Page 38 - The Revolution Will Be Automated
P. 38
Borges’ Library of Babel
To appreciate the importance of selectivity, and the potential for
mere generation to overwhelm a semiotic system, consider the short
story ‘The Library of Babel’ by Jorge Luis Borges.
Borges imagines a vast (but finite) library containing every book of
fixed upper-size and alphabet that was ever written, or that ever
could be written. Want a sequel to War and Peace, or the next Harry
Potter that JK Rowling may one day write? It’s here for the taking.
If you can find it! That’s a big IF: the library contains a great many
hidden gems, but these are lost in a sea of random possibilities. The
library contains many conflicting guides to itself (as these are books
too), but no guide is authoritative, and so the library is unusable.
