Just thinking out loud here, but this is a familiar dynamic in religious movements, especially, but not exclusively, prior to the printing press, which imposed a certain amount of stability on texts. Now the kind of mutations associated with oral tradition happen at lightspeed. https://twitter.com/dappergander/status/1345388634363617280

What you'd expect under the old paradigm is the establishment of a canon, similar to how the dozens of early Christian gospels were reduced to four official (but still inconsistent) texts. But you might need a Constantine to impose that requirement. https://twitter.com/cpicciolini/status/1345393033341231110?s=19

Also now that I think about it, textual and knowledge transmission in a digital world is an important subcurrent in Optimal, although I set aside most of the interesting implications of that for use in any potential sequel https://twitter.com/intelwire/status/1344648251933245441?s=19