What Came First: Stories or Language? Kevin Ashton on the Story of Stories
Keen On America
Outro
Andrew Keen closes the episode, thanks Kevin Ashton and directs listeners to subscribe and comment.
“Nobody’s reality is more or less real.” — Kevin Ashton
It’s the chicken and egg question. What came first: stories or language? For Kevin Ashton, the answer is stories. In his new book, The Story of Stories, Ashton argues that rather than inventing stories with language, we invented language to tell stories. Stories, for Ashton, predate language. They are what makes us human.
300,000 years ago, Ashton argues, humans sat around night fires needing to talk about things they couldn’t point to — the past, the future, the Gods. So they created language. Grunts got grammatical. And the grammar had a structure that hasn’t changed since: character, chronology, consequence. Every sentence in every one of the world’s 7,000 languages is built upon the need to tell stories. Every conversation you’ve ever had contains a narrative. Even this one.
I asked Ashton whether this makes reality itself just another narrative and him just another postmodernist. Our brains construct reality, he explained, in the same way a graphic user interface constructs a desktop. Our dog sees a different rainbow to the one we see. But, in contrast with our dog, we tell stories about that rainbow.
Ashton is a technologist who first coined the term “Internet of Things”. But on AI, he is surprisingly critical. A large language model is a more complicated toaster, he says. It can produce language that fits the format of a story — character, chronology, consequence — because it’s digested millions of words. But it can’t produce meaning. We humans, in contrast, are made meaningful by our stories. That’s why you are reading this now.
Five Takeaways
• We Invented Language to Tell Stories, Not the Other Way Around: Ashton’s central claim is that storytelling preceded and caused the evolution of language. A million years ago, humans around night fires needed to talk about things they couldn’t point to — the past, the future, the gods. Grunts became grammar. The structure hasn’t changed since: character, chronology, consequence. Every sentence in every one of the world’s 7,000 languages is built on this need to narrate.
• Nobody’s Reality Is Real: Our brains construct reality the way a graphic user interface constructs a desktop — useful, not true. Your dog sees a different rainbow than you do. Whose is real? Both. Neither. Ashton isn’t a postmodernist — he’s arguing that our story-shaped brains are the lens through which all experience is filtered, and there is no stepping outside it.
• The Bible Hitched a Ride on Writing: The world’s great religions spread because they were among the first stories to exploit writing as a distribution technology. The Bible is just a word for book. Scripture is a word for writing. Where those texts travelled, those religions still dominate today. Homer is an oral tradition frozen by the alphabet. The oldest surviving story in the world is Noah’s flood, and it comes from Southern Iraq, not Greece.
• A Large Language Model Is a More Complicated Toaster: Ashton is brutally dismissive of AI. A machine can produce something that fits the format of a story because it’s digested millions of them. But it can’t produce meaning. Machines are inherently meaningless. We anthropomorphise them because that’s what our story-shaped brains do — we named our cars, now we’re naming our chatbots.
• We Humans Are Made Meaningful by Our Stories: Ashton’s own life is the proof: a Birmingham DJ who learned Norwegian in nightclubs, fell for Ibsen, marketed lipstick for Procter & Gamble, and accidentally invented the Internet of Things because mascara kept going out of stock. No algorithm would have written that life. No machine could have lived it. That’s why you’re reading this now.
About the Guest
Kevin Ashton is a technologist and author who coined the term “the Internet of Things” and co-founded the Auto-ID Center at MIT. His previous book, How to Fly a Horse, was named Porchlight’s Business Book of the Year. The Story of Stories: The Million-Year History of a Uniquely Human Art is published by Harper. He lives in Austin, Texas.
References:
• The Story of Stories by Kevin Ashton (Harper, 2026) — the book under discussion.
• How to Fly a Horse by Kevin Ashton — his previous book on the secret history of invention.
• Episode 2836: Is Elon Human? — the Musk episode, in which we discussed AI, the scientific method as secular religion, and whether machines can think.
• Episode 2839: Have Our iPhones Eaten Our Brains? — Nelson Dellis on memory, AI slop, and cognitive atrophy — a natural companion to today’s conversation.
About Keen On America
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.
Chapters:
- (00:00) - Introduction: technology tells good stories about itself
- (01:46) - Language was invented to tell stories, not the other way around
- (04:47) - If stories are our water, how do you get outside them?
- (06:40) - Character, chronology, consequence: the Lego brick of narrative
- (07:07) - Hyper-realism and the graphic user interface of reality
- (09:05) - Nobody’s reality is real — your dog sees a different rainbow
- (12:35) - Darwin, Einstein, and science as storytelling
- (14:32) - True stories, true crime, and the O.J. Simpson test
- (17:15) - The Bible as storytelling technology
- (21:49) - Socrates vs. Plato: speech, writing, and the Reformation
- (23:49) - The Internet of Stories: from campfire to smartphone
- (25:05) - Were the Greeks really better storytellers? No.
- (28:49) - Favourite storytellers: Pynchon, McCarthy, Dead Space
- (30...
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