Fire & Ghosts: The Digital Is NarrativeDraft

Last updated August 2026

<<Narrative technologies—the tools and settings through which people tell each other stories—can be read along two axes: how they distribute *narrative engagement* (the rhythm of when and how people participate) and how they distribute *narrative authority* (who gets to shape what a story means). When those two things are balanced and equitably shared, a narrative technology tends toward what I call conviviality, after Ivan Illich's term for tools that nurture human autonomy rather than displace it. When they concentrate into overimmersion or a closed authorship class, conviviality is lost. The following framework, "fire and ghosts," is my attempt to trace that dynamic across two very different narrative technologies: the hearth, and the digital product.>>

By understanding the risks of immersion and authorship concentration, we can begin analyzing how a narrative technology may nurture or displace conviviality. To gauge this, I trace the way the central fire in the proverbial hearth materially conducts narrative engagement and authority, and how this fire is rearranged into digital products.

The primordial example of fire is the Promethean bestowal as the gift of technology. <<(Zeus withheld fire from mortals to maintain divine supremacy, but Prometheus pitied the cold, vulnerable humans and concealed "flame in a fennel stalk" (Barney 4) to deliver us fire as the gift of technology.)>> This enabled us to illuminate and shape our world, as well as come together nightly to pass down stories that keep the world-shaping cycle going. Irish poet Padraic Colum depicts this as the "rhythm of the night" (3): the hearth sets a mood "acquiescent, fitted to wishes" (3) and facilitates storytelling of those wishes. Stories are transmitted—authored and reauthored—intimately during gatherings, a process that mimics firetending. Anthropologist John Niles describes how oral stories retain cultural continuity between tellings through "the theory of the recurrent thaw" (153): a person "freezes" an oral story while listening, but it becomes fluid again when they tell it to others, allowing each story to be "reborn, with personal features" (153) while passing heritage between people.

Further enriched by "somatic communication" (34) through body language, lighting the central fire initiates a warm, active process of narrative engagement, and even if one person is temporarily leading, anyone has the authority to tend the material and metaphorical fire to keep the rhythm of the night going. Thus, like the material science concept of a "substrate," defined as "any object or material upon which an organism grows or to which an organism is attached; an underlying layer or substance" ("Substrate"), fire acts like the substrate for human storytelling. Activities like firelighting and firetending respectively resemble acts of narrative emplotment and authorship.

Hearth communities understand intrinsically that "only with narrative is life elevated above its sheer facticity, above its nakedness" (Han 27). Fire doubles as the means of giving life meaning, inspiring "courage to create a world-changing narrative" (14). Just as with a physical fire, the light of the narrative hearth has the ability to cast shadows in our social spaces. Italo Calvino describes meaning making: when a storyteller lays out a combination of signs into a sequence—like words in a sentence or metaphors in a pattern—their combination arouses "ghosts" of meaning and ideas "half buried or erased from our unconscious" (Calvino, "Cybernetics and Ghosts" 3). These ghosts carry a perspective that can invoke intimate yet kaleidoscopic interpretations, enabling plurisignification that helps gauge "shifting human interests and… social mores" (Teverson 7).

Some ghosts gain authority and "haunt" a community's social imagination through an author function that connects them to certain social structures. Eve Tuck and C. Ree exemplify this in their 2013 critical autoethnography of haunting under coloniality. While some stories fade, others persist by force or relevance. In the case of colonialism, a "relentless remembering and reminding that will not be appeased by settler society's assurances of innocence and reconciliation" (4) continues ancestral wisdom about the violence of settler colonialism through the recurrent thaw. In this way, haunting emerges from an original attribution of significant weight or authority, then becomes continuously authored and reauthored. What lingers may be hopeful and consensual, or unilateral and imposing; either way, ghosts emerge as a substrate for the psychosocial mechanisms that make stories persist in shared reality.

Together, fire and ghosts forge the cybernetic fulcrum <<(cybernetics being the study of how systems, from animal herds to machines, steer themselves toward a goal through feedback loops (Pangaro))>> upon which a community pivots and evolves, with the most haunting stories regulating that evolution. Colum argued that the advent of gas lamps and light technology "meant the cessation of the traditional stories" (3); the central fire transforming into pervasive lighting inadvertently killed the rhythm of the night in favor of written stories and high-production media. Han notes that the "decline of narration" began when the modern novel—"born of the lonely, isolated individual"—upended the collaborative meaning making of the communal hearth (Han 5). These events seem to precipitate the second watershed of narrative technologies, toward our eventual descent into tool self-perpetuation.

Yet the intercourse facilitated by fire and ghosts in the past was never perfectly convivial. Narrativity could be hoarded by the best storytellers, or those with the most charisma or power, systematically excluding certain perspectives from interacting with the substrates. Fire and ghosts have also not disappeared: fast forward several millennia and we have harnessed narrativity anew with the help of modern lighting, projection screens, and most significantly, the digital device. The substrates are compartmentalized into new forms: fire as the electrical currents that run through silicon transistors underlying our screens, and ghosts within our digital footprint. Conviviality remains a dynamic quality based on the relationship between narrative engagement and its authority structures. However, today's interactive digital narratives, forged by technocratic and algorithmic determination, distort the reality of our relationships with ourselves and each other—casting an unprecedented shadow over our modern, fragmented hearth.

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