I personally am overwhelmed by the amount of information sapiens have acquired, and the endless fictions and stories there are. It saddens me to think I will never fully collect all of the myths our species have created, and even more so; I am anxious and depressed over stories that have been lost to history. The natural factor of change and belief in one fiction over the other has led to the destruction of civilizations, language and people depending on which fiction had more power. The lost memory of millions frightens me. With the arisal of the internet and technology that makes recording of stories more accessible, comes the double edged sword of media saturation; stories get lost and forgotten with media saturation. I am curious to what history will be remembered and recorded in the age of complete media saturation. Whose voices will resonate in future? Whose memories and what fictions will children learn about? What histories will be lost?

Our species, homo sapiens, is a primarily social animal, where cooperation is key for survival and reproduction. The wake of the cognitive revolution between 70,000 and 30,000 years ago, in which new ways of thinking and communication emerged, enabled our species to create more intricate networks of cooperation. Our language as a result of this revolution, has the specific unique feature of transmitting information about things that do not exist at all. We can talk about things that we can not see or touch, but that we can imagine. Fictions has enabled homo sapiens to weave common myths to allow flexible cooperation that breach the threshold of the max natural size of a band of sapiens bound by gossip (around 150 individuals). We can cooperate with strangers successfully now by believing in common myths. This allows for the large scale sapien cooperation we see today; either tied by fictions such as a modern state, church, and currency.1

The power of fictions has allowed our species to essentially conquer the world, and grow exponentially and create flexible systems and massive cities. Yet fictions can be dangerously imaginative and distracting; taking us away from the objective reality of our physical world and our own social needs, and into the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations. Fictions are sufficient to bind and unite us superficially, but we still need to be anchored in reality; we are creatures of social habit that need an intimate group to share gossip.