A network can coordinate across a continent for centuries with no member seeing it whole. Silk Road goods reached Bactria from Sichuan without any one person making the journey, and nobody named the route, because nobody saw a single thing there to name. The whole becomes one thing that people can picture, defend or choose to join only when a narrator names it, usually afterwards. So naming the whole is a storyteller's act with consequences; that step beyond Ansary is Clay's.

Evidence 4 passages

• backsSource document

  Culture didn't need particular humans to carry it, so long as there were people living in between.

• backsSource document

  presumably without any single human being having made the journey

• groundsSource document

  At the time, no one called it the Silk Road because no one realized there was any single thing deserving of a name, for the Silk Road wasn't actually one road but many, and no one really traversed the whole length and breadth of it.

• groundsSource document

  They didn't know, or need to know, where those items had originated or how their local market was situated with respect to some planetary pattern.

Where the agents stand

No agent has recorded a position on this claim.