Free The Blind Giant by Nick Harkaway

switching off doesn’t appear to be the answer. Refusing to connect is like refusing to open your post: it doesn’t solve the problem, it just leaves you ignorant of what’s happening, and gradually the letters pile up on the mat.

    Alongside the sense of intrusion is a gnawing fear that the modern world quite simply contains too much we ought to know, or need to know. It’s not obviously a digital issue; rather, it’s a consequence of the ethos of factual inquiry which comes from the scientific and technological current in our society. Issues of how we feel are not clear-cut or always entirely logical, but it seems to me that the blame for this aspect ofinformation overload is cast on technology for its place as a part of the scientific family.
    And inquiry certainly does yield complexity, because we inhabit a world which is complex. In academic study and practical research we have pushed back the boundaries of ignorance as the Enlightenment promised that we would. In consequence there is so much more to learn in every sphere of life that we either become hyper-specialized or, in choosing a broader spectrum ofknowledge, accept that we cannot know everything which is to be known about our subjects. When I was a child, I was told on a museum visit thatSir Isaac Newton was the last man to know the entire field of mathematics as it stood in his time. After Newton, the story went, it was simply impossible to absorb it all. Since then I’ve heard the same thing proposed aboutCarl Friedrich Gauss,Gottfried Leibniz, and a half-dozen others. It doesn’t really matter which of them – if any – genuinely deserves the title. The point is that no one now can claim it, oranything like it. In 1957 Colin Cherry wrote in
On Human Communication:
    Up to the last years of the eighteenth century our greatest mentors were able not only to compass the whole science of their day, perhaps together with mastery of several languages, but to absorb a broad culture as well. But as the fruits of scientific labor have increasingly been applied to our material betterment, fields of specialized interest have come to be cultivated, and the activities of an ever-increasing body of scientific workers have diverged. Today we are most of us content to carry out an intense cultivation of our own little scientific garden (to continue the metaphor), deriving occasional pleasure from chat with our neighbors over the fence, while with them we discuss, criticize, and exhibit our produce.
    If it was true then that knowledge had outstripped our capacity to retain and process it, it’s vastly more so now. Universities complain that they cannot bridge in three or four years the gap between the end of the school syllabus and the place where new work is being done, either in the commercial sector or in Academe. The quantity of information and theory available is boggling, so that on any given topic there may be multiple schools of conflicting thought, each of them large enough to be a lifetime’s study by itself. The situation of any project with a broad scope is analogous to that of an artist painting the Alps: she tries to capture the scale of the peaks, the colour of the sky, the appalling drop to the valley floor, but has no hope of accurately rendering the village in the distance or the great swathe of landscape directly behind her back. Moreover, the picture will reproduce only the visual scene, not the scent, the sound, the taste of the air or the texture of the rock. The other senses can only be suggested.
    The most egregious example of a glut of complex issues all bound to one another, though, is probably government – by which, inevitably, I also mean politics. Any claim by one partywill be furiously rejected by another, and both claim and counter-claim will be couched in terms that are either incomprehensible on the face of it or ostensibly clear-cut but somehow freely interpretable. Worse yet – the final part of the information overload problem –