Software Outran Hardware

Evolution took millions of years. We evolved slowly. Adapted carefully. Changed when we had to.

Now memes evolve in minutes.

Ideas replicate faster than we can process them. Mutations happen before we understand the original. Selection pressure is instant. A thought becomes a movement becomes a backlash becomes forgotten. All before lunch.

We're running evolutionary software at internet speed on hardware designed for glacial change.

The problem isn't that we're slow. The problem is that the environment evolved and we didn't.

Our brains were built for small groups. Dunbar's number: 150 people. That's how many stable relationships we can maintain.

Our tribal software worked perfectly for 200,000 years.

Then the internet gave us 8 billion people. All talking. All the time.

We didn't get new hardware. We got infinite inputs running on finite processors.

The result?

We don't adapt to ideas anymore. We adopt them. We don't evaluate memes. We catch them. Like viruses. The most infectious win, not the most true.

This is Girard at internet speed. We want what others want. But now "others" isn't our tribe of 150. It's millions of others, all wanting simultaneously, all copying each other in real-time.

Desire used to spread through observation. You saw your neighbor's new tool. You wanted it. Months passed before enough people wanted it to matter.

Now desire spreads through notification. Everyone sees everyone wanting everything all at once.

The cycle completes before reflection begins.

Watch what happens:

Someone posts an insight. It's good. It resonates. Others share it. They add their spin. The mutation begins.

Someone misinterprets it. That version spreads faster because it's more provocative. Someone opposes it. The opposition goes viral.

The original insight is forgotten. The battle over the mutation becomes the meme.

Three hours. Millions of impressions. Countless variations.

The original author can't even recognize what they said.

This isn't evolution. This is mutation without selection pressure.

The ideas that survive aren't the most fit. They're the most viral. And virality selects for intensity, not accuracy.

We built systems that make memetic evolution trivial:

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Each one optimized for maximum replication speed.

We didn't ask if humans could handle evolution at this speed. We just assumed we'd adapt.

But biological adaptation takes generations. Cultural adaptation used to take decades.

Now it's supposed to happen in minutes.

The mismatch creates something new: continuous cognitive whiplash. We're always catching up to the last trend while the next one is already forming. We're always reacting to the mutation we just noticed while ten more mutations are spreading.

The system works perfectly. Our brains just weren't built for it.

Here's what we're doing instead of adapting: we're fragmenting.

Some people speed up. They surf the memetic waves. They adopt and discard ideas at internet speed.

They become the medium.

Some people slow down. They opt out. They build walls against the flood.

They refuse to play.

Neither strategy works. The speeders burn out. The slowpokes become irrelevant.

What we need isn't speed or slowness. It's different hardware. Or different software. Or a different internet.

We're not getting any of those.

So we're stuck running glacial wetware at broadband speeds. Trying to process infinite inputs with finite attention. Trying to evaluate ideas that mutate faster than we can examine them.

The question isn't whether this is sustainable. It's not.

The question is what breaks first: the system or us.

My guess?

Neither breaks. Both just get worse.

The system gets faster. We get more fragmented. The gap between evolutionary speeds grows.

And we keep pretending this is fine because we don't know what else to do.

We evolved for millions of years to survive in one environment. Then we built a new environment in 30 years and expected ourselves to adapt instantly.

The experiment is still running. We're the subjects.

And nobody's watching the control group because there isn't one.