{"id":1572,"date":"2016-05-09T13:11:05","date_gmt":"2016-05-09T05:11:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/magicalbits.net\/?p=1572"},"modified":"2016-05-09T13:11:05","modified_gmt":"2016-05-09T05:11:05","slug":"inevitability-in-technology-benedict-evans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/magicalbits.net\/?p=1572","title":{"rendered":"Inevitability in technology \u2014 Benedict Evans"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>A good example is Waterloo &#8211; Napoleon Bonaparte really could have won, and it was very close. He wouldn&#8217;t have needed completely different circumstances, just a few different decisions over the previous few days. There was no inevitability to his defeat. But if he had won, what then? Would he have been able to reach a settlement and place a Bonaparte dynasty on the throne of France for a century, or had Europe changed since his heyday, and would the allies have rallied, raised another army and crushed him a few months later? Probably the latter. This is the answer to a lot of counterfactuals &#8211; if the Ottoman Turks hadn&#8217;t captured Constantinople in 1453, they&#8217;d have captured it in 1454.\u00a0But on the other hand, suppose Lenin had died in a bank robbery in the early 1900s. There would have been chaos and revolution, but Bolshevism would be an obscure sect, filed next to People&#8217;s Will, and Russia might have gone down a much less bloody path.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Source: <em><a href=\"http:\/\/ben-evans.com\/benedictevans\/2016\/5\/2\/inevitability-in-technology\">Inevitability in technology \u2014 Benedict Evans<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A good example is Waterloo &#8211; Napoleon Bonaparte really could have won, and it was very close. He wouldn&#8217;t have needed completely different circumstances, just a few different decisions over the previous few days. There was no inevitability to his defeat. But if he had won, what then? Would he have been able to reach [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1572","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorised"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/magicalbits.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1572","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/magicalbits.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/magicalbits.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magicalbits.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magicalbits.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1572"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/magicalbits.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1572\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1573,"href":"https:\/\/magicalbits.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1572\/revisions\/1573"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/magicalbits.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1572"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magicalbits.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1572"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magicalbits.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1572"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}