The profound and prolific Grant McCracken has spent the last two weeks exploring the implications of Richard Preston's New Yorker story on the Chudnovsky brothers--Russian mathematicians who think they're the same mind inhabiting two separate people, who build their own supercomputers, who calculate pi to umpteen million decimal places, and who were apparently the only possible people (person?) who could solve an unbelieveably difficult digital imaging problem involving Renaissance tapestries.
McCracken wonders just how these obscure oddballs got connected with the equally obscure project to photograph the tapestries, and what it all means for an ever-expanding cultural universe. Just start here for Networks in Expanding Cultural Spaces, Part I, and keep scrolling up (and up) through Part VI. Or you can skip to the money graf:
If contemporary culture is a place of ever greater intensification, where the differences become more different and the absolute culture space continues to expand, solutions will remain estranged from solutions unless and until narrative force or the pursuit of social capital drives stories up out of their obscure little [nooks] and crannies out into the broader world where they may be embraced by someone who needs them. Last time, we speculated that the stories may now be beginning to fail us and, if this post is accurate, it may be true that social capital drivers are, outside of New York City, insufficiently active, too.
Now the question is this: the expansion of cultural spaces may be outrunning the traditional sources and forces of dissemination. Now it falls to the new media to take up the diffusion task and see to the intersection of new problems and solutions.
Already we have seen this new [channel] help like find like. It is also good at helping unlike find like. But surely really "unlike" almost never finds really "unlike." This is another way of [saying] there are solutions out there for our problems but we cannot begin to imagine the key words that would google them in for us. Oh, the search engines will get better. We will get ever more Boolean in our search skills. But all the while the world will encourage more difference. It is finally a little like trying to get a rocket ship to the edge of an expanding universe. You can get better but you can never win. We are living Zeno’s paradox…or something like it.
But, hey, that's just the pessimism talkin'.
