Today I want to explore a trajectory I’ve been noticing.

It’s imperfect, but maybe it leads somewhere interesting.

First: oral histories. For centuries, cultures preserved memory through myth and story — passed from parent to child, elder to youth. Hawaiian chants. Polynesian myths. Homer’s Iliad, carried in human voices long before it was written down.

Then came written histories. Writing shifted the dynamic: no longer did memory have to hold everything. You could inscribe it, preserve it, transmit it. And yet memorization didn’t vanish. Even with the Qur’an, a written work, there is still a deep tradition of memorizing and reciting it in full.

Then: media histories. We captured stories through film, audio, photography, manuscripts, and eventually digital text. Human memory was no longer the bottleneck. Storage became cheap. The archive grew vast.

Now we’re entering a new stage: generative histories.

With LLMs and generative tools, we can not only capture but create at scale. A rambling voice note can be turned into a story. A prompt can become music, art, or narrative. The barrier to storytelling has never been lower.

This creates a paradox. On one hand, there is abundance — infinite content, infinite story. On the other, there is overwhelm. Even before LLMs, a trip to a large bookstore was enough to remind us: there is far more than we can ever consume.

So maybe the next stage is synthesized histories.

We will need tools that don’t just generate more stories, but that stitch them together. That gather fragments from across cultures, geographies, and times, and shape them into something coherent.

This is where I find hope. The Bahá’í principle of the oneness of humanity suggests our story is ultimately collective. Harari in Sapiens makes a similar point: humans unify through shared fictions and shared narratives. That’s how we scale from tribes of 100 to nation-states of millions.

Perhaps synthesis can help us move beyond the fragmented stories of nations into a more unified story of humanity. A tapestry woven from many threads.

Of course, there’s a danger too. As Jenny Odell reminds us, being constantly pulled into media from every place and time can dislocate us from our own geography and present moment. We scroll from a 1920s war archive to a present-day tragedy to a Siberian fox video — and we feel detached from here and now.

Still, I sense hope. As context windows expand — millions of tokens, perhaps more — the possibility emerges to pull together vast amounts of data, to surface the unifying themes that show us we are not so different after all.

Every culture has a creation myth. Every culture has a music tradition. These parallels remind us of our shared humanity.

Maybe synthesized histories can do the same — giving us stories that unite rather than divide, helping us see ourselves not as separate fragments, but as part of one human journey.