The Information - James Gleick [205]
I find that A) tremendously comforting that we’re so close, and B) like Chinese water torture that we’re so close. Because you have to find the right six people to make the connection.
There is not necessarily an algorithm for that.
The network has a structure, and that structure stands upon a paradox. Everything is close, and everything is far, at the same time. This is why cyberspace can feel not just crowded but lonely. You can drop a stone into a well and never hear a splash.
No deus ex machina waits in the wings; no man behind the curtain. We have no Maxwell’s demon to help us filter and search. “We want the Demon, you see,” wrote Stanislaw Lem, “to extract from the dance of atoms only information that is genuine, like mathematical theorems, fashion magazines, blueprints, historical chronicles, or a recipe for ion crumpets, or how to clean and iron a suit of asbestos, and poetry too, and scientific advice, and almanacs, and calendars, and secret documents, and everything that ever appeared in any newspaper in the Universe, and telephone books of the future.”♦ As ever, it is the choice that informs us (in the original sense of that word). Selecting the genuine takes work; then forgetting takes even more work. This is the curse of omniscience: the answer to any question may arrive at the fingertips—via Google or Wikipedia or IMDb or YouTube or Epicurious or the National DNA Database or any of their natural heirs and successors—and still we wonder what we know.
We are all patrons of the Library of Babel now, and we are the librarians, too. We veer from elation to dismay and back. “When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books,” Borges tells us, “the first impression was one of extravagant happiness. All men felt themselves to be the masters of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal or world problem whose eloquent solution did not exist in some hexagon. The universe was justified.”♦ Then come the lamentations. What good are the precious books that cannot be found? What good is complete knowledge, in its immobile perfection? Borges worries: “The certitude that everything has been written negates us or turns us into phantoms.” To which, John Donne had replied long before, “He that desires to print a book, should much more desire, to be a book.”♦
The library will endure; it is the universe. As for us, everything has not been written; we are not turning into phantoms. We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and of the future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information.
Acknowledgments
I am indebted and grateful to Charles H. Bennett, Gregory J. Chaitin, Neil J. A. Sloane, Susanna Cuyler, Betty Shannon, Norma Barzman, John Simpson, Peter Gilliver, Jimmy Wales, Joseph Straus, Craig Townsend, Janna Levin, Katherine Bouton, Dan Menaker, Esther Schor, Siobhan Roberts, Douglas Hofstadter, Martin Seligman, Christopher Fuchs, the late John Archibald Wheeler, Carol Hutchins, and Betty Alexandra Toole; also my agent, Michael Carlisle, and, as always, for his brilliance and his patience, my editor, Dan Frank.
Notes
PROLOGUE
♦ MY MIND WANDERS AROUND: Robert Price, “A Conversation with Claude Shannon: One Man’s Approach to Problem Solving,” IEEE Communications Magazine 22 (1984): 126.
♦ TRANSISTOR … BIT: The committee got transistor from John R. Pierce; Shannon got bit from John W. Tukey.
♦ SHANNON SUPPOSEDLY BELONGED: Interview, Mary Elizabeth Shannon, 25