Enchanted — Working With Lore P2 Discursive Landscapes

The common feature in the work of these emerging thinkers is the centrality of lore, as in folklore, the lore of a fictional extended universe, or more pertinently, the water-cooler lore of an organization, in the framing of the traditional concerns of management and organizational theory. Lore, you might say is the feedstock of both stories and wo... See more

If this hypothesis of lorecraft as an emerging managerial capability is correct, any organization — be it a traditional corporation, a DAO, or just a complex money-making coordination pattern passing through Twitter or TikTok like a wave — will thrive and do interesting things to the extent it has both interesting ideas and content — and skilled lo... See more

In the world building and worlding eras, when the inhabitants of a world misbehaved and tried to smuggle their own narratives into the worldthe creators have been policing them to reestablish order. In the World Weaving era, rather than working with scripted storylines we should create lore-pills and origin myths that can be sewn together and evolv

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Let’s consider that formula: community knowledge + solidarity networks + folklore. The web3 communities I’m in have powerful ideologies; these are spaces with shared perspectives and rituals that have emerged over a compressed period of time. This manner of collective world-building in and around projects (in the best possible way, I wouldn’t use t... See more

But there’s a really compelling alternate hypothesis — lorecraft is how you design and manage organizations where all the dull and boring stuff is increasingly being automated away, and what’s left of management and leadership functions is increasingly just the interesting and hard to automate stuff.

Lore is something you witness, and attempt to shape as it emerges, if it emerges, not something you design and execute. You cannot, for instance, set out to write an origin myth. At least not one that will work as lore (though it may work as part of a grift). You can only recognize and institutionalize one. 

Lorecraft is how you design and manage organizations where all the dull and boring stuff is increasingly being automated away, and what’s left of management and leadership functions is increasingly just the interesting and hard to automate stuff. This is the hypothesis of lorecraft as a genuinely new managerial capability.