Jared Diamond argues convincingly that innovation has to happen when the climate is right for it, and that's certainly random. He doesn't argue that it's a simple process, to be sure, but I think he misses the social aspect of it. Yeah, the printing press was invented in Sumeria a gajillion years ago and nobody did anything with it, and that's an argument that innovation is random. The Sumerian system was used by one or two accountants for their internal books, though. They had an active disincentive to spread that around. The Holy Word of God? Yeah, we want that EVERYWHERE. Thus we call it the Gutenberg Press. I think social media/the internet provide the leveraging factor of the Gutenberg Press to simple tools like the Sumerian coins. Is that "stifling innovation?" I think it's lowering the bar for what we propagate. I'm not going to say that's a good thing or a bad thing, though.