The universe's shambolic but indefatigable path to success:

1) A massive swarm of things stumbling into the future.

2) Then the real world post-hoc selects the ones that turn out to be fortuitous stumbles

3) Then we narrativize the winners and completely forget the 99.99% of failures.

4) Then we repeat!

This emergent algorithm can create massive structures out of random starting conditions.

A little bit of random noise leads to a fortuitously-viable change that is conserved over multiple rounds.

The random noise now stands out a bit, distinct from the background noise.

The narrativization makes us as agents more likely to lean into the distinctiveness and accentuate it.

As long as those extensions are still viable, they also persist.

The more that the thing stands out from the background, the stronger the narrative gets, and the more that future extensions are likely to extend its throughline.

The result can be massive, durable structures that started off as random happenstance and blew up into a society-scale phenomena.