Comment by AndrewKemendo
19 hours ago
“The game” is an emergent property of the human species at scale
Human society cannot exist at this scale without this nested social complexity structure given the biological constraints
So something has to give
19 hours ago
“The game” is an emergent property of the human species at scale
Human society cannot exist at this scale without this nested social complexity structure given the biological constraints
So something has to give
Revenue generation via advertising is an emergent property of humanity?
100%, but it's not a direct 1:1 relationship.
First you need agriculture so people tend to settle in one place. After ag comes more specialization, farmers need houses, graineries, and as society grows social specialists in which we'd call government.
These things in an area typically cause the area to grow because of their stability. As they grow you get more than one person/business doing the same line of work and you get more people than fit in ones monkeysphere. At that size you may not know a person that knows what you need to know and start looking further. This is why as cities grow advertising itself becomes an emergent property. Just go to a Roman city and look for dick pavers for example. Then someone will think "Hey, I can give some poor kids a board with a message on it and have them cry out to go to the place that people pay me to advertise" and suddenly you have an emergent property of humanity.
I (mis)attributed an element of pre-destination to the word emergent that apparently doesn't map to the word properly used.
That said, there's a petroglyph (circa 1150-1600 CE) of a macaw (among other sign-like petroglyphs)[1] on the walls above the pueblo ruins in Frijoles Canyon in Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico that came to mind when reading your explanation. The pueblo ruins themselves are immediately above an agriculturally developed riverbed floodplain with structures previously used for food storage.
It doesn't seem too far fetched to analogize a macaw above a pueblo in a canyon to, say, a flamingo on a neon sign (Circa 20th century)[2] above a bar along a highway, or an ad on a phone in 2025. Perhaps advertising is emergent (and, dare I say, with an element of pre-destination).
[1] https://www.nps.gov/places/petroglyphs-pueblo-loop-trail-sto...
[2] https://www.flickr.com/photos/25229906@N00/4056975591/
An emergent property of scaling civilization then, not just humanity specifically. It does make me wonder how alien advertising might differ.