An 83-year-old short story by Borges portends a bleak future for the internet

Borges Stories and Reality/Information

• Many prefer the original short story “The Library of Babel” to the linked article and see it as the more insightful text.
• Others argue that “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” is an even better analogy for the modern internet: a fabricated world whose ideas and artifacts become socially and politically “real,” displacing prior culture.
• Interpreters link that story to totalizing ideologies and propaganda: perceptions guided from above gradually replace reality, with dissenters retreating into internal exile.
• Some resist reading explicit political messages into these stories; others insist the political dimension is unavoidable.

Library of Babel, Infinity, and Search

• Clarification that the fictional library’s books are finite in length but combinatorially vast, effectively equivalent to longer “libraries.”
• Debate over whether duplicates exist and how concatenations would work under the original constraints.
• A web implementation of the library is shared.
• Related works like “A Short Stay in Hell” and “On Exactitude in Science” are recommended for similar themes.

Curation, Paywalls, and Media Bias

• Strong disagreement with the article’s framing that paywalled, curated outlets are “truthful” while social media is where misinformation “festers.”
• Several commenters view major newspapers as heavily biased, sometimes citing historical failures or war coverage.
• Others note all media is necessarily biased via story selection and wording; the only defense is critical comparison across sources.
• Historical “edit stream”–style curation is likened both to traditional newspapers and to elite products like financial terminals; disagreement on whether such curation must be accessible only to the wealthy.

Misinformation, Fact-Checking, and Media Literacy

• Skepticism that only rich people will be able to afford good fact-checkers; even they can’t reliably know which are correct.
• Emphasis that most information is some blend of truths and lies; the negation of a lie is often just another lie.
• Multiple commenters argue media literacy and critical reasoning should be core education, but aren’t.

AI, Hallucinations, and Training Data

• Concerns that chatbots function as new “gatekeepers,” enforcing current ideological conformity under the guise of fighting misinformation.
• Example given of asymmetric sensitivity in joking about religious figures.
• Some suspect “hallucinations” will become a convenient story that lets society tolerate AI systems that increasingly shape reality.
• Others stress that AI errors are both qualitatively and practically different from human mistakes, especially when used in high‑stakes decisions, and that there’s no robust way to prove AI outputs correct.
• Discussion of data poisoning: random gibberish is seen as largely harmless noise that can be filtered; subtle poisoning might be learned as a style but is likely to be swamped in large datasets.

Preservation vs Access to Culture

• One thread argues the bleakest information future comes less from AI pollution and more from failing to digitize, preserve, and freely expose historical materials.
• Copyright, institutional gatekeeping, and government–media entanglements are blamed for locking away primary sources while derivative commentary and “narratives” proliferate.
• Attempts to sanitize or erase “problematic” historical content are criticized as a kind of cultural “Year Zero.”

Miscellaneous Notes and Recommendations

• Other predictive or thematically related works mentioned include “The Machine Stops,” a satirical “happynet” proposal, and a novel about a universal manuscript library.
• Commenters also discuss user attempts to poison training data with nonsense, playful side projects inferring age from usernames, and jokes about the “best of times / blurst of times” nature of the current internet.