Formatization Unleashed

Critical Patterns Of Development

As in other historical processes, a relatively high variety existing at the processes’ start declined during that processes' course. As a systemic phenomenon, such a pattern has been observed in the late 1970ies already, in investigations of the emergence of city-states and related historical phenomena (Pfeiffer 1978). The general pattern underlying such processes was that a rich variety of entities present at the start of the process – e.g., of city-states in early Sumer (Sumer was an ancient civilization and historical region in southern Mesopotamia during the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age.), of enterprises at the beginning of industrialization, of cultures before globalization – was increasingly narrowed, due to factors generating certain path dependencies the process in question had to follow, in its further course. An important variant of such processes was that a cultural and economic variety present at the start of a process consequently declined, sometimes even up to the point where the society in question doomed; as recent investigations of the matter reveal, comparing different cultures and historical times (Diamond 2005).

At least as cultural variety is regarded, the process we postulate in our thesis seems to follow that very pattern; based on the premise that phenomena of cultural variety can too be addressed in terms of actual freedoms of user-specific possibilities. Our sketch of an evolutionary process focuses on computational devices which serve as frameworks for different ways of software-based information processing (referred to in the following as “systems”), of processors and last but not least, of “users”: the very individuals who should play the central role for those systems, according to their own advertisements.