PART THREE: Rewilding Narrative Supply Chains
An Ecology of Tension
Author Note: This is Part Three of a five-part series on Rewilding America’s Creative Economy to Meet the Demands of a Cognitive Industrial Revolution. Each part builds on the last, so I recommend starting with Part One and Part Two for additional context.
Cognitive Debt
Imagine a tool that promises to make you more creative. Now imagine that with every use, it subtly rewires your brain, making you less curious, less critical, and less able to remember your own ideas. This isn’t the plot of a science fiction film. It’s the emerging reality of the creative economy’s relationship with generative AI.
A recent empirical study from Microsoft, Cambridge, and Carnegie Mellon suggests that professionals who use AI without thoroughly examining its outputs risk becoming less critical, curious, and creative over time.
A new study from MIT reveals just how deep that erosion goes. Using EEG data, researchers tracked how students’ brains responded across multiple writing sessions with and without AI assistance. They call what they found cognitive debt: a compounding neural cost from repeated reliance on machines to do the work of idea formation.
The details are striking:
Brain connectivity dropped by 20%, especially in regions tied to memory and integration
83% of participants could not recall what they had written with AI
Emotional engagement and a sense of ownership both declined
These aren’t marginal effects. They point to a slow reconditioning of human attention itself, an erosion of the necessary friction and ambiguity that leads to innovation. This cognitive threat is dangerous because it is attacking a system that is already brittle: our narrative supply chains.
The creative industries are built on two supply chains: production and narrative. A conventional production supply chain moves materials and products. Efficiency, logistics, and output govern it. A narrative supply chain, by contrast, moves meaning. It governs how ideas, symbols, and values originate, take form, and shape the belief systems in culture. One optimizes for cost and scale; the other must optimize for resonance, coherence, and cultural alignment.
This distinction is especially urgent as we integrate generative AI.
For years, creative economies have shown signs of weakness. We see it in the "say-do gap," where audiences profess to value the arts and premium content, yet their behavior overwhelmingly defaults to the cheapest and most convenient option. We see it in the perpetual fragility of our cultural institutions, which rely on a public sentiment that rarely translates into structural support.
Into this already weakened ecosystem, we are introducing a technology that excels at smoothing out friction and automating synthesis. The short-term risk is a deluge of cultural noise that fails to land. The long-term risk is a national creative economy that can no longer hold contradiction or metabolize emotion and wonder. We are accumulating a cognitive debt that our culture may not be able to repay.
This is the central challenge of the cognitive industrial revolution.
Soggy Dough Systems
The cognitive crisis at hand demands a smart response. Not a retreat from technology, but a deliberate, strategic rewilding of the systems that fuel human imagination. To understand what that looks like, consider a lesson from an unexpected corner of the industrial economy.
In the early 1980s, two immigrant brothers noticed something the food industry missed: Americans had microwaves, but no food designed to work with them.
Paul and David Merage, Jewish Iranian entrepreneurs, saw a gap, not in ingredients, but in behavior. People were eating on the move. Convenience was rising. Their food traditions, with breads like pita folded around fillings, made the idea of a hand-held meal feel natural. Pizza rolls had been around since the late 1960s, but they didn’t solve the problem. Dough turned soggy in the microwave, and the heat didn’t distribute evenly.
The brothers’ answer wasn’t just a new food. It was a systems fix. They created a crisping sleeve made of susceptor material that browned the bread dough while the filling heated evenly. It was a creative shift with massive implications. Hot Pockets launched in 1983 and was sold to Nestlé in 2002 for $2.6 billion.
The win was both the product and the process. Cultural memory, behavioral insight, and technical improvisation all aligned into a form that fit the moment. That kind of alignment is still rare in the arts.
While artists continue to mine and craft bold observations into the evolving human condition, our systems often stay shallow and overlook the practicalities of how people live and work. We ignore signals from other industries that might hold insights for our own. We tend to treat emerging technology as something separate from culture, rather than a force shaping it. We tell stories about our values, but overrely on our own sentiments in our advocacy. We assume that a professed belief in the arts translates into structural support. But as the business world is learning with stakeholder capitalism, the gap between what people say and what they do is where strategies fail.
The gap between professed values and actual behavior is growing in the arts because our support systems cannot metabolize America’s culture shifts. A profound irony, considering artists are more adept at this than anyone.
The lesson from Hot Pockets goes beyond food; its lesson is to see systems holistically. The Merage brothers didn't just invent a product; they diagnosed a cultural behavior and worked with accessible technology to find a creative solution. The creative economy’s narrative supply chains need the same rigorous treatment before they, too, become soggy and unfulfilling.
The Hard Work of Fine Arts
A recent Fast Company article makes a clear, evidence-based point: Most consumers say they care about sustainability and values-based products.
But when it comes time to spend, the data tells a different story.
Mark Twain once quipped, “I know I have morals. But I’d rather teach them than practice them any day.” With his signature wit, Twain uncomfortably acknowledged the preference many have for easy advocacy over hard work. It’s one thing to have fine values; it’s another thing entirely to make the hard choices that breathe life into them. The first is fine talk. The second is hard work.
For years, companies believed that people, especially younger generations, would pay a premium for sustainable products. Surveys consistently affirmed this belief. But when researchers looked at actual purchase data, the story changed. Most shoppers still choose what’s cheaper and more convenient. When money is tight or time is short, good intentions take a back seat. The business world is learning a hard lesson: you can’t count on consumers to fund systemic change out of sheer goodwill.
This same “say-do” gap puts the creative economy at extreme risk. And, it’s a forced error, which means that we have agency over a process but are choosing not to exercise it.
For years, nonprofit arts have pointed to statistics like “7 in 10 Americans believe the arts unify their communities and make them a better place to live.” We’ve used this in countless grant proposals and city council meetings as proof that people value what we do.
It likely is true. But, as I framed out in Part One of this series, that sentiment is not translating into action or jobs. As a result, the nonprofit arts sector feels perpetually fragile.
The for-profit creative economy faces a similar challenge. Deloitte’s 2025 Digital Media Trends report identifies the same 'say-do gap' in media consumption. While consumers express a desire for premium content, their behavior is overwhelmingly dictated by the pragmatism of cost and convenience, leading them to churn through subscriptions as they chase value.
The lesson is clear: confusing audience sentiment with a bankable strategy is risky without something more to support it.
Rewilding Protocols
In ecological terms, rewilding restores the complexity that monoculture erases. A monoculture is a system dominated by a single style, idea, or approach that suppresses variation and narrows the range of possible responses. This kind of uniformity makes systems brittle because it removes the alternatives they need to adapt.
Creative systems behave the same way. Rewilding invites discomfort back into the process. It creates space for wonder, signal scanning, and emotional range. It resists the pressure to resolve too quickly and protects the ambiguity that deeper ideas need to take root.
In the arts, we often mistake refinement for innovation. The constant recycling of decades-old models of management, advocacy, and research may feel familiar, but it privileges legacy systems at the very moment they’re least equipped to respond. That comfort could be our biggest vulnerability, especially in the age of AI.
AI is an opportunity and a risk to manage. Nowhere are the implications so visibly concentrated as in the entertainment subsector of the creative economy, where the narrative supply chain matters as much as, if not more than, our production supply chain. Ensuring that technology amplifies, rather than flattens, human imagination is the critical task.
Over the last seven days, I have taken an in-depth look at America’s creative economy, attending two major meetings on opposite sides of the country. One focused on the for-profit side of the creative economy with corporate leaders. The second on our nation’s nonprofit arts at the Americans for the Arts national convention. As an AFTA board member, I was excited by what I heard this week from AFTA’s new CEO, Erin Harkey, and Program Officer, Ayanna N. Hudson!!
In both for-profit and non-profit areas of the creative economy, leaders should see rewilding as a metaphor and an operational stance.
To operationalize that stance, I’ve developed four directional protocols. These act as creative infrastructure tools for metabolizing ambiguity, emotion, and complexity within systems shaped by speed, scale, and automation.
The protocols are quick practice tools for redirecting perception into consequence. Each one offers a step toward functional repair for specific failure points in the current narrative supply chain that I heard surface over the past week in one way or another.
The four directions are: Wonder Out, Wonder In, Wonder Human, and Wonder Virtual.
These four directional protocols help leaders address the asymmetries I discussed in Part Two of this series and rewire the internal systems by targeting a specific breakdown: how we gather insight, make space for originality, navigate emotion, and work with machines.
Together, they form a living, creative infrastructure for narrative supply chains in the age of AI.
Wonder Out → Scan the Edges
Cultural stagnation often starts when we stop listening at the edges.
Most organizations scan for ideas within their established industries and networks. But breakthrough insights rarely emerge from the predictable center. They gestate at the edges.
Wonder Out is the disciplined practice of building a more robust cultural radar. It trains teams to look where they don’t normally look: among outlier artists, emergent youth cultures, or nascent scientific fields. The goal isn’t novelty for its own sake; it's sophisticated pattern recognition.
What’s emerging in the deeper cultural currents? Where is unseen energy gathering?
What Rewilding Might Look Like in Practice:
A film studio, instead of only analyzing box office comparisons, embeds a cultural anthropologist with a youth skate crew. The goal isn't to find a "skate movie" script, but to decode the crew's slang, status markers, and unspoken anxieties. The resulting insight doesn't recommend a product; it reveals a deep-seated need for peer-validated authenticity. Such work can then inform everything from character development in a sci-fi blockbuster to a new social media strategy. This is about seeking what’s unresolved, what’s pulsing under the surface. Culture rarely moves from the center out; it moves from fracture to new forms of coherence.
Wonder Out sharpens your radar for early cultural signals. It helps creative systems recognize subtle shifts before they become obvious and repurpose them into meaningful momentum.
Wonder In → Cultivate Creative Safety
Originality stalls when there's no cultural permission to take risks.
Creativity rarely stalls for a lack of ideas. It stalls in cultures where people feel unsafe voicing unconventional thoughts, where constructive challenge is mistaken for disloyalty. Wonder In is the essential, often uncomfortable, work of recalibrating our internal culture. It means courageously mapping invisible rules and asking: What conversations are we avoiding? What norms might be suppressing originality? Where are our people hiding their most daring thinking, and why?
What Rewilding Might Look Like in Practice:
In many organizations, creative risk dies in the meeting room, where vital tension is diluted for perceived safety. This is the principle that powered Pixar's legendary 'Braintrust,' a system built not on consensus, but on the radical candor required to elevate good ideas into timeless stories.
Wonder In asks: If our creative rooms aren’t regularly holding the productive tension that cracks open the entire perspective, then are we making things worth remembering? Creative safety isn't the absence of conflict; it's the capacity to navigate it toward a breakthrough.
Wonder In restores the conditions that allow new thinking to emerge. It surfaces the invisible frictions that suppress originality and invites more durable forms of challenge.
Wonder Human → Engineer for Emotion
Mystery becomes a liability when ambiguity starts to feel unsafe.
Emotion isn't noise in the creative system; neuroscience affirms it is often the primary signal. If our teams are exhausted, cautious, or insecure, no workflow optimization will restore deep creativity. We must address the emotional substrate.
Wonder Human is about developing the muscle to stay in the question longer and to resist the premature rush to resolution. It reframes emotion as a legitimate, powerful input in creative development.
What Rewilding Might Look Like in Practice:
Too often, "emotional design" in entertainment is applied downstream. A musical swell here. A special effects flourish there. Both get done in post-production after the core idea has already been sanitized. I’ve seen the same thing in arts policy making and research rooms, where concepts that run counter to preferred narratives are left out in the name of efficiency.
But emotion isn't seasoning; it's the source code of connection to the opportunities that lie beyond the frontier of the familiar. Wonder Human builds this emotional infrastructure upstream. It uses ambiguity as an input to be explored, not a problem to be immediately solved or sidelined. Audiences aren’t overwhelmed by complexity; they are often starving for sincerity. The goal is to let the work crack something open, creating a memorable, meaningful experience.
Wonder Human reframes emotional experience as a strategic input. It expands creative range by turning vulnerability and tension into shared capacity.
Wonder Virtual → Co-Create with Machines
The problem isn’t technology. It’s how quickly we flatten its role into routine.
We are digitizing processes and integrating AI faster than we are adapting our creative philosophies to them. Without deep human context and critical oversight, these tools can replicate biases, flatten nuance, and lead to homogenized creativity. Wonder Virtual is the practice of consciously pairing machine efficiency with irreplaceable human ingenuity. It asks: Are our digital tools amplifying original thought or subtly shortcutting it?
What Rewilding Might Look Like in Practice:
The most innovative teams will use technology not to replace human ideation, but to stretch and provoke it. They will co-create with AI, challenge its prompts, and treat generative systems as powerful sparring partners, not invisible producers. Wonder Virtual utilizes AI to uncover hidden narrative seams and unexpected juxtapositions, not to smooth them out into predictable forms, but to champion their growth. AI is not neutral; it mirrors our assumptions. The opportunity is to use it to reveal and challenge them.
Wonder Virtual checks whether digital tools are expanding creative potential or just speeding up familiar habits. It helps teams consider what kind of thinking technology is encouraging and what it might be crowding out.
An Ecology of Tension
Reading this, a business strategist, an artist, and a scientist might each walk away with a valid critique.
The strategist will demand KPIs for "Wonder Human" and ask for the measurable ROI on "calibrating internal culture." They will see a powerful diagnosis followed by a solution that feels like a set of values, not a business plan.
The artist will recoil at the language of "narrative supply chains," seeing the sterile vocabulary of commodification. They will argue that the moment you try to systematize wonder, the sacred, messy soul of creation is lost.
The scientist will note that while the principles allude to sound cognitive concepts, the framework is a collection of untestable hypotheses—a powerful metaphor, not a proven model. They will ask, "Where is the control group?"
And all of them would be right.
Rewilding with wonder isn’t a universal fix. It’s a working space where essential tensions are made visible and then used. Strategy, science, and art don’t need to reconcile. They need to collide with enough pressure to make something coherent.
Friction isn’t failure. It’s feedback. In high-performing teams and creative economies alike, tension shows you where meaning gets metabolized or blocked. Avoiding it may feel efficient, but it comes at the cost of depth, memory, and long-term relevance.
The friction is the feature, not a bug.
For too long, these worlds have worked in parallel. Business optimizes what it can measure, often flattening the nuance that creates real value. Art protects its soul, often isolating itself from the resources needed to scale its impact. Science seeks repeatable proof, often struggling to engage with the ambiguity where innovation is born. In defending their own languages and logics, they have built the very silos we now seek to overcome.
"Rewilding" creates a new operational discipline where artists, scientists, and business leaders each leverage their distinct ways of knowing to challenge, inform, and strengthen one another.
To the business leader, this framework offers access to the very things a balance sheet cannot capture but which are leading indicators of future success: a resilient, deeply creative culture. This isn't a 'nice-to-have'; it's the source code for breakthrough innovation.
To the artist, this is not a cage for the creative spirit but a charter to defend it. It provides a strategic language to demand the time, space, and safety needed for ambiguity and emotional depth, giving the soul a seat at the strategy table.
To the scientist, this is not a settled theory but a living laboratory. It is a protocol for inquiry and a method for pairing the rigor of technology with the irreplaceable context of human experience.
This is the hard, operational work of rebuilding an infrastructure for creativity within our systems that is capable of holding tension, metabolizing wonder, and transforming the friction between art, science, and business into the fuel for meaningful and durable growth.
Your Rewilding Audit
Audit your own narrative supply chain. Pick one current project (film, campaign, grant program, R&D sprint, etc.) and ask:
Where are we listening from the edges, not just the center?
When was the last time a meeting cracked something open instead of closing it down?
What emotional signals are we ignoring because they don't fit the template?
Is our tech amplifying ambiguity and intuition, or flattening them?
Choose one direction (Out, In, Human, or Virtual) and apply it to a live project. Use it to shift how you frame a problem or evaluate a choice. Bring it into the next strategy session or creative review.
Pro tip: Select a project with clear success metrics already in place. That way, your team can observe whether changes made using the rewilding protocols influence outcomes that the organization already tracks. This makes the experiment legible and worth repeating.
These prompts are working tools. Use them to build systems that hold tension, move with uncertainty, and produce work that lands with consequence.
Up next in Part Four →
How to Build a Creative System That Lasts: A Field Guide for Arts Leaders and Culture Architects
We move from diagnosing creative system failure to building the practices that make resilience real. Part Four introduces a practical guide to spotting high-impact ideas early, protecting them inside your organization, and designing the conditions that allow them to grow, grounded in cognitive science and built for the future of cultural leadership.
©2013-2025 Theo Edmonds | All Rights Reserved.
This article contains original intellectual property. No part of it may be reproduced, distributed, or adapted without attribution. Quotation or reference is permitted for non-commercial use with proper credit. The views expressed here are mine alone and do not necessarily represent those of any affiliated organization.
Co-Edit Statement
As a neurodiverse writer, I use AI to support editorial clarity and structure. The conceptual frameworks, metaphors, and systems logic reflect my own thinking, grounded in lived experience and interdisciplinary research. AI contributed to refining language, not generating ideas. Original analysis, arguments, and insights are my own.
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