haha true. but stand alone complex just arose from people's shared experiences. individual eleven, though similar, was intentionally created by a virus right?
First series was emergent phenomena that the laughing man did not direct, while the second was centrally planned chaos by coaxing using Kuze, false flag operations and misdirecting.
There has always been psychological operations, but Gist took a look into the future and pretty accurately saw the next evolution given the decentralized informational networks.