The Internet’s Butterfly Effect

A cool phenomenon I’ve been thinking about recently

The internet is pretty cool.

You can make something, post it, and then have it be seen by some guy in 2 years and change the course of his life.

I’ll try to explain that a little better.

Something interesting about life is that little moments — often brought about by random chance — can have big effects.

Yesterday, when trying to close a browser tab, I accidentally searched for a few random letters instead. I was about to close the tab but one of the results caught my eye. It was a website for some AI chatbot that wasn’t built on top of GPT.

I hadn’t heard of it before and decided to try it out. I asked it for some movie recommendations and ended up watching one of the movies it suggested. I’d never heard of that movie before and might never have watched it if it hadn’t been for that mistake of accidentally searching some random letters instead of closing a browser tab.

Calling this experience “life-changing” would be a bit of a stretch. All that happened was I watched a good movie I wouldn’t have otherwise. But maybe not, maybe it really is life-changing. That’s another aspect of this phenomenon, you can’t know ahead of time all the things that one catalyzing event will lead to.¹

If that hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t be writing this post. Maybe this post will be seen by someone a week after it’s posted and that person will somehow change my life. Maybe this post will lie dormant for several years until some random guy stumbles upon it and it changes his life. Maybe it just won’t have much of an effect on anyone at all.

This phenomenon is a kind of butterfly effect, where one small action ends up having huge effects later on.

The internet enables stuff like this on a mass scale. Oftentimes, when searching for an answer to a problem, I’ll find that someone asked about the same problem six years ago on an internet forum and some other guy responded with an answer that helps me out all these years later. That’s a mild example, but the implications of this phenomenon are huge.

Without knowing it, you posting something on the internet can end up having a big domino effect.

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