There came a point somewhere in the middle of the previous decade where the number of hours of video uploaded to YouTube in a given day totaled 24. That is to say, each day, one day of footage was added to Google's servers. Now, the number of hours exceeds 24. There is far more video footage being uploaded to YouTube in a day than can be physically watched on that day. In fact, as of May 2011, 48 hours--two days--of footage is uploaded every minute. 

80 years of footage--a little over the average human lifespan--will be updated to YouTube in 10 days. It would take an entire human lifetime to watch just over a week of content added to YouTube. 

Run those numbers through your head the next time you're bored. And those are just the videos, the work of YouTube users who actually take the time to make or take content and put it up under their own names. That's to say nothing of the rest of the internet's content output. Text is literally being published faster than anyone could read it. Spend your entire life in front of a monitor and you could barely make a dent in the labyrinth of information that occupies digital space.

Maybe humanity long ago reached the point where we had written too many words for any one person to ever read. We've been writing books for a long time, after all. But the rate at which our content sphere is expanding increases exponentially every day. Every day new Twitter accounts are created, new blogs founded. Every day people pour billions of words into the digital void. 

We've created a facsimile of Borges's library--that near-infinite, spherical space divided into hexagonal chambers that contain books with letters in random order. The Library of Babel--more a thought experiment than a story, but such is most Borges--contains every possible 410-page book written in the Western alphabet. The number of books is enormous, but not infinite. Most of them are gibberish to most readers, although potentially decipherable once translated. The work of determining value in this sort of library is also near-infinite and therefore logistically impossible for any individual. Librarians go mad in search of meaning.

How long until we've recreated the library in full--until every possible combination of letters, every thought in every language has been expressed, and then some? How many authors will it take? What will we do with information once it's been exhausted? 

Unlike that of Babel, our library organizes itself by author almost automatically. You know what you like to read. You pick contributors to follow across all sorts of platforms. You ignore others. You divide what you perceive to be sense from what you perceive to be nonsense. The library consists of individuals who are both authors and readers. We catalog ourselves. We navigate our catalog with startling intuition. 

In every sector of our library's directory, we still find gaps. We still begin new volumes. We are not even close to done. There are words to be written about every subject and there are new subjects to be created. We are only at the beginning of our journey. We will die long before the halfway mark. But at every moment there exist sequences of words that have never before been written. Every moment presents the opportunity to expand that library--to test the edges of language, to climb nearer to the infinite. We might reach the point of madness before the point of enlightenment. Illegibility may overtake ultimate knowledge given enough chaos in the journey. But we are hurtling towards the endless in ways only dreamed about by a few prescient minds.