In its digital transformation, the basic situation of humanity is a poetic contest, a global theater in which we all participate, a war of narratives of contradictory propaganda, a war for the retelling of our human history. It is a contest for interpretive power over life as it happens, from the nanoscale to the far reaches of space. The outcome of this ultra-marathon contest is uncertain, as it radically changes, with each digital disruption going viral in the global system.

Whether as individuals or as a society, we live in a world of our stories that are now already so permeated with propaganda that it is disabling and life-threatening to our existence. Propaganda stories are invented in which we are the pawns of global players to fulfill the functions and roles intended for us. Once you have identified with your role you try to make the best of your choices, never assuming you could be anyone else.

The global players are almost as powerless in the maelstrom of this digitalized global theater, and are also merely puppets, which can play more sets using the momentum of power. Their subjects can primarily contribute as data guinea pigs to the course of history. For the global players, eternal life, total domination, or an escape to Mars are their rescue fantasies. The data donors have to fight and beg for every right and freedom. As foot soldiers, the population is misled, nudged by threats and led by the nose through promises of a better future.

Everyone lives dangerously. Some live dangerously because they are significant. Others live dangerously because they are insignificant. Everyone is a digital explorer in search of a suitable story, to tell ourselves and to present to others. We are dependent with our lives on the invention of a story. A story, which allows us to survive and be successful within the changing drifts of history.

As a general rule, we always know only part of the story, which we believe to know completely. We know the story of Icarus, whose father Daedalus reached deep into his box of tricks. He enabled his son to escape from captivity with the help of synthetic wings. We know that he warned him not to fly too high, lest the sun melts his wings.

Hardly anyone, however, knows that Daedalus also warned Icarus not to fly too low because the unpredictable air currents near the sea would mean his inevitable death. These deadly air currents just above the sea’s surface in the Icarus story symbolize a life without reflection and vision in which we are helpless against the storms of fate.

The sun represents clarity through reflection, imagination, and planning. We must orient ourselves to the sun of our reason even at the risk of being wrong. Even what is good and right as an idea can be fatal if we do not consider our concrete limitations when we try to realize our ideal.


Humanity on its technological high has to learn from the Icarus story. No idea, no matter how clever, can save us from developing the appropriate way of dealing with the immediate feedback in the practical use of our technology. Like Icarus, we must learn to navigate our technologies in a new environment to survive. Otherwise, what begins with minor high flight turbulence, ends with us mutilated like the remains of Icarus. We need to scale technological transformations, again and again, to meet our human needs.

But like Icarus, we are trapped. Some live in the palace room, others in the torture room of the labyrinth propaganda. Instead of helping each other out of the labyrinth, we deceive each other by playing that only the winner can reach the exit.

What we are presented within these propaganda wars, as the whole truth, is, as in the story of Icarus, truncated and altered so that we can believe in a cliché useful to propaganda, e.g., "The young fail because they don't listen to the old!" Young against old, men against women, left against right, obsessed with propaganda, we live in an Alice-in-Wonderland-like make-believe world where the breathtaking dramaturgy of clichés on our screens turns us into robots and immobilizes our individual decision-making like a palliative patient.

Only analysis and research immunize us against the tide of propaganda stories that have gone viral because they enable us to recognize patterns of our own zombie mode early enough and counteract them. Proposed advantages never replace our analysis and research.

As the powerful few desperately dare the Icarus flight from the captivity of our conflicted state of humanity to the sun of becoming a transhumanist superbeing, it could well be that the debris of this attempt will rain down on us subordinates.

Like lucid dreamers, we, therefore, have to unmask propaganda that can only imitate our true reality in a cartoonish way. Like a dream interpreter, we must examine each story for what desires and fears it appeals to, who benefits from it, and who we become in our own life story when we let that story become a part of our lives.

Only those who understand their own stories and ideas can refrain from adopting those of others. We have to learn how to express our stories and ideas in different media, learning to hear how to create awareness of how we tell our own story through the way we tell it.

Each medium is its own message, and all are part of our experience of our individual life stories. Continuous work on one's own story and our ability to tell it is necessary to protect ourselves from this propaganda.

Analysis and research are the sentinels guarding our life story and
human history. Through them, we create our verse to human history in formation flight with the sun of our imagination.
As long as we can, we should enjoy this freedom to create our own beats within the beat street of history.