Narrative Engineering: The Core Basics - Part Twelve Every significant technological shift in the history of creative industries has been accompanied by two things. The first is a wave of anxiety about what the technology will destroy: livelihoods, art forms, the conditions that made a particular kind of creative work

Narrative Engineering: The Core Basics - Part Eleven Something significant is happening in the global creative economy, and the mainstream narrative about it is still, in fundamental ways, getting it wrong. The mainstream narrative goes something like this: African creativity is rising. African music is going global. African fashion is

Narrative Engineering: The Core Basics - Part Ten There is a question that sits at the centre of every creative career, every creative business, and every creative economy, and it is almost never asked directly in the environments where its answer matters most. The question is: who owns this? Not

Narrative Engineering: The Core Basics - Part Nine There is a belief so deeply embedded in contemporary creative culture that it functions less like an opinion and more like an established fact. The belief is this: if you build a large enough audience, if enough people see your work, if

Narrative Engineering: The Core Basics - Part Eight Most people who work in or around creative industries develop, over time, a surface-level understanding of how those industries function. They understand talent. They understand trends. They understand audiences, platforms, and the dynamics of visibility. What they rarely develop, what almost no

Narrative Engineering: The Core Basics - Part Seven There is a conversation that happens constantly in the creative world, in group chats and studio green rooms and after-show dinners and direct messages between people who have worked in this industry long enough to know better than to say it publicly.

Narrative Engineering: The Core Basics - Part Six There is a pattern so consistent across the global creative economy that it should by now be treated as a structural law rather than an observation. A culture produces extraordinary creative work. That work finds an audience, generates genuine cultural influence, and

Narrative Engineering: The Core Basics - Part Five Most people who work in the creative industries have never been taught how those industries actually function. They were taught craft. They were taught technique. They were taught, in various ways, how to produce work that is compelling, original, and resonant with

Narrative Engineering: The Core Basics - Part Four If the Narrative Power Triangle explains what the three forces of creative economies are, narrative, infrastructure, and capital, then the Narrative Power Stack answers a harder question. It explains how those forces actually move. It maps the sequence through which an idea

Narrative Engineering: The Core Basics - Part Three There is a question that almost nobody in the creative world asks seriously, and it is not because the question is difficult. It is because the answer is uncomfortable. The question is this: why do some creative cultures shape the world while

Narrative Engineering: The Core Basics - Part Two Most people encounter culture at the surface level. They see films, fashion, music, social media trends, and viral moments, and they assume that influence begins and ends there. What they are actually seeing is the final layer of a much deeper system,