As children, many of us grew up on stories. Stories about Santa Claus (who’ll be sliding down chimneys soon, by the way), stories about kindness and being good, about soldiers and wars, about businesses and the strides of men, living and dead.

You’d find that these stories didn’t just entertain us—they shaped how we saw the world, what we believed was possible, and who we thought we could become. They were the invisible architecture of our understanding.

No one is immune to storytelling.

This truth sat at the center of our latest AI Deconstructed conversation with Dr. Ayo on X Spaces, but it’s one we’ve all known since childhood and somehow forgot when we learned to code, to build, to engineer solutions. We began to believe that good technology speaks for itself. That logic and efficiency matter more than meaning. That if we just build it well enough, they will come.

But here’s what we’ve lost sight of: technology doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It exists in the space between what’s possible and what people believe is possible. And that space? That’s where stor lives.

“Narratives simply mean helping people see themselves,” Dr. Ayo reminded us. When someone encounters your decentralized AI project, they’re not running technical evaluations. They’re asking an ancient question: Where do I belong in this? The projects that succeed aren’t necessarily the most sophisticated—they’re the ones that create space for people to imagine themselves as part of something larger.

And here’s the part that should make us uncomfortable: the end user’s meaning is what’s valuable. Not the meaning we intended when we stayed up late debugging. Not the vision we had when we wrote the whitepaper. The meaning they create from their lived experience—that’s what determines whether our technology matters.

Which brings us to a sobering realization: Dr. Ayo surfaced. We don’t have enough user-generated content around decentralized AI. Think about what that means. In a philosophical sense, we don’t know what we’re up against. We’re building systems without collecting the stories of how people actually experience them. We’re so busy telling our story that we’ve forgotten to listen to theirs.

The best technology doesn’t win because it’s the most elegant or the most powerful. It wins because it becomes part of people’s stories—stories where they see themselves, stories that create meaning they can hold onto, and stories they tell. After all, they’re true to something they’ve lived.

Stories are powerful. They can change us. And if we’re brave enough to listen to those who are told about what we’re building, we can change them too.

That’s not marketing. That’s how we ensure the future we’re building is one people actually want to live in.

Interested in learning more about “Why the Best Technology Loses to the Best Story”?

Listen HERE: https://x.com/i/spaces/1RDGlAZbOXlJL