Remarkable coincidence

Philosophical positions with respect to luck, randomness and cause-effect relationship are many, from those who believe that everything happens by chance to those who argue that everything happens for a reason. In the world of internet, there is a surprising principle of self-causation, which could be formulated as "once something starts to happen, it starts to happen a lot": certain images, customs, phrases can go absolutely undetected for years, being totally irrelevant for the big majority of internet users, before one day someone happens to notice them and make a fortunate remark, and they start to spread like a wild fire in a time of drought.

Everybody has their own level of proclivity to the propagation of these memes: some people forward essentially everything they get to every possible group they belong, contributing enormously to their spread; but most users are significantly more subdued and do not forward these things or at least not to a big number of groups. But one factor that contributes significantly to dissipating the shyness of many users is receiving the same content from two unrelated sources: under this condition, the perception is that this factoid, image or animation already belongs to the zeitgeist and is therefore expected that we comment on it.

Photo: PickPic

This morning I ran into this post about Kurt Vonnegut on Facebook, which a friend of mine had re-posted. I have recently finished reading one of his novels, Slaughterhouse Five, so I read the post with as much delight as for the book. And then I came to the idea of trying to trace back the origin of the quote, so I searched "Vonnegut when I was 15" and I was surprised to see that most of the links were fairly recent: this one is dated August 9, 2020; this one is undated, but it is a literal copy of the quote; this one, dated today, even contains the letter and the quote as the first one; this one is dated October 28, also with both anecdotes; medium.com mentions only the quote three days ago; this one, dated November 1, mentions a source and elaborates on the content; this one from August 18 also links back to the first one. Even in the British bulletin boards (down in the fourth page of Google results), the mentions are just from today! 

Surprisingly, it looks as if four months ago this wonderful piece only existed in one place: this post, which is undated but mentions the 85th anniversary of an event in 1926, so it probably dates back to 2011, but certainly earlier than February 2018 when the first comments were posted.

Now that it has hit Facebook plus a major mainstream media outlet have caught wind of the memorable quote, we will probably hear a lot of it. However, I will refrain from copying it here and I will probably comment on its content tomorrow or another day. Let me just reflect on the fact that this kind of gems are hidden all over the place not only in the internet, but also in many books, songs, and other works of art. No one can say how many of them will ever be discovered, very often not in the lifetime of their authors, as it was famously the case with Vincent van Gogh, most of then never. But it is heartwarming that, occasionally, someone runs into one of them and brings them to the light for the great enjoyment of many. Savor it, stay safe and have a nice evening.