Introduction

Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “The Library of Babel” describes a mostly unreadable collection of books—a library that contains every possible iteration of twenty-five characters across 410 pages. It’s the so-called “infinite monkey theorem” played out within a seemingly infinite number of tomes. Before the advent of digital databases and algorithmic automation, such a library was merely a dream of fiction. But twenty-odd years ago, something similar came down to Earth, in a slightly more constrained—though no less fantastical—form, through the work of Professor Philip M. Parker and his Webster’s Timeline History series.

What are the Webster’s timeline histories? It’s difficult to say. There are some 90,000 of them, all produced before 2011. Pick an adjective, noun, or verb, and Parker and his team at the mysterious Icon Group International, Inc. are likely to have generated a book-length timeline of that term. Each volume is a series of chronological quotations pertaining to the eponymous topic, chosen algorithmically and without human oversight. There are the expected canonical subjects: Gods, Death, Taxes, and Australian Total Diet Survey. The books vary in length (the diet survey is a slim eight pages; Death is drawn out) and sometimes require multiple volumes: Cabinet necessitates five, while Infinite is done and dusted in two. The date ranges, too, are … eccentric. Webster’s Timeline History: Internet begins in 1293; Universe finds its origin in 393 BC, while the first volume of Humanness spans from 200,000 BC to 1988. In a twist that might have delighted its subject, Jorge Luis Borges starts in 1816, eighty-three years before the author was born.

Are these books “AI slop” avant la lettre? Or something more profound? Cabinet editor Sally O’Reilly—who originated and commissioned this issue—classifies the Webster’s Timeline History series as a kind of gray literature. This diffuse genre is informational at base, ranging between perfunctory pragmatics, rickety flamboyant amateurism, and the polish of corporate comms. “Gray literature does not have the market or cultural value of a novel or textbook,” she writes. “It is not an end in itself, but facilitative paraphernalia of some other endeavor—midwifery, policing, animal husbandry, war.” But what exactly is Parker’s endeavor? And toward which ends does Webster’s Timeline History slouch? We wondered what it would be like to spend time with these books—which are written by machines and seemingly read only by the misled—and dispatched a team to find out. Each contributor was given a particular timeline to investigate, from Wallpaper through Bristol to John Smith. Their responses vary in tone, style, and medium, and include speculative future histories of trade secrets, grumbling soundscapes, and a memoir about a particularly prodigious year of patent applications. Would they do it again? You’ll have to see for yourself.