Noise

Londonian novelist Hari Kunzru was not many years ago deemed by Granta to be one of the twenty best fiction writers under forty. I am, to say the least, an enormous fan. A week or two ago I put to rest Transmission, the followup to his sensational debut The Impressionist. By all available indicators, Granta couldn't have been more accurate in their assessment, though that's nothing new. Written in 2004 at the heigh of the real version the events are based on, the story follows, among other critical characters, a young Indian man as he moves from his native country to Silicon Valley to work in the dot-com industry right as the bubbling market is about to explode and bust like the failed venture we should have seen it as. Reading it now, so many years after that tide-turning global moment, when we're still understanding and feeling many of the aftereffects of that bursted, fluttering bubble and the ensuing deflations of this supercapitalistic there-can-always-be-more theory of shut-eyed economic thickheadedness, the novel takes on an even more essential tone as it aims its lens at interrelated contemporary topics like the pursuit of dreams, success, globalization, terrorism, economic theory, celebrity idolization, and the ugly union of all the above - not to mention how love manages to figure into all this. 

A particular passage near the end of the book struck me as so devastatingly apropos and timely, given the recent hysteria caused by the attempted bombing of the plane in Detroit and the subsequent shocked, outraged, flabbergasted response calling for all sorts of theatre: more information; bigger, better, more comprehensive terrorist lists; extended watch lists; extended no fly lists; pat downs, piss tests, and strip searches; microscopes slid up your anal cavity; ball-fondling to see what falls loose; more state of the art technology that they can't even assure will be any more effective; more, more, more, all to create the illusion of safety; to, as Kunzru puts it, "abolish the unknown." 

"'We want to abolish the unknown,' writes one Leela researcher. It is a common enough desire. As humans, we want to know what is lurking outside our perimeter, beyond our flickering circle of firelight. We have built lenses and geiger counters and mass spectrometers and solar probes and listening stations on remote Antarctic islands. We have drenched the world in information in the hope that the unknown will finally and definitively go away. But information is not the same as knowledge.  To extract one from the other you must, as the word suggests, inform. You must transmit. Perfect information is sometimes defined as a signal transmitted from a sender to a receiver without loss, without the introduction of the smallest uncertainty or confusion.

In the real world, however, there is always noise.

Since 1965, the Russian Academy of Sciences has published Problems of Information Transmission. It is, insofar as it possible for a scientific publication (even a Russian one) to convey an emotional tone, a melancholy read. Threaded through recondite papers on Markov Chains and Hamming Spaces and binary Goppa codes and multivariate Poisson flow is a vocabulary of imperfection, of error correction and density estimation, of signals with unknown appearance and disappearance times, of indefinite knowledge and losses due to entropy. Sparse vectors are glimpsed through a haze of Gaussian white noise. Certainty backslides into probability. Information transmission, it emerges, is about doing the best you can."