Convergent evolutions

I was reading a Tweet about how some clever bit-torrent creating people were archiving BBC webpages because the BBC announced they were about to take them down. Given the BBC's record of hanging on to important historical documents, these bit-torrenty types decided to grab the lot, archive them and then make them available via aforementioned bit torrenting. (Can you tell I'm not entirely up on the world of bit torrents?) 


The writer of the article then went on to say how he kept thinking of new ideas, only to find some geniuses had already had the same idea. This is a phenomenon I've noticed in the past. I've also tried to think about why it is that for thousands of years, humans were technologically simple, but over the last two hundred have gone techno-bonkers. Imagine my surprise etc when in the comments of the BBC bit torrent article was a post about this very idea. And then I discover that its author, Ben King, lives within a few yards of me. He thinks a lot about convergent evolution and global capitalism while working a low-paid job in retail. What's not to like? I liked his post so much, I wanted to post it here and let my masses of reader know about his theory of convergent evolutions. I'll come back to this at some point, but if you want to explore for yourself, he's here.


His post comes 'after the jump'…




It's not coincidence that these convergent evolutions happen. They happen because there is an attractor within cultural evolution: Reality. We come to our conclusions based upon what seems rational. That doesn't mean True, as you of all people know only too well. Rational in this case merely means the most plausible explanation based upon current understandings *of the individual in question*. Fortunately, we all inhabit the same reality and so share this attractor, accelerated via its formalisation as the scientific method. These 'coincidences' only get more rapid the more 'flat' our cultural network is, since more people see more input. This is equivilent to saying that more experimentors have far larger, shared data-sets from which to draw conclusions, conclusions that will only get more accurate, and therefore more conducive for memetic replication. This is powering an exponential evolutionary force since it also applies to communication technology (moores law) which is itself the infrastructure for the network. This feedback loop is why we have come so far these past few centuries. So, in summary, I have to conclude that not only are these cultural convergences becoming more frequent due to the flattening of societal communication networks and the attractor of reality, but that also about a thousand people at the very least are having similar thoughts right now. Afterall, I just work in retail on £10,000 a year with a 2/1 in History. P.S Just think what that means. Previously, philosophers and the like were special because only a very few were lucky enough to have the time and patronage/wealth to actually read a lot and talk to people from far away/travel. Today, we have hundreds of millions of people with internet access in their homes. By my reckoning we probably have alive today at least thousands of largely unheard voices comparable to those 'great' philosophers of the past. I n case one thinks, "well, they *great*, think of the context of their times, they were head and shoulders above the rest!" Well, yes, but that's not hard when the vast majority are in the gutter. As for being ahead of their time, that may be so. But I rather think that in 100 years time history will say that 10's of thousands of bloggers, activists and ordinary folk were ahead of *their* time in recognising the archaic social nature of global capitalism.