Abstract: Corporations and companies today generate a juggernaut of information, much more than they can process or put to use. The accepted response to running out of shelf space is to invest in more capacious IT and storage systems, with intranets serving as interfaces to ensure this stockpile of information remains accessible and usable. This whitepaper posits a less technical but more evolved response, one that has worked for centuries and enabled the very survival of our species. It recommends overlaying on our intranets the principles of oral-based information systems where a premium is placed on the processing, validation and sculpting of information before its eventual storage for future reference. The paper explores in detail how to put these principles to work within the challenging context of a modern corporate environment. It also implements its own recommendations, preferring to lead by example.

1. The Intranets of Babel ∞ Iqbal Mohammed 1
The Intranets of Babel
Iqbal Mohammed
Twitter: @misentropy | Web: www.misentropy.com
misentropy@gmail.com
Abstract: Corporations and companies today
generate a juggernaut of information, much more
than they can process or put to use. The accepted
response to running out of shelf space is to invest in
more capacious IT and storage systems, with
intranets serving as interfaces to ensure this stockpile
of information remains accessible and usable. This
whitepaper posits a less technical but more evolved
response, one that has worked for centuries and
enabled the very survival of our species. It
recommends overlaying on our intranets the
principles of oral-based information systems where a
premium is placed on the processing, validation and
sculpting of information before its eventual storage
for future reference. The paper explores in detail how
to put these principles to work within the challenging
context of a modern corporate environment. It also
implements its own recommendations, preferring to
lead by example.
Introduction
“Everything is at its peak of perfection.” So
pronounced Baltasar Gracian, a 17th century Jesuit
scholar and political advisor, in his collection of
aphorisms titled ‘The Art Of Worldly Wisdom.’
Much of the advice Gracian penned over 3
centuries ago still stands the test of time. Which is
probably why his reputation and wisdom have spread
far and wide in the intervening centuries.
But in stating that all things get better with time,
the worldly-wise monk just might have
underestimated a tool of information diffusion that
he himself made masterly use of.
Aphorisms, proverbs, sayings, maxims, epigrams
– call them what you will. But wisdom literature is
universal. Every ancient culture we know about, had
perfected the art. From the proverbs of The Old
Testament and the spiritual pronouncements of the
Tao Te Ching to the maxims of Nietzsche in ‘Thus
Spake Zarathustra’ and Baltasar Gracian’s own ‘The
Art Of Worldly Wisdom.’
Over the last century or so, technology has made
many things possible. But has it found a way to beat
the common garden-variety proverb in its elegance
and efficiency as an information carrier?
The question is relevant, today more than ever,
because the raison d’etre of the modern organization
– definitely the modern marketing and
communication organization – is information. And to
ensure it flows smoothly and seamlessly, we have at
our summons a mind-boggling array of freshly-
minted technology – computers buzzing at the speed
of electrons, networks connected with high-
bandwidth lines, database systems, truly colossal
storage space, graphical user interfaces – all coming
together to give us that internet-inspired information
network: the intranet.
But even its most fervent supporters will concede
that, at best, intranets work sputteringly. The
carriage has been made, the wheels well-oiled, the
physics of motion studied and understood. But
bewilderingly, the horse stays put – refusing to have
anything to do with the contraption.
The thesis that follows explores the answer to the
question posed above. And provides learnings from
our own past – a past we seem all too willing and
eager to relinquish.
PART ONE
In which we ponder on the ubiquity of information
and wonder how we ever managed without it.
The Indispensability of Information
Few things characterize the modern world as much
as information. We accumulate it, consume it, create
it, revel in it, wallow in it, trade it, build on it, wage
wars with it and swear by it. We even refer to our
times as the Information Age – the pinnacle of our
ongoing quest for omniscience.
With characteristic inward-looking vanity, we
have grown to believe that progress is represented by
our ever-increasing quantum of information. We
believe we are above our brutish ancestors simply
because we know better, we know more and because,
we even know that we know.
The knowledge economy is but the latest
manifestation of our love affair with information. In
our current world, the noblest calling any mortal can
hope for is to spend his life creating this precious
commodity. If one can do that successfully,
immortality is assured. One lives on in the
information one bequeaths.
It’s a mighty edifice. But like the biblical Tower Of
Babel, is it an edifice that just might end up spelling
our doom instead of our triumph?
It’s a sign of our youthful exuberance that we
dismiss such a possibility without even as much as a
thought. But if one takes a closer peek at the edifice,
the cracks are there for all to see.
A Bushelful Of PowerPoint Presentations
Statistics abound about the number of books printed
since Gutenberg invented the moving type and about
the number of web pages created since Tim Berners-
Lee created HTML and, in a big bang of his own
making, the World Wide Web.
Statistics about the number of intranet documents
in the world, however, are hard to come by. But that
shouldn’t deter us in our journey. A visit to the
nearest company intranet and a simple search will
yield an impossibly large number of PowerPoint
presentations, research documents, reports, fact
sheets and other such treasure troves.

2. The Intranets of Babel ∞ Iqbal Mohammed 2
Depending on past experience with such an
experiment, one may or may not be surprised at the
abundance of informational wealth that resides
within even the most self-effacing organization.
Regardless, to serve time in the modern organization
is to live with a sneaking suspicion that the universe
is bursting at the seams – with dark matter and
information.
Make no mistake about it. The information factory
is working overtime, its assembly lines disgorging
information relentlessly onto an unsuspecting world
and clogging its pipelines.
The Stockpiling Of Knowledge
Who consumes all this information? Not you and me,
certainly. And if you dismissively think somebody
else must be doing it, do remember that somebody
out there is counting on you being their somebody
else. Dismissively or otherwise.
It is precisely this titanic imbalance between the
information created and consumed that prompted
WIRED magazine to run this warning on their credit
panel for years: “The ignorance of how to use new
knowledge stockpiles exponentially."
We just aren’t doing a good job of imbibing the
information we create. And our exponentially
motivated information surplus leaves us no hope of
catching up, ever. More often than not, it even
paralyses our earnest attempts at making a
beginning. Sounds familiar?
To redress the balance and make a difference to
our situation, we need to start with a pilgrimage to a
time and place a few thousand years ago.
Information And The Hunter-Gatherer
It is undeniably true that our ancestors living
between 50,000 and 5,000 years ago had only a tiny
fraction of the information that we grapple with. But
their living and life depended on putting that little
information to good use, in a way that can never be
said about us.
Life for a hunter-gatherer depended on
assimilating and sharing a complex web of data about
the world he inhabited. Which roots were poisonous
and hence needed to be avoided? How did one ensure
that you didn’t end the day on some animal’s dinner
plate? Which plants yielded fruits all year round?
How does one find that watering hole one came
across a few weeks ago?
Long before a hunter-gatherer on his deathbed
was hustled by the family lawyer to carefully consider
his will and his material wealth, he had a much more
important legacy to pass on. Information which
ensured that his progeny was equipped to survive the
turbulent times. Information that was passed on to
him by his ancestors. Information that was whetted,
validated and added upon by him during his lifetime.
Information without the benefit of which they all
wouldn’t have made it, even as scientific curiosities.
Writing would have helped, had it not been
invented only as late as 3,000 BC. The printing press
would have been great too, but that lay a further few
thousand years ahead. Computers and the internet,
those magnificent tools of information storage and
retrieval, were mere hunter-gatherer science fiction.
Not-so-primitive Information Systems
How then did our ancestors manage to store and
transmit information without any of the tools we
have come to rely on for doing the same? There’s no
doubt, of course, that they did manage to do it
successfully, or else we wouldn’t be around right now
pondering on that question.
Undoubtedly, stories and myths served that
function. But they too were a comparatively later
invention – needing the mastery of complex ideas
like cause & effect, characterization, plot, symbolism,
etc.
Anthropologist Jared Diamond talks about a Great
Leap Forward that happened about 50,000 years
ago. Archaeological yields from the time – artifacts,
tools, decorative beads – reveal that this is the
Rubicon that divides ‘modern’ man from his
predecessors. Precisely what caused that Great Leap
Forward is still a matter of debate.
It certainly wasn’t an abrupt increase in brain size.
‘Anatomically modern’ human beings have had our
brain size for a few million years before the Great
Leap Forward. The development of language?
Probably. But mankind (and other species) have been
conversing with each other ever since they could
grunt in two different timbres.
The answer, I believe, lies elsewhere.
Archaeological digs can and do yield the material
possessions of our ancestors. But what of their virtual
wealth? I do use the word ‘virtual’ with great caution,
though I must admit it is probably the first time the
word is being used to describe something belonging
to primitive man.
Yet, it is in this virtual realm that the Great Leap
Forward took place – whether it is the same one that
Jared Diamond is referring to or something distinctly
different. We know at some point in the past, our
ancestors devised an information-sharing system
that outlasted their memories and their lives. It pre-
dated writing and, by our reasoning from before,
even story-telling.
Philologists and ‘language archaeologists’
regularly come up with digs of their own. Our
languages, regardless of where in the world they
originate, are rich with an oral-based information-
sharing system, often with hidden clues to its
primitive past. And the information carrier of choice?
The humble, innocuous and flap-your-ears-and-
you’ll-miss-it proverb.
PART TWO
In which we trace and establish the origins of the
world’s earliest information sharing network.
A Proverbial Journey
Proverbs probably began life as simple injunctions –
a set of do’s and don’ts, later peppered with proto-
metaphors and rudimentary analogy to aid memory
and recall. But it is this simple step forward that
effectively put us on the road to who we are today.
Before proverbs were invented, each man carried
whatever he learnt in his lifetime to his grave. There
simply was no means by which he could ensure that

3. The Intranets of Babel ∞ Iqbal Mohammed 3
the tribe-at-large would benefit from his wisdom
after he was gone. Proverbs, for the first time in our
history, made it possible for information to exist and
accumulate outside of us.
(Prior to this development, only genes and
evolution combined to transmit information between
generations. External information systems have
dramatically speeded up the process by short-
circuiting evolution, which works in timeframes of
millions of years. An account of the evolutionary
mechanisms superseded by proverbs, and other
external information systems that followed, is outside
the purview of this thesis.)
Progress was swift (by prehistoric standards) after
proverbs were hit upon. Each generation built on the
proverbial wisdom of their predecessors – validating
it, adding layers, sculpting it to its shortest most
memorable form, opening new doors of connotation,
adding new ones of their own and also discarding the
wisdom that didn’t pass the unforgiving real-life test
of usefulness.
Armed with this body of accumulating wisdom,
mankind went on to invent agriculture, domesticate
plants and animals, discover metal tools, form
complex societies with centralized governments,
create literature, forge modern civilization as we
know it and even stumble upon writing. Finally.
Unchanging Wisdom In A Changing World
And did the proverb opt for voluntary retirement
with the invention of writing? Of course not.
Thousands of years of experimentation in the real
world had evolved the perfect formula for
information transmission. To successfully make a
living, a proverb had to complete the long journey to
a listener’s ear, be memorable enough to be
summoned in times of need (think the middle of a
wild tiger chase) and even more importantly, had to
have that magic quality that obsessively compelled
one to share it with others.
Some of the earliest surviving literature is
epigrammatic. And proverbs didn’t wait for the New
York Times to acknowledge their success; they’ve
been topping the best-seller charts through pre-
history and history. Even as late as the 18th century,
thinkers were hammering away aphorisms at their
typewriters. And if you must ask, Baltasar Gracian
still commands shelf-space in a bookstore.
Even in the 20th century, proverbs occasionally
crop up. But primarily as agents of counter-culture
drafted for help by thinkers and revolutionaries
struggling against the juggernaut of information
overload. (Waiting to be read in my inbox right now
is a mail forward with one-liners under the subject
line ‘Taxi-Driver Wisdom.’) That they are still being
used attests to the timelessness of the formula.
The Rise Of The Machines
But why, in the first place, have they fallen out of
favor? There are 3 primary reasons for the
turnaround.
Firstly, the proliferation of literacy along with the
widespread availability of instruments of writing and
recording. This seemingly empowering development
gives all of us our own marquee show on the
information channel, a development that bestows far
more prestige than the alternative – being the couch-
potato consumer of age-old wisdom. Conversely,
having one’s thoughts carved in stone is no longer a
preserve of the wise.
Secondly, the rising creed of individualism –
probably the most successful and widely exported
commodity to come out of the west. This outlook has
convinced us that each of our experiences and
learnings is unique and only marginally similar to the
experiences of the rest of humanity. Nothing could be
further than the truth. Nothing has been more
harmful to our collective wisdom.
Finally, the rapid development of information
storage and retrieval technologies. With the advent of
computers empowered with Moore’s Law, hardware
and software are combining to give us dazzling
storage capacities with equally dazzling retrieval
times. Unsurprisingly, it has occurred to nobody to
put an upper cap to burgeoning knowledge. We can
keep cranking it out because the universe is one big
storage shelf – or it will soon be.
Where Does Information Reside?
But is there space in our collective minds for the
reverse osmosis to occur? For the information
created and accumulated in silos outside of us, to
seep back into our minds as wisdom?
It’s this reverse osmosis of information that
completes the loop and makes it… well, information.
But this assimilation cannot always happen at the
moment information is needed for processing. There
indeed is more than one reason why there doesn’t
exist a single cave painting of primitive men chasing
game and simultaneously flipping through a well-
thumbed copy of Ancient Hunting Proverbs.
Proverbs, by their very nature, infiltrate the
human mind long before they are needed. Once in
the mind, they grow, mutate and take up permanent
residence deep in our subconscious. And like a virus,
they enlist the infected mind to find new hosts to
propagate and spread further. And the process
continues ad infinitum. Their actual use only serves
to validate and confirm their truth.
Now consider the intranet and the way it’s been
designed for use. More storage space coupled with
better search algorithms have only ensured that we
postpone the process of soaking up information to
the very last moment possible – preferably just
before putting it to use.
That wouldn’t have been too bad either. If only
the information in our documents was not hidden
well enough for underground oil deposits to develop
an inferiority complex. It is the norm for entire
presentations to be uploaded on an intranet for
‘reference.’ Reports often are islands of information
unconnected and aloof, all by themselves. Fact sheets
will contain tons of data that you don’t need – the
relevant bit is still awaited as an update.
The one tiny morsel of information you are
looking for could make a difference, if only you can
find it.
The universal despair of not being able to find the
information we are looking for is one of the few
emotions that unites all of humanity. Which is why

4. The Intranets of Babel ∞ Iqbal Mohammed 4
we eventually give up and give in to the idea that the
actual universe might or might not be expanding, but
the docu-verse definitely is. We harbor no hope of
keeping up or making sense of even a minuscule
portion of it and choose to concentrate instead on the
resulting feeling of liberation.
So, is that necessarily a foretelling of doom? In the
biblical story of The Tower Of Babel, the descendants
of Noah built a ziggurat far larger and taller than any
built at that time. Their success filled them with pride
and they continued to build it higher and higher.
God, in order to teach them a lesson, ensured that the
words spoken by each one became unintelligible to
the others overnight. Unable to communicate with
each other and frustrated, each of the descendants
went away to a different part of the world. And the
Tower of Babel was reduced to ruins.
The allegory has a strangely happy ending.
According to the Bible, the punishment God meted
out to Noah’s descendants gave birth to all the
different languages spoken by different people
around the world today.
The real-life Tower Of Babel we are building in our
organizations ensures that while everyone is talking,
no one is listening. The fallout will have no silver
lining, as we all withdraw into our own shells,
harboring no hope of ever being heard or understood.
For an organization, it means people toiling away
and re-creating the very same information created by
some one else just across the office. It means wasted
resources in time, energy and fragmented
information. And, above all, it means a wasted
investment – intranets were embraced because they
could reduce these very redundancies.
The Internet Does Its Bit
The biggest information system out there – the
Internet – is showing signs of sprouting solutions to
the very problems we are posing. New ‘tagging’
technology on social networking sites like Flickr, 43
Things and del.icio.us is empowering information to
percolate in strange new ways, and is allowing users
to build their own collection of what’s useful to them
– information that others are also free to draw and
build upon. Other sites like Internet Movie Database
(IMDb) and Wikipedia are seducing users to treat
their databases like extended notepads, welcoming
everyone’s two-bits to form a colossal tapestry of
information weaved together by millions of
contributors.
The Internet – or the 50% of it not created just for
the delight of friends and family – is a tool subject to
the principles of the free market economy. Market
forces are exerting their influence on it to ensure that
dysfunctional technologies and tools are constantly
weeded out. Innovation and the profit motive are
ensuring that their place is taken by new ideas and
products that arise spontaneously.
The company intranet, however, is a different
animal. Not subject to economics and market reality,
the intranet instead reflects one designer’s, or worse
still, a committee’s need for control of information
flow. This then is rigidly coded into the system
making it inflexible, restrictive and, in the most part,
useless. But placing the source of problem elsewhere,
companies then send in reinforcements – hoping that
if money can’t buy love, it should at least be able to
buy the perfect information-sharing tool. With the
same results.
Intranets, fortunately or unfortunately, are here to
stay. Which is why a little planning and a lot of care
can go a long way in ensuring they serve the purpose
they were built for.
If proverbs could talk and dispense the wisdom
they have gained from thousands of years of carrying
information to and fro, what would they have to say?
And if we were to benefit from this received wisdom,
what kind of information-system would we design?
PART THREE
In which we listen to the whispering wisdom of
proverbs and contemplate the lessons they contain.
Aphorism 1: “The value of a network
approximately equals the square of the number of
users of the system.”
Metcalfe’s Law (as the above aphorism is known)
was first formulated to explain the cumulative
networking effects of technologies like telephones,
computers, faxes, and even formats like DVDs and
(as an explanation of the loss of Sony’s superior Beta
format) the VHS video format.
Simply put, the more the number of users, the
greater (in many orders of magnitude) the benefit of
a technology. The logic is impeccable. And to Sony’s
rude shock, very real.
But there are hidden realities, tucked away by
marketing hype that we often come to believe
ourselves. Every employee has access to the company
intranet, but does every employee access the
company intranet? The number of employees who
access it are often a subset of the total number of
employees. Further, the number of users who actively
search for information is a subset of all users who log
in. And so on and so forth.
The truth is that the actual number of users who
use a particular feature of a network is always a
much-nestled subset of the overall number. When
advocates of digital nirvana espouse the value of
computer networks, they sometimes avoid reading
the fine print aloud.
Network worth can also be eroded in far more
subtler ways. Consider x to be a certain number of
people who have the access and the inclination to
read a PowerPoint presentation of 10 slides. For
every additional slide henceforth, the number x only
falls. Until we reach another number y which is the
number of slides which effectively reduces the
number x to zero. The highest value the variable x
can take still remains in theory. But in practical
reality, it is far short of it. So also the value of the
network which stores that particular presentation.
Proverbs operate in mysterious ways to ensure
that the force is on their side. To begin with, they are
uncomplicated and don’t need a masters in computer
technology to be used. Most of them are short – so
everyone who comes in contact with them has
grasped their essence; there are almost no dropouts.

5. The Intranets of Babel ∞ Iqbal Mohammed 5
The best ones are not only memorable but also
compel us to share them with every one we can.
In short, proverbs ensure that they benefit from
cumulative networking in an outward spreading
ripple. On the other hand, the intranets we encounter
start with a maximum number of users and work
inwards, ending up cornering only an ever-
diminishing fraction of it.
Lesson: The lesser you have to say, the more the
number of people willing to listen to it.
Aphorism 2: “Information is nobody’s property; it
belongs to whoever uses it best.”
I hate to be the one breaking this to Richard Stallman
(founder of the Open Source Software Movement)
and Linus Torvalds (creator of the Linux Operating
System.) but the Open Source movement pre-dates
not just them, but the whole of known history.
(Though, do keep up the good work and the free
software.)
Proverbial wisdom is the first great open source
experiment. Everyone in the community shared
whatever wisdom they had with everyone else. The
users in turn could chisel the proverbs, add to them,
change them (for better or for worse) and would
return them back to the community pool. Thus, the
collective proverbs in a community were always
being improvised upon by whoever had the
experience and ability to do so – the same model that
open source software currently follows. Wisdom thus
was sculpted into shape not just by one man’s
experience or genius, but by collective and
collaborative effort.
It’s counterintuitive, but what makes open source
movements work is that the people collaborating do
not expect explicit credit, or even money, for the
work they do; they share their skills instead for the
sheer love of doing so. Of course, if the trust under
which the system operates cracks, the structure will
crumble. But when information-systems are designed
to be ‘honest, open and genuine,’ users will give of
their time, skills and even more importantly, will
share all the wisdom they hold deep within.
Internet Movie Database (IMDb) and Wikipedia
have been harnessing this model successfully for
years. And both of them are currently challenging the
professionally established databases – built up
through paid labor of supposed experts in their
respective fields. Not only have the above two sites
managed to achieve similar results at a microscopic
fraction of the cost, they have managed to do it at a
fraction of the time as well.
Of course, remove the anonymity clause in these
systems and they grind to a spectacular halt. Which is
why proverbs are often signed ‘English proverb’ or
‘Jewish Proverb’ rather than ‘Fred the Farmer’ and
‘Moredecai the Merchant.’ Attribute the name of a
person to a quote and you freeze it for eternity –
tinkering with it will only attract howls of protest
from irate family members and avaricious lawyers.
Give it a generic attribution and you invite people to
sandbox it – fool around and play with it until they
come up with something probably better.
Lesson: If you want superstars and divas, give
contributors credit and money. If you want to build
a robust self-sufficient information-sharing system,
keep your sights, and the spotlight, firmly on
knowledge.
Aphorism 3: “Don’t talk unless you can improve
the silence.”
It’s commonsense, but there’s more to Coughlin’s
Law in this context than Mr.Coughlin imagined there
would be.
In ‘The Cluetrain Manifesto’, authors Rick Levine,
Christopher Locke, Doc Searls and David Weinberger
argue that markets resemble ‘conversations.’ The
actual transactions – buying, selling, trading –
represent words and sentences communicated
through a language that can either be open, honest
and direct or dry, humourless or worse still,
insincere. Of course, these ‘market conversations’ can
take weeks, months or even years to unfold.
The hypothesis they proffered has been much
embraced and has found a widespread following in
that hotbed of innovation, Silicon Valley.
Entrepreneurs saw in it the promise of an Internet of
the future – not shackled by its current frumpy image
of a huge monolithic library of information. In the
words of David Sifry, founder of the first blog search
engine Technorati, the Internet “is a river of human
chatter, constantly joined by other creeks and brooks
but ever flowing.” And he wasn’t referring just to its
hormone-filled chatrooms; he was talking about all of
it.
What’s true of the Internet is true of intranets too;
if only less so. What this means is that the mere act of
uploading your profile, or that 200 page report, is the
beginning of a conversation with someone out there.
Whether you receive a reply or not depends on how
gregarious or frosty the atmosphere in the network
is. Along with how easy you make it for people to
enter into a dialogue with you. Of course, a response
needn’t be an email – it can be another presentation
or an activated link to yours.
Lesson: Your manners are visible in places where
you won’t be seen.
Aphorism 4: “Knowledge is learning something
every day. Wisdom is letting go of something every
day.”
In the 1970s, with an oil crisis looming large, British
economist E.F.Schumacher proposed a host of new
ideas and terms : sustainable development,
intermediate size, intermediate technology, etc. But
he is most famous for giving the world a book and
with it, a slogan: ‘small is beautiful.’
The problem with slogans is that they are catchy
and look good on banners – and that’s where it ends.
‘Small is beautiful’ became a rallying cry for
everything from the protest of gas-guzzling vehicles
to the population crisis in China. But somewhere
along the way, everyone forgot the lesson and the
means to it.
Michaelangelo Buanorotti – renaissance painter,
sculptor and genius – has a more helpful and useful
way of explaining the same lesson. Beauty, in his
words, is the purgation of all superfluities. Of course,
as a painter and sculptor he should know.

6. The Intranets of Babel ∞ Iqbal Mohammed 6
Far away from the world of Renaissance Art (and
yet inadvertently using or abusing the very same
processes), designers of intranets swear by the
mantra ‘more is good.’ And with modern technology
and unfathomable storage space available, there’s
nothing to stop them from filling up an infinite array
of cubbyholes in a fierce underground competition to
build the largest collection of unread documents in
the universe.
In use far before writing became widespread,
proverbs were limited in bandwidth and storage
space by the recalling ability of the reigning heavy-
weight memory champion of the community.
Anything that couldn’t be remembered by him or
anyone else was discarded. Understanding this
simple principle, communities ensured what they
only remembered and passed on was what was most
useful.
In modern information storage systems, it’s hard
to evolve this kind of natural spring-cleaning system.
But a combination of an externally imposed spring-
cleaning system, the constant resistance of the urge
to upgrade to the latest storage technologies and a
foreknowledge of the essential principles of
information storage and flow, should do quite fine
instead.
Lesson: Be careful of what you wish for; it might
not always be what you need.
Aphorism 5: “The more frequently an expression is
used, the more likely it will be replaced by a shorter
equivalent.”
Someone once said ‘A ship in a harbour is safe; but
that is not what ships are meant for.” The same
holds true for information and knowledge.
We build and accumulate knowledge in order that
we can use it to help us navigate the world we live in.
Yet, we leave it in coldstorage – in books, libraries,
presentations and on the net – until the very last
moment, relying instead on the efficiency of search
engines, overnight cramming sessions, or both, when
the need arises.
Yes, search engine technology has progressed by
leaps and bounds since two graduate students
cobbled together Yahoo and rigged the system online.
But even now the best search engines are no match
for raw human talent at processing, storing and
recalling information. Else, we would have
newspaper headlines screaming : “Artificial
intelligence is a reality.” For the moment, they are
lamenting the exact opposite.
Call it whatever you want – information,
knowledge, wisdom – it was never meant to be a
mantelpiece. It always was and is a tool to be taken to
work, a weapon carried to battlefield, an idea taken
to a laboratory and a truth awaiting its real-world
test. In the spirit of the scientific method, and the
ideas of Karl Popper (who defined it), science can
only be advanced by empirical falsifiability – the
theory that all knowledge is a series of ‘conjectures
and refutations’ approaching, though never reaching,
a definitive truth.
Karl Popper aside, information should be put to
use for another good reason. Zipf’s Law, quoted
above, dictates that the more the information is used,
the more it will benefit from the exercise – losing
flab, acquiring the spring of step and the leanness of
build it needs to travel far and wide.
Lesson: Information is not the end result to our
quest but only the means. Do not hoard it.
Aphorism 6: “Fortune brings in some boats that
are not steered.”
A few words in the English language are so beautiful
to the ear that listeners gush even before they find
out what it means. In my experience, 'serendipity' is
one of them. Serendipity also encapsulates within
itself a beautiful idea – that of finding something
unexpected and useful while searching for something
else entirely different.
Life is one long series of serendipitous experiences
– the friends of our insignificant other who stay on
long after the two-month fling ended, the hobby we
pick up while trying to run an errand for the aunt of
our best friend, the program we discover while
randomly surfing TV at 3 in the morning and the
book that ends up changing our life after being
rescued from a garage sale.
In fact, many people are all too keenly aware of
their inability to exhaust the experiences on offer,
especially if they wait for life to work its
serendipitous magic. They consciously and rigorously
use serendipity as a method to seek new ideas, new
experiences, new knowledge, new friends, new
hobbies – new just-about-anything.
Which is why it’s baffling when system analysts
leave no room for the unplanned in the intranets they
design. It isn’t a big deal finding the needle people
are looking for in a haystack. Sometimes it may be
wonderful to turn up with the safety pin they weren’t
looking for and didn’t know they needed. Until then.
In fact, even more than ‘programmed
randomness’, a truly efficient information sharing
system is built on an open architecture – designed to
grow into an extension of its users, going in
whichever direction they take it.
Proverbs had no defining manifesto – they instead
evolved and flowed down pathways their users
thought useful. This open architecture along the
natural laws of evolution and survival of the fittest
ensured that the strongest strains of wisdom survived
and prospered.
Incorporating randomness in an intranet is always
tricky. But constant and controlled experimentation
with emerging Internet technologies – like blogging,
tagging, podcasting – will ensure that the intranet
grows in the territories the Internet is exploring;
instead of continuing to look like a sepia-tinted
snapshot of the Internet in its bell-bottomed
extravagant youth.
Lesson: Plan for flexibility and you don’t have to
plan for anything else.
Aphorism 7: “A proverb is a short sentence based
on long experience.”
Lying crumpled in the waste paper basket at my feet
is a piece of paper that contained my first
recommendation to ensure our own Tower Of Babel
stands tall: “dismantle our intranets, sell our storage

7. The Intranets of Babel ∞ Iqbal Mohammed 7
disks as scrap and send our back-up tapes to the
National Archives with our best compliments.”
I would be most surprised, to put it very mildly, if
any self-respecting organization would take that
advice seriously. Chances are that even the current
thesis would be much appreciated, categorized,
tagged with appropriate search words and filed safely
away in an intranet – to gather virtual dust. To be
woken up from deep slumber, now and then, by a
fresh set of back-up tapes.
However, as creators of our organization’s
intellectual wealth it is imperative then that we – you
and I – turn the tables by taking the onus of ensuring
that those long toilsome nights burning the midnight
oil weren’t all in vain.
We could, of course, fool ourselves into believing
that we have incorporated the wisdom that proverbs
have to offer and still land up at the pearly gates of
the intranet with a bound copy of a 172 slide
presentation.
Or we could throw everything that’s expected of us
out of the window, and go ahead and say everything
we want to say in one short sentence. The choice is
ours.
And for those of us who cannot take that advice
(and that includes me, thanks to the Matrix), I have
only one further lesson to offer.
Lesson: Write out that damn presentation. And as
a summary, throw in the proverb for free.
PART FOUR
In which we attempt a summary of our long journey
and take our own bitter medicine.
Summary
Epigrams succeed where epics fail. – Persian Proverb
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
IQBAL MOHAMMED is a brand and marketing
strategist whose area of specialization lies at the
intersection of advertising, information systems and
economics.
He is the winner of the WPP Atticus Award 2006
for best original published writing in the 'Branding
and Identity' category.
To subscribe to email updates of his latest papers,
visit www.misentropy.com/samizdat.html
BIBLIOGRAPHY
 Dawkins, Richard (2003) : ‘The Ancestor’s Tale’
 Diamond, Jared (1997): ‘Guns, Germs And Steel: A
Short History Of Nearly Everybody for 13,000 years’
 Economist, The (Sept. 15th 2005) : Technology
Quarterly – ‘Websites of Mass Description’
 Economist, The (Oct. 6th 2005) : ‘The Life And Soul Of
The Internet Party’
 Gracian, Baltasar & Maurer, Christopher (1991) : ‘The
Art Of Worldly Wisdom’
 Lessig, Lawrence (2004) : ‘Free Culture’
 Levine, Rick; Locke, Christopher; Searls, Doc &
Weinberger, David (2001) : ‘The Cluetrain Manifesto’
 Parker, Victoria (2002) : ‘Children’s Illustrated Bible’
 Popper, Karl (1935) : ‘The Logic Of Scientific
Discovery’
 Skinner, Robin & Cleese, John (1996) : ‘Life And How
To Survive It’
URLs
 43 Things – www.43things.com
 del.icio.us – http://del.icio.us
 Flickr – www.flickr.com
 IMDb – www.imdb.com
 Technorati – www.technorati.com
 Wikipedia – www.wikipedia.org
What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?
- CLR James, 'Beyond A Boundary'
META
Suggested Citation: Mohammed, Iqbal, The Intranets of
Babel (January 15, 2006). Available at SSRN:
http://ssrn.com/abstract=2446830
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