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In Dream Society, Jim Dator suggests that we are moving beyond the industrial age—organized around production—and beyond the information age—organized around knowledge—into a phase where emotion, narrative, identity, and performance dominate value creation. In this new configuration, symbolic resonance outweighs institutional principle. Experience matters more than output. Meaning organizes markets as much as material goods once did.
But if we widen the lens historically, this so-called novelty begins to look familiar.
The Pre-Modern World as Dream Society
Pre-modern civilizations were already structured around narrative power.
Myth grounded political legitimacy. Ritual sustained social cohesion. Kings ruled not merely through force, but through cosmology. Public life was theatrical. Truth was inseparable from sacred story.
Emotion did not follow reason; rather, what counted as “reason” was embedded within mythic frameworks. Medieval Christendom, imperial spectacles in Rome, classical rhetoric in Athens, and cosmological statecraft in Persia and China all reveal the same structural pattern: power was performative. Authority was narrated.
In that light, the industrial era appears historically anomalous. The Enlightenment elevated rationality into an organizing principle independent of myth. The 19th and 20th centuries institutionalized this orientation through bureaucratic governance, scientific method, capitalist production, and the nation-state. Rationalization became infrastructure.
If we adopt a cyclical perspective, then the Dream Society may not represent a radical rupture—but a reversion under new conditions.
What Is Actually New?
If emotion and narrative are not new, what is?
The difference lies not in structure but in amplitude.
Today we witness:
Temporal compression — narratives circulate globally in seconds.
Spatial expansion — emotional contagion crosses continents instantly.
Technological mediation — algorithms amplify performative behavior.
Individual-as-organization — a single person can mobilize myth at planetary scale.
Pre-modern myth required temples, courts, and oral transmission. Today, performance is digitized, quantified, algorithmically curated, and globally distributed.
The recurrence is structural; the scale is exponential.
This is not merely a return of narrative power. It is narrative power embedded in digital infrastructure. Emotion has become datafied. Identity has become scalable. Performance has become measurable.
The Rebalancing of Civilizational Logics
The industrial age privileged:
Production
Material infrastructure
Bureaucratic principle
Scientific rationality
The emerging era privileges:
Identity
Symbolic capital
Narrative coherence
Emotional alignment
But we should be careful: modern rational systems have not disappeared. Science continues. Institutions persist. Markets function. What has changed is the hierarchy.
Reason increasingly operates inside emotional ecosystems.
Scientific legitimacy, political authority, and economic value are mediated through narrative and affective resonance. Rational systems must now perform symbolically to maintain coordination.
We are not witnessing the death of reason. We are witnessing its subordination within mass emotional coordination systems.
Cycle or Spiral?
It may be too simple to describe this as a cycle. History rarely moves in perfect circles.
A spiral offers a better metaphor:
Pre-modern: myth-dominant
Modern: reason-dominant
Post-modern/Dream: myth re-emerges within technological hyper-structures
The spiral retains memory. The rational infrastructures built during modernity remain intact. But they now operate within emotionally saturated, algorithmically mediated environments.
In earlier eras, myth structured relatively bounded civilizations. Today, myth competes at planetary scale. The result is not a return to medieval conditions, but a new synthesis: rational systems embedded within mythic amplification networks.
The Deeper Oscillation
At a deeper level, human societies may oscillate between two modes of stability:
Stability through myth
Stability through rational structure
When rational systems grow too rigid, narrative and emotion return as corrective forces. When myth overwhelms coordination capacity, rationalization reasserts itself.
What distinguishes our moment is not the oscillation itself, but its planetary entanglement. Both mythic and rational logics now operate simultaneously, globally, and instantaneously.
The stakes are correspondingly higher.
Exception or Default?
This leads to a more provocative possibility.
Perhaps the industrial-information age was the exception—a historically brief dominance of rational abstraction. Perhaps the Dream Society is not an innovation, but the resurfacing of a deeper anthropological constant: humans coordinate through story before they coordinate through principle.
If so, then our era is not abandoning modernity but absorbing it. The mythic returns—but it returns armed with data centers, algorithms, and global networks.
The decisive question, then, is not whether the Dream Society is new.
It is whether we are witnessing:
A regression to pre-modern emotional governance,
Or the birth of a new synthesis between mythic and rational orders.
Is this merely restoration?
Or is it a civilizational mutation?
The answer will determine whether narrative becomes destabilizing spectacle—or a new foundation for planetary coordination.
And that remains an open question.
