The Crisis of Narration by Byung-Chul Han review – how big tech altered the narrative

From Instagram to health apps, the modern world no longer allows for rich and complex storytelling argues the philosopher in an entertaining polemic that's short on humility

In Charlie Kaufman's puppet animation Anomalisa, everyone looks and speaks the same. It's as though a scene in an earlier Kaufman-penned film, Being John Malkovich, in which Malkovich surveys a restaurant from his table and notices everyone - waiters, diners, perhaps even a passing dog - have his face and voice, has gone global.

No one is immune: at one point, the mouth of the narrator, a motivational speaker called Michael Stone, falls from his face into his hands and chatters away all by itself. The guru's improving homilies are so artificially intelligent, predictable and effectively transhuman, that they need no warming body or soul to sustain them.