CAOS and Narrative!
What you believe is crafted. Welcome to the cognitive theatre of your feed-shaped beliefs.
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I. Three Acts to Understand Where We Are
In Act One, Business Storytelling from Steve Jobs to Silicon Valley Bros, I showed how product centrality has steadily vanished. Storytelling is no longer wrapped around innovation. It drives it. And the face of that story is often the CEO—a figure closer to a mythic hero than a manager.
In Act Two, The Corporate Brand Is Dead, the final blow: corporate identity gives way to personal identity.
It’s no longer about trusting the brand, but trusting the feed.
Narrative dissolves from logos and lands in the founder’s LinkedIn profile, their podcast voice, their well-timed leaks. The product becomes background. The real plot is who’s telling it.
In Act Three, Alien Languages and Viral Ideas, I explored why certain narratives work.
Ideas don’t spread because they’re true.
They spread because they behave like cognitive viruses: short, ambiguous, easy to transmit, hard to disprove.
They’re not built to persuade.
They’re built to survive.
Three acts. One trajectory: storytelling has supplanted the product.
Value isn’t proven. It’s insinuated.
Trust isn’t built. It’s performed.
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II. Still Doubting It? Look at Our Kids
At this point, you might think: “Sure, but this is just a Silicon Valley drift—startups, marketing, AI…”
No. It’s much deeper.
It’s the infrastructure of the world we’re building.
Look at our kids. Listen to Freya India.
The original promise of social media was connection.
Instead, it delivered isolation, anxiety, depression.
75% of British children spend more time indoors than prison inmates.
Young people report higher loneliness than the elderly.
Even among the wealthy, meaning is in short supply.
Relationships are commodified, ephemeral, disintermediated.
Ghosting is normal. The Other has become invisible. And without material foundations—housing, stable work, community—there’s no space for joy or future.
Technology replaced human goals with artificial objectives: likes, followers, grinding.It gave us endless ways to stay connected, but fewer and fewer reasons to stay together.
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III. Custom-Built Realities
We no longer discover reality—we assemble it. And today, we assemble it in fragments, personalization, and scrolls. Attention is broken. Memory is full.
The never-ending content stream has made fact-checking irrelevant.
All it takes is internal consistency—or repetition— and something becomes true enough to function.
It started with the destruction of focus and the fragmentation of attention.
The overflow of information saturated our cognitive buffers.
Now we can’t track anything that lasts beyond a few screen swipes.
What we call reality is now a customized artifact, generated in real time through signals, biases, and micro-narratives. We’re fully aware of filter bubbles, algorithmic feeds, curated content. Everyone receives a different version of the world, designed to reinforce what they already believe.
News no longer needs to withstand verification.
It just needs to survive attention—long enough to be followed by another unverified signal that confirms the previous one.
And as Joseph Goebbels, Nazi propaganda minister, once said: “A lie told once remains a lie, but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth.”
In this landscape, stories don’t describe the world.
They construct custom worlds, synthesized to entertain—or entrap—each of us.
And only one thing moves freely between all of them: the legend.
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IV. The Absolute Genius of Sam Altman
Stephen Klein -KUDOS- put it perfectly in a Linkedin post: Sam Altman is not just a CEO. He’s the most effective storyteller of the AI age.
He doesn’t shout. He whispers.
He doesn’t promise. He implies.
He doesn’t publish roadmaps. He “leaks” them.
He’s the reluctant prophet of an infinite narrative—always in beta, always ahead.
He’s the Jobs of the algorithmic age.
His “big moves” aren’t products. They’re narrative acts:
The looming threat of AGI
The moral ambiguity of capped-profit
The viral leaks that clarify nothing yet ignite everything
The construction of a calm, almost ascetic persona—the CEO who doesn’t chase the stage, but owns it
Altman doesn’t just lead OpenAI.
He shapes the global perception of the future.
He is the clearest example of new power: not the one who builds things, but the one who tells the story better than anyone else.
And once that story takes hold, no one asks if it’s true.
Because it feels true.
And that’s enough.
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Final Scene
Maybe it’s always been this way.
But now it’s explicit. Accelerated. Scripted.
Directed like an Oscar-winning production.
Just like Steve Jobs did—through his legendary reality distortion field— today’s CEOs don’t lead companies. They generate imaginaries—for customers and investors alike.
This is the Cognitive Theatre: A stage where everyone performs inside a scenography of feeds, AIs, and micro-worlds.
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p.s. If you’re investing in paid content and advertorials, you’re probably not reading this. But if you are, ask yourself a few questions.
And if you’re just a regular human, caught mid-scroll, make sure you’re also saving time to think — critically. Preferably offline, immersed in the wild nature of our blue planet.
(Image: Damiano, Norway)