I feel it goes against the idea I (we) may have about personal freedom.
This makes someone not aware of said systems a puppet doesn't it?
To the point you think you have freedom, but your attempts could be doomed to failure.
We are still free to shape our networks yes, and it requires work ...
So success is a function of how good you are at Psyop then /s
The problem being that maintaining and shaping networks is very expensive in the most limited resource: time and attention.
And the more realistic model of such networks are cliques, and switching or merging cliques is hard - were it easy we would not talk of charisma and makers.
To join a clique you have to be compatible with its selection process in some way, and certain cliques are made of birthright.
Face it, we're all elitist. We have to be or we would be socially overloaded or worse, exploited.
Ultimately, because there are statistics involved, there will be social butterflies and successful climbers, but they will be rather rare and it's hard to discern chance, opportunity and genetic (including environmental) source of said success from each other. It's extremely hard to run such experiments due to age number of social feedbacks involved.
I do not trust the "simple math" involved, though certain coincidences might have enough weight to statistically dwarf others. A lot of the alleged laws like Zipf's is trivial restatement of correlations between diverse subgroups of a group. They're not constructive nor prescriptive.
Cliques tend to not obey commands of individuals who are not influential nor even if influential ones if the command goes against the existence or success of the clique, and an outsider is especially not influential. (The degree by which they do is called stability.)
People tend to be in many networks but rather few cliques. Network is much less relevant than the cliques. (E.g. being a banker vs personally a few bankers in a specific bank vs knowing and working with Congress budget committee.)
The overarching network effects tend to be shared by big groups and likewise can prove to be big barriers or boons, but they're not something you can change on your own or even as a society most of the time.
It's often that genetic reasons cause the relatively even probability of being in or out to shift due to feedback effects, and feedbacks are rather hard to change.
Most importantly, few people have the resources to explore properly.
There's no question of probability of high achiever group when genetic causes are not in place as that clique will reject you. (At least earlier in life.) Likewise if you're ugly, good luck getting into cool kids club. It can change somewhat, but more often than not it doesn't.
Society tends to put social success on pedestal, while such aspirations might not be achievable by most due to lack of any of the necessary components that are unknown.
I concur. I'm from "Savoie", FR Alps. I have filmed on Hi-8 the glaciers nearby where I lived as a kid. Some are just no longer visible from the valley.
