Cont'd

So I think of humans / society like a big pile of ants crawling all over this space and with enough time and jostling we'll tend to form some pattern with the landscape we're currently in - e.g if we don't have boats we'll walk around the lake, when we have boats we might go straight over. (yeah I just added water to the energy topology thing ... ignore that).

There's a degree of fatalism about this, but it's not that straight forward because there are so many variable involved that the landscape is always changing - e.g. if climate crisis become a big thing, and we have mass migration starting, then mobile phones are going to become even more dominant, and so is offline-first communication. Our expectations of how we communicate will change, and our ways of speaking + organising will if there's different latency...

So the contour can and is changing, and just because there's a lowest (most stable) point doesn't mean we'll reach it - there might be a big range in the way that we just don't have enough motivation of visibility to get over. Concrete example is that story about VHS vs BetaMax. It could have been that BetaMax was the better technology, but the porn industry chose to start mass producing content on VHS. This changed the landscape and meant we never really saw BetaMax.