How We Feel About Links

The footnotes of T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland as a jumping-off point for connected knowledge

Earlier this summer I did an episode of Techs on Texts, a podcast where Jed Sundwall talks with technologists about the literature that has influenced them. We chose to talk about T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland and it led to a wide-ranging discussion on modernism, the Internet as an expressive medium, and the nature of truth. Here’s the full episode and select show notes from Jed:

• T.S. Eliot reads The Waste Land on YouTube

• The Waste Land on Wikipedia

• Hypertext enjambment

• The truly great Carl Malamud

• Trut from Emigre Magazine #41

In an earlier conversation, Jed had introduced me to The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges, a short story that described a universe in the form of a vast library containing all the possible words and letters of the world, arranged in ways that are ultimately inscrutable and un-knowable.

The Library of Babel is the most sophisticated thought experiment in what happens in an un-indexed, under-annotated world, and it made me think of The Wasteland, a long poem with a vast set of footnotes referencing specific passages of other works of art that allow the reader to better understand the meaning of the text.

Reading T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland in 1989 was a formative experience in annotation for me. Looking at the end notes, I started walking through UIC’s Main Library, finding the original paper texts of each ref, experiencing it in my body, walking, finding, reading.

The brutalist glory of the UIC campus is where my quest for fully indexed knowledge began.

Annotations became a passion of mine.

As an artist/ technologist, I’ve chased annotations through the Annotated bibliography of American poetry told through the Pulitzer Prize, An Annotated Look at the San Francisco Port-a-Potty Arsons, and annotated City of Chicago muncipal code on Rap Genius. Looking back, I see obsession unfulfilled.

Spreadsheet of addresses of arson incidents. Knowing everything is hard.

The idea of fully understanding a text, of having a complete view of what someone said or wrote, is an endless goal. These brutish experiments, and the marvelous and ultimately inadequate magic of search engines, got us close to deep knowing, but not really.

Commercially available artificial intelligence tools are a promise; I want it.

One day we’ll know everything.