In class, on October 14, we discussed political narratives. I began a narrative on plastic grocery bags in California. I will complete that and post it as an example.
Your assignment is to choose one of the other four narrative leads and write the narrative using the five-paragraph structure. The general outline for the narrative should be similar to the following, but which narrative elements to include in each paragraph will depend on the story and your choices. Just be sure to include all of them somewhere:
Introduction with an overview of the story.
Second paragraph with narrative elements giving background, including the time, place and cause of the action.
Third paragraph with narrative elements including the agent, the action, and the manner as well as the peripeteia or reversal of the intended or expected outcome.
Fourth paragraph with narrative elements including the anagnorisis or the recognition of what happened, how, and why, and the consequential pathos or resultant suffering.
Conclusion that recaps the narrative’s major elements and summarizes the outcome.
| The 6 Narrative Concomitants Agent (Who): The person or character who performs the action. Action (What): The specific deed, event, or thing that was done. Time (When): The historical period, season, or time of day when the action took place. Place (Where): The physical location or setting of the narrative. Manner (How): The way or mode in which the action was carried out. Cause (Why): The motivation, reason, or ultimate purpose behind the action. |
Narratives for assignment:
Narrative 1: The CrowdStrike Global IT Outage (2024)
Category: Technology vs. Society / Monoculture Risks
- The Setup: In July 2024, a single faulty software update pushed by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike to Microsoft Windows machines crashed approximately 8.5 million computers worldwide. It instantly grounded global air traffic, halted hospital surgeries, shut down 911 dispatch centers, and disrupted banking infrastructure.
Narrative 2: The “Urban Doom Loop” & Remote Work (2020–Present)
Category: Corporate Politics / Economics / Social Order
- The Setup: The sudden shift to remote work during the pandemic revealed a deep conflict between corporate employees, commercial real estate developers, and municipal governments. As employees refused to return to office towers, corporate real estate values cratered, devastating the tax base of major cities and destroying the ecosystem of small businesses (lunch spots, dry cleaners, transit) reliant on office foot traffic.
Narrative 3: The Erasure of Digital “Ownership” (The Streaming Economy)
Category: Economic Issues / Cultural Property / Technology
- The Setup: Over the past decade, media companies transitioned consumers from buying physical media (CDs, DVDs, physical books) to paying monthly subscriptions (PlayStation Store, Discovery/Max, Amazon Prime Video). Recently, media companies began quietly deleting purchased digital movies from user libraries or pulling entire TV series off platforms overnight for tax write-offs, while simultaneously cracking down on password-sharing.
Narrative 4: Battlefield Dependency on Starlink
Category: Technology vs. State Sovereignty / Corporate Authority in War
- The Setup: When a cyberattack crippled Ukraine’s military communications at the onset of the 2022 invasion, SpaceX rapidly deployed thousands of Starlink satellite terminals. What began as an emergency backup quickly became the absolute backbone of modern algorithmic warfare, powering artillery targeting, drone strikes, and frontline communications. However, as the conflict dragged on, both sides became tethered to this privatized network, leaving nation-states subject to the geo-fencing policies, terms of service, and unilateral decisions of a single private corporation.
Write a 5-paragraph narrative on one of above political narrative subjects. Include all the narrative elements. Submit it as a post in the “narratio” category.