Let There Be More Biographies Of Failures

Let there be more biographies of failures, people who were ignored by the world, whose ideas came before their time, whose great work was left in ruins.

The point of biography is to set an example, to teach us how other people did the things we want to do. That might be something grand like live a good life, or it might be something more mundane like manage a small company. Whatever it is, the genre suffers from selection bias. Only the successful get biographies.

But we will not all be successful, and if that is our main criteria we won’t learn as much from biography as we could. There’s a lot of fascinating information in Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age, by Alex Wright, but some of the most interesting is about how Otlet was repeatedly let down by the world.

Otlet was something of a genius. After an unusual education (tutors until he was 11 as his father thought school was stifling, then a Jesuit school) Otlet did what a lot of interesting people do when they are young. He made the mistake of going to law school. The real benefit that reluctant young lawyers like Otlet get from their career is boredom. Their minds wander.

His passion was bibliography, the organising of information, and he devised a system based on organising and cataloging chunks of information. Books imprison ideas in structures that authors arbitrarily impose on them. Otlet wanted to break the ideas down to chunks and make them retrievable by anyone. He was thinking his way towards an analogue version of the internet. This was in 1892.

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In short, he was having ideas that sound remarkably like a prototype internet. And yet he was obscure, unknown even, to the people who did eventually create the internet and the world wide web. Unlike Otlet, who favoured a massive, systematic, centralised, categorisation of knowledge, the internet was built on ideals of distribution, flat hierarchy, and emergent order. As Alex Wright says, modern internet ideals make ‘the notion of “universal classification” seem like an enormous act of cultural hubris.’ Wikpedia would be foreign to Otlet.

Right to the end, Otlet’s vision was frustrated.

So what are the lessons we can learn? It doesn’t always help to be right. Ideas aren’t easy to implement without the right combination of technology, attitudes, and luck. The work is what’s important, not the result. Maybe the cranks who fill their houses with cart loads of ephemera aren’t so crazy. Don’t make political trouble. Get a PR department. Have a partner who can do these things if you can’t. Be in the right place at the right time. Don’t get cynical, or as Churchill said, don’t let the bastards grind you down. Keep working. Philosophical and ethical beliefs matter a lot to what work you do and how you do it. Don’t be so pragmatic you end up being a conformist. Conventional schooling isn’t always the best approach for your children. Worry less about imaginative young people becoming lawyers. Being bored might give them the opportunity they need to have their big idea.

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