¸.·✩·.¸¸.·¯⍣✩ Welcome to Babel's Digital Forest! ✩⍣¯·.¸¸.·✩·.¸

Jorge Luis Borges' short story The Library of Babel is well known for its depiction of the infinite library. It conceives a world consisting of a seemingly endless array of bookshelves containing every single combination of letters that can fit in a book — but the books are ordered randomly throughout the library. The inhabitants of the library, being human, can only explore the megastructure one room at a time. The Library of Babel is also well known for its internet adaptation at https://libraryofbabel.info. It is a straightforward projection of the original world into a digital medium, with some added features more suited for a website.

The Library taps into the concept of curated knowledge, in particular the desire to curate and collect more and more information. Perhaps this form of knowledge-gathering is part of the human condition, part of our desire to understand the world around us. We have shared oral traditions and documented our knowledge for as long as those methods have existed to us. A library in particular has a specific philosophical implications regarding knowledge. It implies intent in the collection and organization of information. This is ironic, even humorous when juxtaposed with the random unfiltered approach to knowledge contained in the Library. But could the concept of The Library of Babel be brought to the internet in a less direct way?

Nowadays, the internet has given light to a new kind of information. Our every message and interaction online increasingly leaves traces and sends ripples across networks. We produce a monumental amount of this data, more than is possible to analyze with a single mind. The tech industry calls this "big data" (though that specific term exists largely for the profit of big tech companies, a shareholder hype bubble much like what "metaverse" is/was).

But even before the hypercommercialization of our online interactions, we have created digital traces of ourselves and our relationships. A link on a webpage is an example of such traces. Two webpages linking to each other creates a conceptual connection between two nodes in a graph. These networks of relationships were a new kind of data at the center of the early internet.

The 88x31 is perhaps the most iconic symbol of this early-web graph-building. Popular in Geocities (and trending recently), 88x31s are small banners (88 by 31 pixels in size, hence the name) that you can place on a website and use to link elsewhere. Pages can create unique banners to represent themselves and thus to build an interconnected network of sites across the internet.

Like a universal library, there have been attempts to compile repositories of 88x31s across the years. Perhaps the most impressive of them is https://eightyeightthirty.one, which displays a graph visualization of the links in question. Of course, such a feat is nigh impossible, due to the sheer scale of the internet and its rapid evolution. Not every page is reachable within the network, and there are bound to be isolated pockets of sites that don't get picked up by the webscraper. However, these attempts are very impressive and served as inspiration for this page, Babel's Digital Forest. Because what if the collections of 88x31s could be universal? What would it look like to have a "god's eye" perspective on the whole internet?

Ironically, we do already have groups with such a god's eye perspective of the internet. Our digital lives are increasingly being controlled by a small handful of companies like Google, Microsoft, and Meta née Facebook. Their motive is to drive online interaction into their platforms, which are entirely within their control. The data that we produce is funnelled into massive databases and piped into monstrously complex algorithms to generate data insights, tailor content, and (most importantly) sell ads.

Taken in a different less depressing direction, one might reach this page. Babel's Digital Forest is a projection of the spirit of the Library translated to the internet, without retaining its medium. It's an extrapolation of the desire to curate to the uncuratable mass of the internet, communicated using the aesthetics of Web 1.0. Every single 88x31 ever made is here on the page at your fingertips. The tradeoff, of course is the same as that of the Library: it is impossible to find coherent information from the Forest that you don't already know.

The finitude of the Library is subtle in its original formulation. By virtue of being inside it, forced to take on the perspective of an ant, your perception of scale grows. A single human lifespan is quite strictly bounded, and the library is placed within the physical realm. Thus, the Library creates a tangible representation of unreachableness. For all practical purposes it is infinite.

But the Library is, at least as described, only able to contain a finite number of unique books. The precise size of the alphabet varies between 20 and 30 per interpretation and adaptation, but stays finite. A page must in turn also contain only finitely many characters (around 3000 is sensible). Finally, a book can only have finitely many pages (400?). Putting all this together, we find that there are (alphabet size) ^ (chars per page * pages per book) unique permutations of letters (i.e. books) — a far cry from infinity!

(As a side note, the web version of the Library only contains every unique page containing 3200 characters rather than every 400-ish-page book of such pages. I assume this is for technical reasons, but this does mean that it only contains 29^3200 unique pages of text... which is less than the number of banners on this page. In fact, an 88x31 can store the same amount of information as about 4 pages of text! An image indeed says more than a thousand words.)

The tension between the finite and infinite comes from how we are able to interface with the library. As a lone wanderer inside a megastructure, one's only option is to traverse the hallways. The books one is able to read, or even to reach, are but a drop in an ocean compared to the vastness of the whole library, finite or not. One's search for hidden knowledge is doomed from the start, for the likelihood of finding any coherent text is infinitesimal — much less text that communicates information beside entropy.

In the online version of the Library, we are given additional means of interacting with the Library. We can locate a book by its position, eschewing the need for physical traversal. We can also jump directly to a random position, as if whisked away by reality. Finally, we are able to search for the precise location of specific sequences of characters, effectively allowing us to recall books we know to exist in the Library.

Notably, these extra methods do not allow us to gain any more knowledge from the digital Library that the physical Library didn't offer. While we are able to find more instances of coherent text (simply by searching for it), we are not able to find any information that was not provided by us in the first place. Jumping to a random or specific coordinates is no good, either — since there's no pattern to the contents of a book at a coordinate, every turned page is equally likely to contain a prayer. Thus, the theoretical inaccessibility of the Library is maintained.

However, these additional capabilities introduce tension between the apparent infinitude and the theoretical finitude of the Library. When jumping between locations, we are no longer acting from within the Library, but rather outside it. The physical metaphor of the Library begins to break apart as soon as we are able to transcend physical barriers and jump to arbitrary points within. The Library becomes a thing to be interacted with, rather than an environment to traverse. The medium of a webpage promotes the former kind of interaction. Nevertheless, it does not necessarily imply bounds on the Library as a thing. We only see a snapshot of the Library at any given point in time and thus are not privy to the size, outside of calculations like those above.

So what if this tension was then taken further? What if it was faster and simpler to traverse the Library? What if the finitude of the Library was displayed to you at every moment? What if you were presented with an abstraction of the entire Library visible at once? These questions helped drive the development of this page. In Babel's Digital Forest, I hoped too push those borders further, through the single continuous scrollable page, the speed at which you can zoom through 88x31s, the progress bar in the footer, and the general presentation of the site. By adding additional features, I wanted to inch the bar of tension further without breaking the moment. Though despite these features, the smallness of the Forest is illusory. The progress bar in all its 13 decimal digits of precision will never tick as a result of scrolling (you'd need almost 20000 significant digits to see it change in real time).

(Sorry by the way if the page is unstable on your browser. I know there's jank on Safari.)

In the end, I found myself being drawn towards the metaphor of the forest. Not a well kept garden, but a thick forest. A forest and a galaxy are cute comparisons to draw here. They are infinitely complex (eco)systems with an amount of detail that a single human could never fully internalize. They are systems that follow sets of rules, even if they are not at first intuitive. They go on seemingly forever, but do ultimately have some bounds. Both are beautiful. However, the emphasis on the metaphor does detract from the aforementioned tension building. Embracing the idea of a complex ecosystem to take a walk through hinders the thingification of the system. In the end, I can't help but to leave my own imprints on my art.

By asserting a complete collection of anything, one claims finality. The Library contains every book that could ever be written; hence any new books are simply copies of existing ones. The Forest contains every 88x31 that could ever be linked to, hence every new 88x31 in every website is already marked here. But human knowledge is not completable, and neither are human relationships. We will continue to create novel content and forge social networks for as long as there will be humans. The unreachability of these repositories is the point. I find that comforting.