The Information - James Gleick [187]
In his novel The Infinities, John Banville imagines the god Hermes saying: “A hamadryad is a wood-nymph, also a poisonous snake in India, and an Abyssinian baboon. It takes a god to know a thing like that.”♦ Yet according to Wikipedia, hamadryad also names a butterfly, a natural history journal from India, and a Canadian progressive rock band. Are we all now as gods? The rock band and the wood nymph could coexist without friction, but more generally the breaking down of information barriers leads to conflict over names and naming rights. Impossible as it seems, the modern world is running out of names. The roster of possibilities seems infinite, but the demand is even greater.
The major telegraph companies, struggling in 1919 with the growing problem of misdirected messages, established a Central Bureau for Registered Addresses. Its central office in the financial district of New York filled an upstairs room on Broad Street with steel filing cabinets. Customers were invited to register code names for their addresses: single words of five to ten letters, required to be “pronounceable”—that is, “made up of syllables that appear in one of eight European languages.”♦ Many customers complained about the yearly charge—$2.50 per code name—but by 1934 the bureau was managing a list of 28,000, including ILLUMINATE (the New York Edison Company), TOOTSWEETS (the Sweet Company of America), and CHERRYTREE (George Washington Hotel).♦ The financier Bernard M. Baruch managed to get BARUCH all to himself. It was first come, first served, and it was a modest harbinger of things to come.
Cyberspace, of course, changes everything. A South Carolina company called Fox & Hound Realty, Billy Benton owner/broker, registered the domain name BARUCH.COM. A Canadian living in High Prairie, Alberta, registered JRRTOLKIEN.COM and held on to it for a decade, until a panel of the World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva took it away from him. The name had value; others who claimed an interest in it, as a brand and a trademark, either registered or unregistered, included the late writer’s heirs, publisher, and filmmakers, not to mention the several thousand people worldwide who happened to share his surname. The same High Prairie man was basing a business on his possession of famous names: Céline Dion, Albert Einstein, Michael Crichton, Pierce Brosnan, and about 1,500 more. Some of these people fought back. A select few names—the pinnacles and hilltops—have developed a tremendous concentration of economic value. The word Nike is thought by economists to be worth $7 billion; Coca-Cola is valued at ten times more.
In the study of onomastics it is axiomatic that growing social units lead to growing name systems. For life in tribes and villages, single names like Albin and Ava were enough, but tribes gave way to clans, cities to nations, and people had to do better: surnames and patronyms; names based on geography and occupation. More complex societies demand more complex names. The Internet represents not just a new opportunity for fights over names but a leap in scale causing a phase transition.
An Atlanta music writer known as Bill Wyman received a cease-and-desist letter from lawyers representing the former Rolling Stone bass player also known as Bill Wyman; demanding, that is, that he “cease and desist” using his name. In responding, the first Bill Wyman pointed out that the second Bill Wyman had been born William George Perks. The car company known in Germany as Dr. Ing. h.c. F. Porsche AG fought a series of battles to protect the name Carrera. Another contender was the Swiss village, postal code 7122. “The village