About this publication

You are a storyteller. Not by profession, but because you are human. Stories are how you make sense of the world, and that faculty runs on a slow, ancient kind of attention, the thing endless scrolling wears thin. The Human Storyteller is about reclaiming it.

It is a series of essays, published here for the first time. Each one carries a single idea as far as it will go. They are meant to be read slowly, and shared, because really seeing again is not something any of us does alone. If an essay makes you stop and see something differently, you are already part of what this is for.

A word about who is writing them. I started as a journalist and produced one of the world's first interactive documentaries. I wrote a book about interactive documentaries called The Digital Storyteller (Den Digitale Fortæller). After this, I spent almost a decade at Magnum Photos in New York, learning how much visual stories can change our worldview. Later, as a tech entrepreneur and a fellow at MIT and Constructive Institute, I watched our attention and the human story get derailed. I am not a critic standing outside the machine. I helped build it.

Now I build differently. My latest startup, Duckling, is a new kind of media, designed to fuel the attention that human stories need, and Nordic Media Lab is a collective I founded to unite people building a more trustworthy social internet. I am not here to sell my projects. They are here as proof that the cure is real and already underway.

In the end, this is not about me. It is about you, because you are the storyteller. Read one essay. If it lands, stay, and send it to one person who would feel the same. That is how a new collective story begins.

For talks, interviews, or collaboration, write to b@humanstoryteller.org