Even as the Anthropocene polycrisis manifests in myriad ways throughout the physical world, it is echoed by a partner phenomenon centered in the human imagination. It is the narrative polycrisis: a profound disjuncture in the connection between the empirical world and the stories people develop about and from it. For all the urgency of stemming the heating of the planet, the loss of its biodiversity, and the pollution of its organisms and ecosystems, it is unlikely that we humans will succeed in those efforts without simultaneously addressing how information connects belief and action.

Critiques of information ecosystems based on mass media are nothing new. But just as the Anthropocene polycrisis represents a massive globalization of problems that have long existed at a smaller geographic scale, today’s narrative polycrisis is uniquely pernicious because it is so wide-ranging. Multiple crises in processing and disseminating information have merged into a singular Gordian knot that threatens our understanding of what empirical truth is, who bears agency, and what the sharing of information is ultimately for.

This polycrisis has some clear root causes:

New communication technologies. The development of the Internet in the late 20th century presented dramatic new opportunities to disseminate propaganda and so-called ‘fake news,’ while the simultaneous expansion of digital photography and video, including editing tools, allowed images to be manipulated as easily as words. In the 21st century, new technologies enabling the creation of ‘deep-fake’ videos threaten the last vestiges of the age-old foundational belief that ‘seeing is believing’.

Social media. The rise of social media in the early 21st century has been the largest blow to the integrity of journalism as a ‘gatekeeping’ profession that, though always flawed, worked to establish a common base of understanding among citizenries and electorates. Standards of information integrity in social-media environments have not developed to anything like the extent to which they were in many professional journalism communities in the 20th century (Fisher, Reference Fisher2022); in effect, there are now far too many authors to fact-check.

Artificial intelligence. Since the public release of ChatGPT in 2022, a groundswell of critique has arisen in response to concerns about how it and other artificial intelligence (AI) technologies threaten creativity, political discourse, scientific inquiry, and human agency. Some researchers have identified AI as one of the primary ‘existential risks’ that may threaten the survival of humanity – for example, if AI tools paired with robotic technologies develop decision-making processes entirely independent of human beings (Grace et al., Reference Grace, Stewart, Sandkuhler, Thomas, Weinstein-Raun, Brauner and Korzekwa2024; Yudkowsky & Soares, Reference Yudkowsky and Soares2025). Written and visual content mimicking conventional stories can now be developed without human input – a new phenomenon in history.

Loss of local ecological literacy. Many people are ill equipped to critically assess information about such threats as climate breakdown or biodiversity loss. Fueled by such trends as urbanization, consumerism, migration (whether domestic or international), mechanization of food production, and loss of story-based traditional Indigenous knowledge, a widespread loss of ecological understanding has left many people susceptible to misconstruing both causes and consequences of environmental change (Edwards et al., Reference Edwards, Larson and Clayton2023).

Neoliberal capitalism. Neoliberal economic and political philosophies, which have been largely ascendant since the 1970s, are based on the paired premises, and well-developed storylines, that (1) economic growth can continue indefinitely on a finite planet, even in the face of unprecedented and rapid climate breakdown; and (2) government-based regulation of problems – or even acknowledgement of problems – is anathema to a market-based economic system. Despite heavy critiques (Keen, Reference Keen2020; Pindyck, Reference Pindyck2017), neoliberal ideals continue to inform and often structure information flows – for example, through the sensation- and profit-based business models of many news outlets.

Seduction by apocalypse. As the contours of contemporary crises have become more well known, end-times thinking – native to some religious traditions – has spread into a broader range of human communities. Whether motivated by spirituality (Veldman, Reference Veldman2019), nihilism (Winslow, Reference Winslow2020), eco-anxiety (Sangervo et al., Reference Sangervo, Jylhä and Pihkala2022), or despair about the future of democratic governance (Lindvall, Reference Lindvall2021), the resulting no-hope storylines simultaneously feed on and can themselves stimulate elements of the physical Anthropocene polycrisis (Friederici, Reference Friederici2022).

Any one of these elements can stand as its own complex nexus of crises, but together they amplify one another and interact with the physical elements of the overall Anthropocene polycrisis. AI tools allow so-called ‘threat actors’ to improve the language quality of targeted social-media disinformation aimed across linguistic and political boundaries, fueling autocratic regimes around the globe (OpenAI, 2024). The massive amount of electricity required to run the data centers AI needs slows the transition from fossil-fuel to renewable electricity generation, imperiling progress in combatting climate change (Lacoste et al., Reference Lacoste, Luccioni, Schmidt and Dandres2019). Furthermore, climate progress has been slowed by both political adherence to neoliberal worldviews and individual end-times thinking – a failure that in turn has led to increased doubt about prospects for democracy (Friederici, Reference Friederici2022).

It is the intertwining and often causal linkages between these crises that merit the use of the term polycrisis. But why narrative? The term refers to a ‘system of stories’, or a broad enmeshed network of ‘content’ originating from multiple sources, in multiple modalities, that in the aggregate forms a worldview (Reinsborough & Canning, Reference Reinsborough and Canning2017). Narrative in this sense is not only a defined set of stories used to explain a phenomenon but rather a much more deeply rooted product of cognition that we use to understand the world and our place in it – a core tool in establishing individual and societal identity. When threatened, such narratives of identity are often ardently defended, often at the cost of fairly considering contrary information. If one way of thinking about the Anthropocene polycrisis is as a breakdown in global infrastructure, whether ecological or political, then a useful way of thinking about the narrative polycrisis is that it constitutes a breakdown in human cognitive infrastructure arising out of sometimes well-founded doubts about the quality of incoming information.

We can plumb this global-scale narrative polycrisis by examining previous narrative crises. How have communities and societies navigated severe trauma such as war, genocide, and forced migration? Often, researchers have found that stories of such events fail to resonate because audiences find them unimaginable (Jackson, Reference Jackson2013), or experiences of crisis are so intense that the potential tellers of stories cannot even articulate them (Becker, Reference Becker1997). As the anthropologist Michael Jackson put it (Jackson, Reference Jackson2013), ‘life all but ceases to be narratable’. Traditional cultures often exercise a core belief that the proper functioning of the world relies on such narrative practices as storytelling and ritual; under trauma, the central role that narrative plays in creating meaning, in world-making, falls apart.

This is a helpful, if incomplete, way of understanding the narrative polycrisis, because one of its elements is that it consistently does offer narrative explanations. But rather than emphasizing that participants play a critical role in creating meaning in the world, these pathways tend to emphasize the opposite by obviating the possibility of meaningful human agency.

This suggests at least three promising directions for research and action. Although there is a large and rapidly growing literature on psychological responses to climate breakdown, among other issues, it could be more firmly situated within the context of a broken information ecosystem. The psychological concept of ‘narrative identity’ posits that a narrative of self is a core element of personality – and one strongly associated with well-being and possibly feelings of agency (Adler et al., Reference Adler, Lodi-Smith, Philippe and Houle2016; McAdams, Reference McAdams2019). Expanding individuals’ understanding of narrative identity may help ground them as effective participants in the public sphere in the face of the information- and story-based slipperiness that characterizes the narrative polycrisis. Polling examining how many people worry about climate change, yet rarely bring up the topic (Leiserowitz et al., Reference Leiserowitz, Maibach, Rosenthal and Kotcher2023), suggests that even actions as seemingly minor as mindfully starting conversations can help increase feelings of agency and community belonging.

Secondly, just as the degree to which the hypothesized Anthropocene polycrisis is unique remains debatable, so should the extent of the narrative polycrisis. Citizens and societies steeped in today’s immersive information ecosystem, especially in privileged locales, may be uniquely susceptible to experiencing the information crisis. Those on the front lines of climate breakdown and other Anthropocene polycrisis disasters, more immediately steeped in empirical reality, may be less apt to be misled. Better analysis of how people in different locations and cultures perceive, contribute to, and respond to changing information systems can help craft responses to both the narrative polycrisis and the larger Anthropocene polycrisis.

This second direction of inquiry directly leads to a third that examines how narrative practices can not only lend meaning to current realities, but shape new ones. Some societies, such as Indigenous ones, have navigated profound loss of narrative identity through the practice of what some have called ‘radical hope’, or opening ‘imaginations up to a radically different set of future possibilities’ (Lear, Reference Lear2006) – shaping new possibilities for narrative identity from the ashes of the old. Even if there is no true historical analogue for the narrative polycrisis, or for the Anthropocene polycrisis itself, articulating the possibility of such reshaping might itself allow new eyes for better understanding our predicament.