From Von Neumann to Tibesti
Why are we sucked into Wikipedia holes?
I came back from a bike ride this morning and slid into my Stupid Studio T with a purple print of a dog dreaming of fantastical glory. I love this shirt. It reminds me of one of my favorite books: Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea. With her direct prose, Le Guin cracks open a geode-world of shimmering possibility. Earthsea captures the feeling of being a kid and reasonably dreaming (this was me) that I could both play in the Stanley Cup and sing the national anthem. The first few chapters are soaked by this preternatural wonder until the world of Earthsea buckles under the weight of it’s own lofty aspiration, and Le Guin casts the readers adrift in desperation and darkness…It’s a book for kids! I read it for the first time in college in a Stilgoe seminar and have returned to it many times since. Le Guin reads like ancient knowledge, myth and prophecy,
Today has been one of those days where my mind just wanders. I’ve been sitting on the couch reading about the Tibesti Mountain Range, a band of ancient volcanoes that hover like martian wraiths 11,000 feet above the central Sahara. Now I’m looking at my local Sierra Nevadas on Google Earth. It’s 10:11 PM, holy hell. Alright, Weber, you better get writing tomorrow…
Why are we sucked into Wikipedia holes?
I don’t know a single person who hasn’t at some point followed the purple-link road down a Wikipedia hole. For most of my friends, this is a common occurrence, a diversion waved-away with a palm and a shake of the head similar in tone to Don Draper coming into the office hung-over, as in “What do you expect?” It’s equal parts invigorating and embarrassing: wasting time but not really; learning but not really. Yesterday (see above) I think I started with John Von Neumann and have zero recollection how I ended up reading about Tibesti. A time-warp, a worm-hole. Wikipedia exemplifies, in this way, the operative quality of the internet, a world outside spacetime, a vast network of wayfinding. In this way, one gets “lost” in Wikipedia in a way distinct to getting “lost” in a book. In a book, one is transmuted, totally absorbed until the words disappear, like sitting in a lounge chair strapped to the front of a train. The internet is more akin to driving a souped-up bumper car in a pinball machine. At every juncture your choice is emphasized, literally underlined and highlighted by nature of the internet’s own mechanics. It’s a fun-house mad-house house-of-mirrors chase-of-infinite-knowledge. Totally invigorating.
I bet it would be the book of a lifetime that runs the invisible thread I chased yesterday from Von Neumann to Tibesti, and it’s cool that I know things, but I guess what’s missing is context. In a world where everything is connected by a magic accessible to everyone at all times, relationships and context start to disintegrate and, with it, goes meaning. We are all hobbyists of knowledge, at risk of deep ambivalence!
The crisis in the third Earthsea book follows these lines. In it, the world simply starts to fade, people start to forget things, singers lose their songs, magicians lose their spells, names begin to slip, and a breach opens between the worlds of the living and the dead, between the present and the past. The internet, while it connects and invigorates, also has the capacity to open this chasm between now and then, between real and fake, names and namelessness. Two-faced, it’s a Janus fractal, digging the moat and building the bridge in an infinite repetition. More and more, I find my mission of the future to be truly learning things, not just knowing things. I think this is connected to the malaise of the internet-skim, an act that prioritizes knowing and delights in random, un-contextualized jumps, from Von Neumann to Tibesti not knowing how or why.
Anyway, I hope this makes sense. Please let me know your thoughts!
For the greatest of all Wikipedia content, check out Annie Rauwerda’s Substack, Lots of Links, where she dives in and out of Wiki-holes with the grace and derring-do of a rocket-powered swan. Her visionary ability to connect the world of the internet to the world around us is inspirational and embodies a model for a better society where we can use our powers of infinite-connection-and-knowledge for true good. (You can find her everywhere else as Depths of Wikipedia.”)
OH SHIT I ALMOST FORGOT!
I started a record label! Check it out @SpecificNorthwest! (specificnorthwest.info in the works)
I’ll write more about this next week, but suffice to say that I am so excited. It has been a decade-long dream of mine to start a record label that reimagines what a label can be for musicians, and I think our motto, “up and to the left” is a cheeky nod to where we want to go (up) and how we want to do it (together), a reference to our music (left of the dial), and the literal direction of North-West on maps.
New music coming imminently…
See ya soon,
AW
Your latest Wikipedia hole? Lmk
I’ve never thought of the readily available pile of knowledge that the internet makes accessible as anything less than desirable. Maybe cause I’m a 21st century baby LOL