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They’re like that. Blame them. Actually, blame Matt Ridley, who gave a rather interesting 2010 Ted talk titled When ideas have sex. It’s just over fifteen minutes of pure sexy goodness:

To stand on Matt’s shoulders, I would say that as time passes, we are becoming better at sharing and combining ideas.

We improved how the ideas are packaged: that’s our ability to turn complex systems into black boxes. Almost every single thing we use today is a stack of countless layers of abstraction. In the 300 milliseconds this article took to reach your computer, it was encoded as HTML, sent over the HTTP protocol (which enables you to ask for a piece of data and receive it), which in turn is built on top of the TCP protocol (which enables you to communicate data to someone else). And your TCP uses the underlying IP protocol (which enables you to communicate fixed-size data packets to someone else). And IP is just a protocol used by routers to talk to each other, but the actual transmission involves fiber-optic cables at the bottom of the Atlantic ocean, and relays, and error-checking. And there is not a single person on earth who can explain, in detail, what happens at all points during this transmission. Let alone understand the underlying physical properties of the cable and the routers and the processors in the routers and the transistors in those processors.

I know HTML, I kind-of-get HTTP, I understand the basic principles of TCP, I think I heard rumors about IP, and I honestly don’t know how data is actually transmitted over the ocean. Maybe there’s satellites?

We’re not standing on the shoulders of giants anymore. We’ve built a pyramid of midgets, with thousands of layers, and no one has any deep knowledge about more than one or two layers above and below.

And then, we improved how ideas are shared: that’s our ability to hear the ideas of thousands of people within the same week. Homo Erectus didn’t get to meet thousands of people in his entire life. The internet, with the ability for anyone to push their ideas forward for anyone to hear, is helping us.

First, we moved from the “no one talks to strangers” approach to the “one talks to the couple of strangers they meet every month” one when we started trading stuff in early history. Then, missionaries, books, radio and television finally introduced the “a few people speak to a lot of strangers” which, as long as those few people had great and original ideas, was even better. Now, we’re moving to “many people speak to many people“, which is less efficient as a whole for spreading ideas: there are more people talking, but you still only have 24 hours a day to listen to other people, which means the previously well-spread ideas get less audience. Where one church or one radio channel could be heard by everyone, now there are so many sources of information that none can get as many listeners as before.

On the other hand, this many-to-many universe means there’s a lot more potential for two ideas to meet. Instead of having idea A breed with ideas B, C, D; now you have pairings A-B, C-D and E-F. More pairings means more potential for an unexpectedly great outcome. As a society, we don’t need to help good ideas survive—we manage that quite well already. What we need is a way to help more good ideas emerge.

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