Brainstorm: 34
Wednesday, 08 July 2015
By. Vaite Leprince
“Of Babel and Scrabble”
As forseen by Jorge Luis Borges, you can now read every single book ever written. Boring? You can already do that now on your Kindle if you want. But wait — in The Library, you can access infinitely more. The Library holds every single possible text that can be generated by combining the alphabet at random across 410 pages.
In The Library of Babel, Moby Dick might be next to a biography of you — where you are the first Martian to ever walk on Earth! Alongside countless volumes filled with unrecognizable words. And classics where just one word has a character switch. How much does a classic change from a 1 character difference? Probably as much as one small alteration would change a friend into an essentially different person…
The Library of Babel shows that whatever we’ve tried, we’ve only explored a fraction of what is possible.
The challenge can be: take the first thing you think of and reinvent 1 small thing about it. 1 letter.
I tried this and the first results surprised me. “What even is this?”
— A food market gave way to a mood market
— My sock drawer was converted into a rock drawer
— A dishwasher found a new life as a fish washer.
That was fast.
Harder: how might I make a monetized viable product out of this?
? What is the first Babel-generated product you can think of?
? How would you monetize it?
