Myths vs Protocols

Sorelian myths organize collective action around an image of the future. For Georges Sorel, the general strike mattered less as a prediction than as a way of compressing separate struggles into a single image through which people could understand themselves as acting together. The future organizes the present. Because myths coordinate by giving many events a common meaning, they tend toward totalization: more of the world gets interpreted through the same central image. Gramsci asks how such a myth becomes durable. Organization gives it memory, strategy and continuity. Institutions acting around the myth then alter reality, and those changes can make the original myth seem increasingly plausible. Myth produces action; action produces institutions; institutions begin to materialize the myth. AGI can be understood this way. It remains an unstable technical category, yet it already organizes research, investment, data centers, energy infrastructure, regulation and career decisions. An anticipated future becomes a premise of present institutions. Protocols organize action differently. They do not require a shared vision of the future, only common rules through which heterogeneous actors can interact. Ursula Le Guin’s distinction between the spear and the carrier bag is useful here: the Sorelian myth resembles the spear story, aimed toward a decisive event; protocol resembles the carrier bag, holding different actors and purposes together without requiring a single destination. Both contain arguments about how the world should work. Myths persist by being continually recharged and returned to consciousness. Protocols persist by becoming embedded in standards, defaults and infrastructure. Their engineered arguments acquire hardness as they become less visible. The danger of myth is totalization: one story explains everything. The danger of protocol is naturalization: a contested argument comes to seem like simply how the world works.