. We’re using the same mental models to navigate information environments that are now being created by entities, machine and human, with completely different goals than survival of a tribe.
So we are in a liminal period as old cultural patterns breakdown and we learn to re-wire our brains through culture. We can’t stop this new form of myth-making. Instead we need to learn to participate in our collective storytelling and forge new norms and behaviours. That will take time, but we’ve done it before. It’s the need to adapt and maintain coherent identity yet updating our our understanding in the digital age.