# The Story of Stories by Kevin Ashton - Blinkist

What’s in it for me? A history of storytelling from apes to AI.

There’s a famous photograph of the moment viewers witnessed an extraterrestrial being bursting out of John Hurt’s chest at a test screening of the 1979 movie Alien.

Horror, disgust, and terror distort their faces; it was later reported that many of them left the theater to be physically sick.

We can’t be sure the image shows what it’s said to show – the photograph is part of the movie’s marketing lore.

But we do know what happened next: Americans stood in line to watch a gory R-rated thriller that disgusted and delighted in equal measure.

Staged or not, the image reminds us that we’re drawn to stories that make us feel something, good or bad.

Evolution is behind this attraction: we’re hardwired to notice things that engage our emotions.

We’re wonderful reasoners, but we remain a feeling species.

Stories help us make sense of our experiences.

Our ancestors told stories about what happens if you eat this mushroom or defy that god for the same reason we tell our children fairytales about big bad wolves: they create memorable impressions that help us navigate the world.

Court hearings, sales pitches, sermons, and conversations rely on the same age-old structures.

The urge to tell stories may be innate, but its expression changes over time.

One of the threads we’ll follow in this Blink is the entanglement of technology and storytelling.

As we’ll see, the story of stories has its own narrative arc, with each new storytelling technology increasing the number of people who can share their own stories and hear those of others.

Stories gave us language

From the rattle that gives the snake its name to the trilling of bluebirds through a scale of grunts, cackles, caws, and barks, there are many ways for animals to make deliberate sounds.

Humans talk.

More precisely, we vocalise, modulating and vibrating the air leaving our lungs.

This complicated physiological apparatus was at first a means of sending simple messages during primal pursuits: hunting, gathering, playing, grooming, and mating.

The development of language began a million years ago, after our ancestors learned to make and then control fire.

Fire unlocked calories and extended the day.

Its warmth brought tribes together.

The urgency of the hunt receded in the soft light of glowing embers and humans began making sounds that conjured imagined and remembered scenes.

As language grew more complex, the stories told with these sounds became more vivid: moods, tenses, and cases allow us to talk more precisely about character, chronology, and consequence.

There are around 7,000 languages.

All make use of sentences containing a subject, a verb, and an object.

Standard conversations string these sentences together to narrate sequences of events in which characters perform actions that have some kind of consequence.

That was precisely how Aristotle defined storytelling in one of the most influential works ever produced on the subject, the Poetics, written just under 2,400 years ago.

Aristotle also pointed out that our stories almost always have human-like characters.

If there are aliens, gods, or toasters, they are anthropomorphised aliens, gods, and toasters.

(The Greek philosopher didn’t use these examples, of course.

) As Dr.

Seuss said, “none of my animals are animals; they’re all people.

” Lewis Carroll put a rabbit in a top hat and folk tales dwell on porridge-eating bears for the same reason: we can’t stop talking about ourselves.

When we talk about ourselves, we’re talking about our experience of an apparently random – and mostly unjust – universe.

Stories impose a pattern on otherwise patternless experiences, allowing us to discover meaning and design in them.

A cast of colorful gods is a sense-making tool, but so are concepts like evolution and the economy.

When we say that our brains “trick” us or that algorithms “know” us or that markets are “nervous,” we’re telling Aristotelian tales populated by distinctively humanlike characters.

Early stories were limited by transience: they were spoken and then they were gone.

With the exception of a literate elite, that was how it was for most people across history.

Print changed everything.

As we’ll see in a moment, this was the first great storytelling revolution.

Gutenberg invented the mass production of mass communication

Bernardino of Sienna was a priest with a simple story that he never tired of telling.

He set up his makeshift pulpit in the market squares of towns across Italy and began.

For the next four hours, he denounced the fleeting delights that distracted his listeners from God’s eternal glory.

When he was done, a pile of sinful frivolities was made and set alight.

A contemporary account lists the objects consigned to the flames in early fifteenth-century Florence during one of these “bonfires of the vanities.

” Musical instruments, mirrors, high-heeled shoes, perfume, lace dresses – and 4,000 sets of playing cards.

Playing cards were new in Italy.

Invented in China around 760, they slowly traveled westwards before igniting a craze in medieval Europe.

We associate early printing with religious material, but as often as not gambling was fuelling innovation.

When Germany’s first paper mill opened in 1390, it was to cash in on the growing market for cards.

The artisan designers of block printing presses had equally earthly concerns: profit, not piety, motivated their tinkering.

Religion came later.

Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses, the match that lit the conflagration we call the Reformation, was published a century after Bernardino’s Florentine bonfire.

The just-so story that’s often told about the Reformation pairs Lutheran doctrine with Gutenberg’s press.

In broad brush strokes, it’s a solid account of what happened, but it glosses over some important details.

Gutenberg didn’t invent printing with movable metal type – a Buddhist text had already been printed using that technology in Korea in 1377.

Gutenberg’s stroke of genius was combining pre-existing print technologies, of which card printing was an important part, to create a press that was quicker and cheaper than anyone else’s.

To get a sense of just how fast Gutenberg’s press was, we need only stroll over to St.

Alban’s, a Benedictine abbey half a mile down the road from the printer’s workshop in Mainz.

Using goose-feather quills dipped in ink and writing on carefully prepared animal skins, the abbey’s most skilled scribes could copy two pages of scripture a day.

In contrast, on the day his workshop opened, Gutenberg’s press produced 3,000 pages.

What Gutenberg invented was the mass production of mass communication – and, with it, mass persuasion.

Luther and his fellow reformers were the first to realise that this technology could change the world, but they wouldn’t be the last.

For better or worse, revolutions after the Reformation would now rely on mass-printed stories and counter-stories.

Technology changes storytelling; storytelling changes society

There’s an old joke that mid-century American broadcasting was controlled by 12 middle-aged white men.

It’s an exaggeration, but it’s true that radio and television rarely strayed far from America’s standard story.

The nation portrayed to radio listeners was inhabited by suave men of the Frank Sinatra type, their “dames,” and the occasional nostalgic cowboy.

The music was always live, always from a national network, and always white.

Broadcasters didn’t see the need to change much when television expanded in the 1950s.

They sold established radio stations, stopped opposing new competitors, and moved their resources over to TV.

Radio didn’t die off, but it did have a problem.

Suddenly, there were more stations and less programming with which to fill them.

Big names like Bing Crosby still refused to let stations play their records – they wanted people to buy them, not to listen to them on the radio.

That left just one source of popular recorded music: jukebox singles.

If you owned a jukebox, you had to put songs on it that people liked; if you didn’t, no one used your machine.

That made jukeboxes more democratic than other mediums.

If you were in a business catering to Black customers, you’d hear singles made by Black musicians.

Local radio stations began playing these singles in the early 1950s.

It was the first time Black music made for Black audiences reached large numbers of white listeners.

Slowly but surely, a musical style that had been brewing for a good 30 years started percolating into the consciousness of Americans.

It was called rock ’n’ roll.

Quintessentially Black in origin, the sound soon found great white exponents too: Elvis Presley, Bill Hayley, and Buddy Holly.

Rock ’n’ roll might have been nothing but a brief fad if it hadn’t been for transistor radios.

Old tube radios were like today’s TVs – a kind of hearth for the family to gather around.

In practice, that meant parental control.

It was America’s patriarchs and matriarchs who decided what the family listened to and that certainly wasn’t going to be rock ’n’ roll.

They said it was too noisy, too sexual, too little in awe of God and the flag.

What they meant was that it was too Black, even if it was played by white musicians.

Small, light, and cheap, transistor radios bypassed these parental gatekeepers.

For the first time, young people could own their own radios and choose their own music.

They chose rock ’n’ roll.

Music didn’t end segregation – that took the work of generations and millions of civil rights activists.

But when white teenagers heard Black music and found they liked it, some at least began to question what they’d been taught about its creators.

AI hijacks our evolved instinct for useful and meaningful stories

Julodimorpha bakewelli is better known as the jewel beetle.

Native to Australia, it uses visual cues to locate mates.

Unfortunately for males, brown beer bottles look a lot like the dimpled wing cases of females.

In the 1970s, scientists observed males mounting discarded, sun-hot bottles and dying from heat exposure.

A decade later, the species was close to extinction.

In 2016, an AI system called AlphaGo beat the best human player at Go.

Until that point, this ancient and mind-bogglingly difficult game had proved resistant to brute-force computation.

When the system defeated Lee Sedol, the South Korean reigning world champion, it was clear that a new frontier in machine learning had been crossed.

There’s a thread tying these stories together.

To unravel it, we need to talk about superstimuli.

Before artificial lighting, the brightest horizon at night was always the ocean reflecting moonlight.

For sea turtle hatchlings, this stimulus triggers an evolved instinct to head into deep water away from land-dwelling predators.

Manmade objects such as street lamps can “overmatch” once-reliable stimuli, producing maladaptive behaviors like turtles crawling onto hotel beaches.

When scientists talk about superstimuli, they mean these kinds of objects.

DeepMind, the company that made AlphaGo, used reinforcement learning to train its Go system.

The idea is as simple as the computing is complex: tell a computer to get the best score in a game and wait while it runs billions of permutations to get there.

When companies like Google and Facebook scrambled to buy DeepMind, it was because they understood that this technology could also be used to control what stories we read, hear, and see.

Take Facebook, which has been using reinforcement learning for over a decade.

The objective is the same as AlphaGo’s.

Facebook’s system chews on the data it collects on users’ clicks, likes, and shares until it finds the winning move: the content that most reliably motivates you and I to click on it.

In other words: the highest score.

Unlike other species, we’re able to produce our own superstimuli.

Reinforcement learning is part dimpled beer bottle, part disorienting street lamp: it hijacks our evolved instinct for useful and meaningful stories to sell us burgers, bogus cures, and bathroom cleaners.

If that means drowning democracies in fake news and conspiracies, so much the worse for democracies.

If politicians aren’t going to save us, we’ll have to do it ourselves

Silicon Valley isn’t the first commercial power to sell our attention to advertisers.

Nor is it first to do so using compelling stories.

Explosions and one-liners fill seats when James Bond movies hit theaters, but we leave knowing exactly which Dutch lager 007 finds most refreshing.

TV, radio, magazines, and newspapers use the same tricks.

The difference is curation.

At the very least, there’s an editorial team that understands the meaning of the content newspapers and TV stations publish and broadcast.

A company like Facebook doesn’t curate or edit or even know what’s in the stories it places on users’ feeds: the entire process is automated.

Their highly profitable model is a problem for the rest of us.

Learning machines can predict the order of words in sentences and win games of Go, but they can’t ascribe meaning to those sentences or games – that’s still something only humans can do.

So, what happens when we entrust these machines with distributing meaning in our societies?

The journalist Kevin Roose has one troubling answer.

In a 2019 experiment for the New York Times, Roose created a fresh Facebook account and “liked” boilerplate stories about the Republican National Convention.

Within 72 hours, his feed was displaying stories from the Daily Stormer, a conspiratorial message board run by unashamed neo-Nazis.

Roose’s story is bigger than the presence of political extremists online.

Our brains respond to black-and-white accounts of villains and heroes.

Propagandists have always known that.

So have democracies: that’s why fact-checking and the careful weighing of claims are highly valued in open societies.

A learning machine that’s been instructed to get the highest score doesn’t “know” anything, but its data inputs tell it something similar.

The best move, the move that most reliably gets us clicking, is often the most extreme move.

That’s usually a story that stimulates the whole spectrum of bad feelings: anger, disgust, fear, and hatred.

We now live in high-technology societies.

Globally, the average age of elected officials is 52; in the United States, it’s 64.

Their most common professional background is law.

Even if they have the chops to understand new technology, proliferating crises mean that there’s less and less time to be curious about them.

In any case, elderly lawyers aren’t the ideal demographic to lead us into the AI age.

Unfortunately, we’re stuck with them: our leaders seem intent on clinging to power well past dementia and unto death.

Assuming politicians aren’t going to save us, we have two choices.

We can either live in a world in which people believe anything that captures their attention or confirms their biases, or we can educate our children in critical media literacy several times each week, from kindergarten through to graduation.

Final summary

In this Blink to The Story of Stories by Kevin Ashton, you’ve learned that the human desire to share experiences through storytelling has shaped everything from our physiology to the technology we develop.

While our desire to tell others a captivating tale that engages our emotions has served an important evolutionary purpose, it also has a darker side – the potential for those with a storytelling platform to influence and exploit us.

In an age where technology saturates us with stories, critical thinking, curiosity and fact-checking offer a path away from rhetoric and toward meaningful communication.

Okay, that’s it for this Blink.

We hope you enjoyed it.

If you can, please take the time to leave us a rating – we always appreciate your feedback.

See you in the next Blink.