Why infinite libraries are treated skeptically in the annals of science fiction and fantasy
.. “The number of pages in this book is no more or less than infinite. None is the first page, none is the last.”
.. The appearance of order is an illusion. Many of the books contain “senseless cacophony, verbal nonsense, and incoherency,” and many of the people who are born and eventually die in the library are miserable for their fate.
.. Socrates worried that writing would destroy human memory. And, indeed, the oral tradition was, across many cultures, upended by print. In the Victorian era, people were cautioned that reading fiction would make their minds atrophy. The telegraph, telephone, television, and internet, among other technologies, have all prompted similar concerns about how technology might destroy intellectual rigor.
.. The expectation, increasingly, is that information ought not be collected in one place, but kept everywhere, so that it is accessible at all times.
.. The great paradox for those who seek to reconfigure the world’s knowledge systems, is that the real threat of information loss is occurring at a time when there seems to be no way to stop huge troves of personal data from being collected—by governments and by corporations.