[chrisin2d]

"Lossy compression" is a succinct description. Humans, constrained by finite time and cognitive resources, cannot understand reality at its full resolution. Narratives are compact maps of the territory.

We're living in a second Gutenberg moment. I think that epistemic ecosystems, like biological ones, have information carrying capacities — the aggregate ability of its members to produce, exchange, and use information. We all live in one or more such ecosystems. Think: liberal university-educated Bay Area millennials in technology and the kind of information they produce and exchange within that ecosystem. When the information carrying capacity is exceeded, the ecosystem becomes unstable (Narrative collapse) and has to stabilise by splitting into smaller ecosystems that can support coherent, authoritative Narratives.

I think it's useful to look at the first Gutenberg moment. The mass production of books caused an information explosion that exceeded the information carrying capacity of the Catholic ecosystem and resulted in its fracture into smaller Catholic and Protestant ecosystems that can exert enough power to control Narratives (new capacities). We can see a similar scaled-up phenomenon today where countless novel virtual communities and ideological factions that don't conform to the traditional Left-Right dichotomy emerge and offer people various new, coherent maps to the vastly expanded information territory.