Narrative Critics Are Storytellers Too

Why Exposés and Hype Belong to the Same Economy of Attention

This article was originally written in my native language, Japanese, and has been translated into English by AI. You can read the original Japanese version here.

In April 2026, a New Yorker exposé by Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz targeting Sam Altman went viral. In response, Altman reportedly said: “I had underestimated the power of words and stories.”

That admission, perhaps unintentionally, cuts to the heart of the modern tech industry.

As Nobel Prize–winning economist Robert Shiller argued in his 2019 book *Narrative Economics*, markets are not moved by numbers alone. The stories people tell each other shape price movements, drive investment behavior, and determine the fate of entire industries. The tech world is a prime example. Companies with no profits yet command valuations in the tens of billions. Technologies still under development are said to be on the verge of transforming humanity. Investors are not just buying present performance — they are buying future possibility, and the person most capable of narrating that future compellingly.

Within this structure, figures like Sam Altman and Elon Musk often attract criticism. Are they selling a vision of the future more than the technology itself? Are they inflating expectations beyond reality, drawing in investors and society while consolidating their own power? These critiques carry real weight.

But here is where a strange reversal takes place.

Critics Are Also Selling a Story

Critics appear to stand in direct opposition to tech CEOs. One side promises the future; the other questions that promise. One inflates hope; the other sounds the alarm.

Yet structurally, the two are strikingly similar.

Tech CEOs sell the narrative of “future revolution.” Critics sell the narrative of “exposing the deception.” Both take a complex reality and compress it into a legible, emotionally charged plot. Both attract attention — and derive value from it.

The CEO’s story offers dreams: AI that saves humanity, full self-driving, Mars colonization, near-infinite clean energy, the defeat of disease. These are compelling to investors because grand visions imply grand markets.

The critic’s story offers outrage: lying CEOs, corrupt boards, deceived investors, exploited workers, dangerous technology. These are equally compelling to readers, because exposé carries a moral pleasure. The reader gets to feel like one of the undeceived. Complex problems get sorted neatly into villains and victims.

The New Yorker piece in question is rigorous investigative journalism — based on interviews with more than a hundred people and hundreds of pages of internal records. And yet it is also designed as a narrative. Who is cast as the central villain? Which facts are foregrounded? Where is the reader’s emotion directed? These choices are what give the article its power. And the more it spreads, the more influence its authors accumulate.

Acknowledging the Asymmetry

That said, the two cannot be placed on perfectly equal footing.

A corporate executive wielding hundreds of billions in capital and technological infrastructure operates at a fundamentally different scale than a journalist writing a critical piece. There is also clear public value in holding power to account — exposing corporate misconduct, conflicts of interest, and governance failures is a necessary function in a democratic society.

Even so, the critic is not free from their own narrative nature.

When Narratives Become Dangerous

The problem is not the use of narrative itself.

Human beings cannot comprehend complex reality without stories. Investment, politics, journalism, criticism — all are sustained by some form of narrative. The danger arises when the narrative loses its tension with the facts.

A CEO who sells hope without demonstrating feasibility is dangerous. A critic who sells outrage without demonstrating evidence is equally dangerous.

Both are seduced by the same temptation: simplification.

“This CEO will save humanity” and “This CEO is the root of all evil” are both easy to understand. That is why they are powerful. But clarity often comes at the cost of complexity.

The problems of a tech company cannot be explained by a single genius or a single fraudster. They involve investor expectations, the structure of capital markets, employee incentives, national industrial policy, the attention economy of media, and the desires of users. The CEO may be at the center, but is not the whole cause.

Likewise, a critical article does not merely “reveal the truth.” It selects which facts to include, in what order to arrange them, what language to use, who to cast as the villain, and where to direct the reader’s anger. Those choices shape a narrative.

Using Narrative With Skepticism

What is needed, then, is not the rejection of narrative — but the use of narrative with skepticism.

When a CEO narrates the future, we should ask: What numbers, technologies, funding plans, risk disclosures, and governance structures support that future? When a critic narrates an exposé, we should ask: What evidence, what alternative hypotheses, what distinctions between fact and opinion, what calibration of severity support that indictment?

The person who criticizes “tech CEOs who create value through narrative” is themselves creating value through a narrative of accusation. This does not invalidate the criticism — but it does impose a responsibility on the critic.

If you question power, you must also question the power of your own words. If you are skeptical of visions of the future, you must also be skeptical of your own exposés. If you criticize others’ exaggerations, you must ask whether your own outrage has become an exaggeration.

In the end, what generates value in modern society is not technology alone, nor facts alone — it is the stories that give technology and facts their meaning. That is why we need narratives. But we must not be consumed by them.

Both the seller of futures and the seller of exposés deserve the same questions.

How far is this story supported by the facts? Whose interests does it serve? What does it make invisible? And when we believe it — what do we give up?