A Thin, Perilous Condition
But I do like "bête noire."
I came across this little gem in the first few pages of William Gaddis’ JR, for which he won the National Book Award in 1975:
knowledge has to be organized so it can be taught, and it has to be reduced to information so it can be organized … this leads you to assume that organization is an inherent property of the knowledge itself, and that disorder and chaos are simply irrelevant forces that threaten it from the outside. In fact it's exactly the opposite. Order is simply a thin, perilous condition we try to impose on the basic reality of chaos.
This while lampooning of the invasion of the classroom by the television, that era’s academic bête noire. The quote above, though, is provocative - knowledge, distilled to information so that it can be sorted, is just a candle against the darkness.
That quote, long as it is, will likely be the epigraph of my next book.
About Five Years, of which you’ve already bought and distributed dozens of copies1, contemplates the future of a specific industry facing an array of potentially-devastating changes. The next book, which has no title yet, will zoom all the way out, looking at how information management has informed the very structures of public and private-sector organizations and how the pre-digital, post-industrial handling and communication of information is the potential blueprint for the next, AI-driven, knowledge revolution. Or something like that.
It’s a more ambitious project than A5Y was. I expect it’ll take longer. I’ll bring you along! What’s the worst that could happen?
right?