Coastlines were even worse, leading to the realisation that it is in fact impossible to give a completely accurate account of the length of a nation’s borders. This ‘coastline paradox’ came to be known as the Richardson effect, and formed the basis for Benoît Mandelbrot’s work on fractals. It demonstrates, with radical clarity, the counterintuitive premise of the new dark age: the more obsessively we attempt to compute the world, the more unknowably complex it appears.
