In the article On the Unraveling of Scripts, my favourite digital writer Venkatesh Rao writes about scripts and scriptlessness.
I’ll define scripts as collections of learned patterns of behavior that reliably supply both psychological and material resources for survival. These lend meaning and sustenance to power the script, respectively.
The article refers to these scripts in two forms, individual scripts and collective scripts. Individual scripts are simpler: they are the series of steps, recipes of plans someone has for their personal character arc. Narratives always make retroactive sense, and humans are constantly making sense of their lifes by putting themselves at the the center of a hero’s journey.
Collective scripts are more complicated: they are the set of scripts that power common meaning and understanding. In a sense, culture is a set of scripts, and so is religion. Scripts are actionable lists derived from a set of values, the typical Singaporean script looks like this:
- Go to primary school
- Get a good PSLE grade, go to secondary school
- Good O’levels -> Good A’levels -> Get into NUS
- Get a girlfriend
- Land a well-paying job
- Apply for BTO
- Get married
- Get promoted and keep getting promoted
- … keep imaging the Singaporean dream
To me it feels like Singapore has a small list of valid scripts, more liberal countries like the United States and the UK might have a larger set of valid scripts. A script doesn’t just have to apply to general life, it could apply to something specific. A script of healthcare in Singapore looks like:
- Notice yourself falling sick
- Go to the polyclinic
- Get referred to a specialist and get an appointment
So the script induces a lot more action than it specifies, by cueing patterns of behavior that already exist in the culture (so a script is something like a program in a high-level language that makes extensive use of API calls and library functions, unlike raw machine code). In the case of improvisation, the script is also driven by these patterns. Most scripts are some mix of pre-scripted and improvised (or feedforward and feedback).
Scripts can invoke sub-scripts which are similar to social subroutines that handle lower level behaviours. A large part of a country (or a community’s) culture is learning the set of scripts that govern it. culture-is-a-product and subculture memberships are selling access to scripts that define people’s behaviours (this is one to say cult in an elaborate sense).
One key difference that should be highlighted between scripts and executable code is that scripts come with some metadata which conveys meaning to the actions. It is an intentional set of actions not just any random set. Venketash Rao here says:
When scripts unravel, it is a loss of both motivation (meaning) and sustenance (sustainability, survivability, the ability to execute the script)
On unravelling scripts: ideas-are-cannibals destruction-and-creation-are-path-dependent