michael_nielsen

Not just because of the connection to UI design, of course! But rather his essay describes a way of understanding story, and how we understand the world.

This is marvelous. Ofc beyond fiction there's a sinister tinge to it: how immensely flexible our minds are to enter, accept and internalise any story that looks coherent - that seems to provide info on how to lead out lives and what to think - and then exist in it.

One of the things I took from that Tolkien essay is some of the difference between story & myth. It's exaggerated and too blunt, but roughly: a culture has a plethora of stories; myths, by contrast, have cultures.

And much of the detailed difference between story and myth lies in this quality of subcreation. (Reading Tolkien on his beloved Christianity and Catholicism reinforces this point, I believe.)

You mean that every generation can add to a story - but every generation *reinterprets* myth as it is? This would make Hamlet a myth.

Something like that. I think the idea is sufficiently interesting & generative that I don't _want_ to reduce it to a tweet, or a single essay. But, yes, to a large extent our culture has been made by Hamlet (or by the Bible, or Star Wars, etc).

Isn't this more a competition/distribution question tbh? Or how P Thiel would like us to think about Google or something Be the last search company... Be the last canonical version of Hamlet. The last version of what Christ was. The last way to use present perfect in English.

I suppose if you're thinking of it as trying to win a competition between startups. But I'm quite happy to think of it otherwise. If myths have cultures, and that comes (in part) out of the act of subcreation, then who "wins" is really beside the point.