The Library of Babel and the Hawaii Project

Lately, I’m surprised at how prescient and pertinent the stories of Jorge Louis Borges have become.  “The Library of Babel,” published over sixty years ago envisions a kind of infinite library filled with not only the greatest books ever written but assemblages of total random characters and everything between.  One of the most interesting aspects of the story is its foresight of humanity’s response to the existence of an apparently infinite library.  Librarians are understandably suicidal, cults arise, some seeking to purify the collection others to search for the perfect, all-knowing critic, “the Man of the Book.”

Internet access and the vast collection of books accessible through online book sellers as well as more particular sites mean that we live day to day with an approximation of Borges’ abstraction.  Crushing, international price and margin competition exacts not just a financial toll from the traditional book publishing industry as it struggles to adapt and reinvent itself.  New strategies for manipulating, even corrupting the book reviewing  process emerge constantly.  One of the most important innovations in retail, democratic starred reviewing is actively and fiercely gamed.  In 2013, Forbes reported the existence of companies specializing in elevating  books to the New York Times Best Seller’s List.  At the same time, the Humanities have become balkanized.  The question of what one should read has probably never been more fraught with controversy.

I worry the most for difficult books, books which are not pleasant or compelling at first, books that are a struggle, that nevertheless are sometimes the most important ones we ever read.  If there’s no one you respect telling you it’s worth the effort, why try?

Sadly, there are very few reviewers I trust these days, among them are George Packer, Nick Paumgarten and Adam Gopnik.  Whilst they’ve pointed to some very important books, Phil Klay’s Redeployment, for example, their purview doesn’t completely intersect with my own.  Finding and identifying not just pretty good books, but extraordinary ones remains incredibly difficult.

A good friend and former colleague, Mark Watkins, shares my concern.  He’s passionate about it.  For years he’s imagined solving it with an online system built to serve the reader and the reader only.  And not just a generic reader, but each, necessarily unique reader with her or his particular interests, requirements and aspirations.  And now he’s building it.  I have had the privilege of beta testing it for the last several months:  each morning I have an email with a selection of new books and stories about books which his system has created by crawling the web for the previous 24 hours and matching them to my particular interests.

And it works.  It finds extraordinary books, books I feel I have to read.  And, by the way, it is way more fun, first thing in the morning, to look through a small collection of new good books instead of mostly tired, often horrific news.  That can come later in the day, don’t you think?

Mark has just launched a Kickstarter project to support the project.  Why Kickstarter?  Remember, I said it serves the reader and the reader only.  It serves you.  Go take a look at the Hawaii Project.

It’s one of those “things to come” that was never more needed.  (Apologies H. G. Wells.)

 

The Virtual and Physical Hidden in Plain Sight

When I was a child we used to play a simple game in a friend’s expansive, shadowy basement.  Each of us would take turns hiding something in plain sight.  Some of us had a gift for it, some didn’t.  It was spooky, dramatic and great fun.  I remember the thrill of hunting through shelves and trunks and oddly stacked furniture.

The frisson that Lynn and I experienced when we first came across the Greenwich Foot Tunnel, which crosses beneath the Thames, was similar.  The long tunnel has its own dreary, Victorian beauty and almost abstract geometry, of course.  But it’s equally fun that in a sense it’s hidden in plain sight.  It remains a commonly used footpath for crossing the river and the entrances on either side aren’t that interesting.

A different example is in Chaco Canyon.  If you don’t know much about the area or even if you do and it’s your first time, you’re naturally drawn to the monumental great houses built by the Chacoans a thousand years ago.  It’s entirely possible to pass by the immense butte in the center of the canyon thinking it’s interesting, dramatic geography but no more.  In fact Fajada Butte is as worthy of attention as the more ostensible remnants of Chacoan construction.  The remains of a 95-meter-high, 230-meter-long ramp is hidden in plain sight on the southwestern face.  And, if you have an eye for detail, you can see remnants of construction near the top.  In fact it’s a diverse archaeological site; evidence suggests it may have been used for religious and ceremonial purposes as well as astronomical and solar observation.  So Mayan pyramids immediately come to mind:  did the Chacoans use a natural feature instead of a constructed one for the same purpose?  What relationship, if any, did Mayan culture have to Chacoan culture which came shortly after?  And it’s in plain sight.

Here’s something new in plain sight.  Twenty-five years ago I read a Computer Science paper of which I can find no record.  I believe the authors were David C. Evans and Micky Mantle and the title was something like “Once More Around the Wheel of Reincarnation.”  The point of the article was that as digital technology and research advance, old architectures are reinvented and applied to meet the exigencies and opportunities implicit in new elements.  Their particular example was the computer workstation (which was then in the ascendant) and the mainframe computer.  Since then the architectural balance between those elements and the elements themselves have been “reincarnated” many times.  Today we have tablet computers and multiple clouds.

Another technological idea which recurs and is reapplied is that idea of creating a single and/or preeminent portal for accessing entertainment, or purchasing hard goods or even consolidating scientific and technological research.  Amazon clearly demonstrates how successful that strategy can be while Spotify and even Youtube are more ambiguous in spite of their ubiquity.

In that context, I find Shakespeare’s Globe’s recent decision to stream their productions of Shakespeare’s plays very provocative.  The key question is why aren’t they doing it through one of the much larger portals?  The obvious answer is that they don’t need to.  And, if they don’t need to, others don’t either.  It could be that contrary to the expectation that digital content will continue to be consolidated, the wheel of reincarnation may be turning to a phase of dramatic decentralization and distribution.  Perhaps content provision and curation may become entirely separate as it’s necessarily a compromised relationship anyway.  I’m aware of at least one new technology start-up, The Hawaii Project, which is consistent with that technology culture change.

Around 1150 Chaco was abandoned and the culture that dominated the Colorado Plateau decentralized.  Perhaps the image of the Crab Nebula super nova hidden in plain sight on the path to Peñasco Blanco in Chaco Canyon was interpreted as a prophesy of that event.