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I have a personal connection to Borges, in that I actually met him in Rio de Janeiro in the mid-2000s and became a very good friend of his. He was Portuguese teacher to my family, which is odd because Borges was a Spanish-speaking Argentinian, and doubly odd given that Borges died in 1986. The person I am referring to was of course not Borges himself, but my goodness was he a reincarnation. As well as being the spitting image, my teacher had the mannerisms of a literary academic, and a sonorous South American twist on an upper class English accent. If English fluency is mastery of the language, Luiz Oscar was next-level-fluent in the culture too. An Anglophile, he worked, like Borges, as a translator. And of course we talked mostly about books. He was already an old man when I met him and he is sadly no longer with us. My lasting memory is of a man who could find fascination and humor in the smallest thing and who could spin a long tale about a short walk. Whenever I read Borges, it is in the voice of Luiz Oscar, and I think Borges would have enjoyed being channelled posthumously by him. In my mind the two are one and the same, and who's to tell me otherwise? The death of the author is a constant Borgesian theme, and so I take advantage of it.
Here are my notes on the stories I read this month, and why I think they are stories about our current world.
This is one of the most famous stories in Labyrinths, and it speaks deeply to me as a math nerd. I do know the author took an interest in mathematical topics, through a philosophical lens rather than a technical one. Could he have imagined the internet of today that the Library prefigures? I love this story because of its science-fictional qualities - comp-sci-fi? - and its compactness. A huge space is generated by its few words, much as the Library's limited alphabet of 25 characters gives rise to 25^1312000 books.
Generators, combinatorics, randomness, entropy, structure, geometry, infinity... this is math-fi if not sci-fi. Borges is highly complementary to the likes of Turing, Gödel, von Neumann, Shannon, Knuth, and Dijkstra.
If The Library of Babel prophesizes the information universe, this story foretells the information planet of Wikipedia, or perhaps of shared storytelling environments like Orion's Arm as they spill over into the real world like cosplay gone horribly wrong. More directly, it is a close ancestor of Greg Egan's Permutation City. If you want to know something quickly, you look in Wikipedia. What it says becomes consensus reality whether it's true or not.
This story is disorienting in its opening pages, which I had to re-read several times, before understanding that the actual story resides in the quotation, with the quotation never formally terminating - an unclosed parenthesis that causes the story to theoretically contain all that comes after it, like XKCD 859. Again, the theme is how unreality comes to take over reality. Software eating the world? The actual story is rich in concepts familiar to us online today: information leaks, covert channels, pre-agreed keys, ciphers, and the reconstruction of plaintext.
Here Borges again has reality subordinating itself to a fiction - this time, a game. In our time, gaming is interwoven with the development of computing, first through being the gateway drug that creates programmers, then in driving hardware and architecture trends through GPUs and consumerization. If software is eating the world, then gaming is writing the menu. Shared virtual spaces bring the forces of gaming and info-unreality together, as we race towards a collective belief in the primacy of tech over hard-fought offline laws. Crypto proof-of-work schemes, with Babylonian Lottery randomness at their core, are captivating crowds whilst simultaneously grabbing an ever-greater share of power. The ruling power is a Company, not a government! Borges was a prophet.
This is another story about order and chaos. "To accept errors is not to contradict chance: it is to corroborate it": recall how Apple had to introduce Smart Shuffle, which made random playlists less random, because people were perceiving legitimately random clustering as non-randomness. And so, the randomness of the Company’s actions becomes indistinguishable from the randomness of everyday reality. In this fashion, the company becomes a myth because you cannot distinguish it from imposters or from the natural blowing of the wind. Its existence is plausibly deniable! The "terrible consequences" it threatens might be naturally occurring, or C-x M-c M-butterfly.
Amusingly, the idea of a messaging system involving spies posting information into designated slots, to be later collected by the Company, is a crude description of Apache Kafka. The authors of that software claim to have named it after Franz Kafka, but there's an intermediate origin story here in Borges' latrine Qaphqa.
I most definitely do not get the milieu of this story. I have no idea how much of the French literature scene here is real and how much is made up. To me, this is all about bit color:
https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
Two bit-for-bit identical texts can indeed be created from different lineages with different intentions.
git rebase don-quixote
This Matrix-in-a-Matrix story was the last I managed to read this month. And then I ran out of September.