From Fake News to the End Times: The Emerging Narrative Polycrisis as Global Threat

Non-Technical summary.The Anthropocene polycrisis is echoed by a partner phenomenon that resides largely in the human imagination.I propose calling it the narrative polycrisis: a profound and globalized loss of connection between the empirical world and the stories people develop about and from it.Rooted in revolutionary digital technologies, social media, and artificial intelligence, and boosted by loss of ecological literacy, neoliberal thinking, and end-times worries, this linked set of disruptions in how people process and communicate information constitutes a breakdown in cognitive infrastructure that both reflects and worsens the visible elements of the Anthropocene polycrisis.Technical summary.Well-warranted critiques of the effects of mass media are nothing new, but only in recent decades have trends in technology, the media industry, and the sociopolitical realm fused to create a unique set of problems that constitutes a polycrisis.I label it the narrative polycrisis, both because it is characterized by many feedbacks between its own components and those of the larger Anthropocene polycrisis, and because like the larger polycrisis it poses unique threats to human well-being.This paper lays out some of the primary technological and socio-political roots of the narrative polycrisis and offers a defense of my choice of terminology.It also suggests potential directions for inquiry that may help researchers and others who seek to work to improve human well-being better understand how the narrative polycrisis and Anthropocene polycrisis are linked and could be addressed.Social media summary.The Anthropocene polycrisis is shadowed by a narrative polycrisis-a new and dangerous breakdown in how we communicate.Even as the Anthropocene polycrisis manifests in myriad ways throughout the physical world, it is echoed by a partner phenomenon centered in the human imagination.It is the narrative polycrisis: a profound disjuncture in the connection between the empirical world and the stories people develop about and from it.For all the urgency of stemming the heating of the planet, the loss of its biodiversity, and the pollution of its organisms and ecosystems, it is unlikely that we humans will succeed in those efforts without simultaneously addressing how information connects belief and action.