glossaLAB - User contributions [en]

From Babel to the Cloud

2025-12-19T20:57:13Z

Violafejza:

= From Babel to the Cloud: The Rise and Fall of Cyberutopia =

== Introduction ==
Did Jorge Luis Borges, in his short story ''The Library of Babel''<ref name=":0">Borges, J. L. (1998). ''The Library of Babel'' (A. Hurley, Trans.). In J. L. Borges, Collected fictions (pp. 112–118).

Penguin. (Original work published 1941)</ref>, get inspired by the limits of his own society at the time which led him to idealise the future and put it in the metaphor of human behaviour? Or did he somehow anticipate how humans would be in today’s digital environments? This contribution is based on the idea that human desires – especially the desire for total knowledge and connection – might be more predictable than one might think. Borges’ imaginary library, in which he fantasises the idea where all possible books already exist, says a great deal about our present information society and about human intentions.

Today society is moving deeper into what can be called the age of cyberutopias<ref>[[Cyberutopia (preliminary)]]</ref>, which means, technological dreams of a perfectly connected and informed humanity. One example that immediately comes to mind is the evolution of the Internet or “the cloud”: an infrastructure where the traces of almost all human activities are stored, processed and presented back as “knowledge”.

This paper follows the metaphor “From Babel to the Cloud” in order to ask how the dream of universal information turns both into a utopia of perfect wisdom and into a dystopia of control, overload and inequality.

== Stage 1: Babel — The Dream of Total Connection ==
In this short story, ''the Library of Babel''<ref name=":0" /> represents a place where all possible information already exists (even though most of the books are total nonsense). The characters of the story were immediately fond of the idea and some of them put their whole life's work into searching for answers, everybody has different desires which leads people to act in ways where they're ready to risk everything just for some peace of mind. Some did succeed, but only in claiming that the library does in fact hold every book possible (which means every answer possible, even the way one dies). This only made people act more irrational and selfish, again as might be expected from many people.

So why does the idea of “knowing everything”, “having all the answers” manipulate humans so easily that they lose sense of their reality and their real self? Some might say it is because they are scared of the things they don't know, because they’re something they can't control.

Another interesting side of ''the Library of Babel''<ref name=":0" /> is that, depending on which point of view, it can be both a utopia or a dystopia.

* Utopia of total Information: we can be more cautious, intellectual, rational, etc.

In theory, a place like the Library could make people wiser. If every possible answer already exists somewhere, humans could avoid repeating the same mistakes over and over again…

* Dystopia of Despair: overflow of Information, chaos of emotions.

In practice, though, the characters in the story don’t become calmer or more reasonable…

This double face of the Library of Babel – as both a dream of total knowledge and a nightmare of confusion – is important for the whole idea of this cyberutopia.

Very similar promises and dangers appear again when one takes a look at the Internet and the modern ‘cloud’ as a kind of real-life universal library.

== Stage 2: The Cloud — Modern Cyberutopia ==
Slowly the fantasy of this story is starting to look more and more real in today's world, and that has started to happen since the invention of the internet. Instead of the infinite books in the library now there's billions of websites, social media posts and all the blueprints of humanity floating around for everybody's fast access. So all that can be perceived as a version of Babel.

When we focus on how the evolution of the internet went, we can notice the similarities between Borges’ Babel<ref name=":0" /> and the modern world. Authors in the field of the information society argue that our time is organised more and more around information flows and digital networks (Díaz-Nafría, 2014; Capurro, 2008).<ref>Díaz-Nafría, J. M. (2014). Ethics at the age of information. ''Systema, 2''(3), 43–52.</ref><ref>Capurro, R. (2008). Intercultural information ethics. In K. E. Himma & H. T. Tavani (Eds.), ''The handbook of information and computer ethics'' (pp. 639–665). Wiley.</ref>

'''The Servers'''

Starting on the physical matter: today's version of the Library itself. In reality the “cloud” is made of server farms, hard drives, cooling systems and cables, but in everyday life people hardly think about these buildings and machines. It feels like a weightless, invisible “cloud”: physical data centres are not actively in people's minds, the results just show up on screens, so the whole system appears like a library that is simply presented with open access.

'''The Web'''

Political scientists like Schulze (2018)<ref name=":1">Schulze, M. (2018). ''From cyber-utopia to cyber-war: Normative change in cyberspace'' (Doctoral dissertation, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Germany). <nowiki>https://doi.org/10.22032/DBT.35107</nowiki> revistas.pucsp.br</ref> have shown that the early discourse around the internet was strongly marked by cyber-utopian expectations. So now the web already holds most of the information “known to man”, which gives the feeling of total knowledge and puts it at the core of most of society today - The only main difference between this and Babel<ref name=":0" /> is that all of the information was created by people themselves and not from the idea of random character combinations. This is the “cyberutopian moment”: the belief that if almost everything is online and connected, then humanity is finally close to a kind of “perfect wisdom”. Imagine every question has already an answer on the web, that every problem could in theory be solved with enough information and connection.

Thinkers like Pierre Lévy call this the rise of “collective intelligence”: the idea that many minds connected through cyberspace can create new, shared forms of knowledge (Lévy, 1997)<ref>Lévy, P. (1997). ''Collective intelligence: Mankind’s emerging world in cyberspace'' (R. Bononno, Trans.). Perseus Books.</ref>. Yochai Benkler talks about “commons-based peer production”, where people collaborate online on projects like free software or Wikipedia instead of just passively consuming information (Benkler, 2006)<ref>Benkler, Y. (2006). ''The wealth of networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom''. Yale University Press.</ref>. A simple example of this dream is Wikipedia itself: an online encyclopedia that anyone can read and (almost) anyone can edit. It looks like the perfect symbol of the web as a universal library created “by everyone for everyone”.

At the same time, the web also gives individuals an unprecedented possibility to become visible. The existence of globally known celebrities, political figures, authors or scientists whose work you can follow directly online is proof that it is possible for a person, or a work of somebody, to be known worldwide. Social media accounts, personal websites, video channels or blogs amplify this feeling: the sense that, in principle, anyone could “publish a book in Babel<ref name=":0" />” and find an audience.

'''Social Media'''

Social media is one of the reasons for this form of “perfect connection” in our world today. It makes it possible to be up to date with the news, “new trends”, and interesting stuff happening around the world – by “interesting” is meant what people consider worthy of being trendy. Everyone processes all this, but they don’t experience most of it in their real life; instead it happens in their online life. People just perceive it on their screens, and sometimes they forget the feeling of that being reality and it becomes just another piece of news in their feed.

Social media also allows people to interact with people they would never have met without it. Usually it is because one ended up in the same community or the same “corner of the internet”. That already means more enhanced social interactions, where it's possible to skip getting to know each other beforehand, something that could be a little uncomfortable for some people. So, of course, social media is a crucial part of today's social lives of people.

Socialising is a very crucial part in the survival and development of humans as a species, so slowly one might say life is starting to sound impossible if the internet were not to exist. Some researchers even talk about “social media addiction”, when people feel they cannot disconnect without stress or fear of missing out<ref name=":2">Goldman, Bruce. 2021. “Addictive Potential of Social Media, Explained.” ''Stanford Medicine News Center'' (Insights), October 29, 2021. <nowiki>https://med.stanford.edu/news/insights/2021/10/addictive-potential-of-social-media-explained.html</nowiki></ref><ref>Kuss, D. J., & Griffiths, M. D. (2017). Social networking sites and addiction: Ten lessons learned. ''International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 14''(3), 311. <nowiki>https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph14030311</nowiki></ref>. This is why some authors describe the web and the cloud as central elements of the utopia of “perfect connection” and “perfect wisdom”, especially in the utopian families of “The Perfect Wisdom”<ref name=":4">[[Conceptual clarifications about "Utopias and the Information Society"]]</ref> and “The Perfect Social Order”<ref name=":4" />. So this is another similarity to Borges’ story: fear can create dependency, and it is exactly this fear that makes people attracted to digital systems that promise to store and predict everything.

== Stage 3: Cyber-dystopia — The Fall of the Dream ==
''“The internet has gone “from cyber-utopia to cyber-war””'' (Schulze, 2018)<ref name=":1" />. What once looked like a space of free information and connection is now increasingly described in terms of conflict, manipulation and control.

The “social media addiction”<ref name=":2" /> that many people experience today is something that is being taken advantage of by those who hold more power. This dependence is built into the algorithms behind almost every form of content consumption. These systems are also used to influence or even manipulate people in their political beliefs, for example in the time before elections and political campaigns. Sometimes this manipulation goes as far as spreading fake news<ref name=":3">Jardine, Eric. 2019. “Beware Fake News.” Centre for International Governance Innovation. April 2, 2019. <nowiki>https://www.cigionline.org/articles/beware-fake-news/</nowiki></ref> in order to achieve a specific goal. All of this shows a way of using the internet that is not morally good. So does this still sound so utopian in the end?

This leads us to the next main similarity with the Library of Babel: the dystopia. We are entering an era of the internet where some people have developed a kind of paranoia about the content we receive. Some no longer believe the news at all, since it could be fake news <ref name=":3" />– just like in Babel, where a book could always give you the wrong information or “knowledge”. These methods of manipulation are becoming more and more creative, especially with the development of AI<ref>[[Artificial Intelligence (Cyberutopias)]]</ref>. This starts to look very similar to the world of “Big Brother”<ref>Orwell, George. 1949. 1984. London: Secker & Warburg.</ref> and the dystopia of surveillance<ref>[[Draft:Orwell's "1984"]]</ref>.

The kind of world that is slowly emerging here is not completely new: writers, filmmakers, game designers and graphic artists have already imagined similar realities in cyberpunk universes such as those of Gibson, Stephenson, “Blade Runner”, “Ghost in the Shell” or “Cyberpunk 2077” or even comics such as w0rldtr33.

=== Cyberpunk universes ===
In these cyberpunk worlds, the dream of perfect connection has already collapsed. Most of them show societies that are far more chaotic, violent and unstable than our own, which makes them feel close to us and at the same time uncomfortable to watch. We see how people have lost the war to false hope and try different ways to compensate for it: drugs, implants, hacking or escaping into virtual realities. High technology is still very idealised, but it no longer appears as a solution; it is just the background of everyday struggle.

For example, in ''Neuromancer'' by William Gibson and ''Snow Crash'' by Neal Stephenson, the network is everywhere, but it does not lead to a better or fairer world. Instead, huge corporations and powerful AI’s dominate cyberspace, while most people live in poverty or chaos. This is often summed up as “high tech, low life”: technology is extremely advanced, but everyday life is unstable and dangerous. Hacking becomes both a survival strategy and one of the biggest forms of threat.

Then we have worlds like ''Cyberpunk 2077'', ''Blade Runner'' or ''Ghost in the Shell'', where not only are people deeply connected with each other, but the whole city is full of cyberutopian technology. Holograms, neon advertisements, cameras and data streams make the urban space look like a physical version of the cloud instead of something that only exists on the screens. There is also the idea of humans having machine parts, which means the dependency on the digital world is not only mental but also physical, through cybernetic implants and prosthetics <ref>Cyberware. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberware</ref>.

In most of these stories the protagonists are fragile figures of hope. They try to resist or at least survive within systems (like the corporations in power) that are much bigger than them. Their attitude often fits Borges’ <ref name=":0" /> words: <blockquote>''If honor and wisdom and happiness are not for me, let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my place be in hell.''</blockquote>All of these cyberpunk universes are reflections of the bad parts of the internet utopia. They exaggerate tendencies that can already be noticed: dependence on the digital world, manipulation of power through information, growing surveillance and a constant focus on conflict and destruction. In Borges’ Library of Babel there are also groups who try to control meaning by deciding which books are valuable and which should be destroyed <ref name=":0" />. In a similar way, in both cyberpunk worlds and in our own cloud-based reality, different powerful figures fight to control what information we see, trust and remember.

=== Ethical reflections ===
Looking back from the cyberpunk worlds to our own, one can recognize softer versions of the same problems. Many people feel strangely alone or empty even though they are constantly “connected”. Some are very dependent on the dopamine they get from simple online social interactions, trying to make everything look perfect for “the post”. Even without direct manipulation from outside, people sometimes build a false identity just to receive the best possible feedback and attention from their online social network. Once this identity is created, it becomes harder to find the way back to your real self. After one bad event, or when the feedback suddenly changes, their whole world can feel like it is collapsing, because they started to believe this constructed image too much.

Beside this, there are also the so-called figures of power. Throughout someone’s time on the internet, they will encounter hundreds of advertisements a day, which are most likely personalised for them from the data collected while they are surfing or doom-scrolling<ref>Doomscrolling. <nowiki>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomscrolling</nowiki></ref> online. This is already an indirect form of being under surveillance: clicks, pauses and searches are constantly observed in order to predict what one might want next. What looks like “free content” is often a system designed to guide people's attention and behaviour in subtle ways.

In a more positive sense, the more massive data collection becomes, the more people begin to notice the system’s imperfections. Mistrust grows, and some users become more cautious about what they share and how they present themselves online. This can have a good effect: it may push people to focus more on their offline lives instead of losing themselves in a carefully curated “fake” world. However, for those whose social and emotional lives already depend heavily on the internet, this shift can also create stress and mental strain—especially when their online identity starts to feel more real, or more valuable, than their offline self. At the same time, these effects are often difficult to see from the outside: friends and family in “real life” might not notice how strongly someone is being shaped by online feedback loops. This creates an ethical challenge, because the signs of manipulation and harm may only become visible within the cloud itself—through patterns of attention, behaviour, and self-presentation.

In other words, the task is to defend the possibility of a real self and a shared public truth inside digital space, so that the promise of collective intelligence does not collapse into collective manipulation.

== Conclusion ==
So, did Borges pinpoint the modern world? In a way, yes. Not because he could predict digital technology but his highly intellectual assumptions and ideas of the Total Knowledge say a lot more for modern society than anticipated. Not only he predicted patterns of the digital world (which he couldn't even imagine would've existed) but also human behaviour patterns.

The Cloud reflects very well on the metaphor of the Library of Babel: where we try to find meaning and trust but could end up losing ourselves in between. This is how the internet first appeared as a cyberutopia: a promise of global connection, harmony, and collective intelligence. Yet the same structure also produces the opposite—overload, mistrust, manipulation, and the risk of losing ourselves between endless information and constant performance.

Because cyber-dystopias exaggerate these tendencies, they can function as warnings rather than just entertainment. They remind us to ask why we wanted this “perfect connection” in the first place. The idea of being able to share your unique self with the world, your life work and motivations will most likely be appreciated from somebody (or even more than somebody) at some place in the world. To remember that maybe one simple like on the digital world, means more for somebody out there than we actually think.

These are just little things to think about and remember that we don't have to be as predictable and fall for the traps set into our world now. If we lose ourselves through it we should fall back to the people we trust and choose reality over the endless library.

== References ==
<references />*''Use of AI: Grammar check, Quotes accuracy check, correct format of References, reminder of some plot details of Snow Crash.''

From Babel to the Cloud

2025-12-19T13:42:11Z

Violafejza: /* Stage 2: The Cloud — Modern Cyberutopia */

= The Rise and Fall of Cyberutopia =
== Introduction ==
Did Jorge Luis Borges, in his short story ''The Library of Babel''<ref name=":0">Borges, J. L. (1998). ''The Library of Babel'' (A. Hurley, Trans.). In J. L. Borges, Collected fictions (pp. 112–118).

Penguin. (Original work published 1941)</ref>, get inspired by the limits of his own society at the time which led him to idealise the future and put it in the metaphor of human behaviour? Or did he somehow anticipate how humans would be in today’s digital environments? This contribution is based on the idea that human desires – especially the desire for total knowledge and connection – might be more predictable than one might think. Borges’ imaginary library, in which he fantasises the idea where all possible books already exist, says a great deal about our present information society and about human intentions.

Today society is moving deeper into what can be called the age of cyberutopias<ref>[[Cyberutopia (preliminary)]]</ref>, which means, technological dreams of a perfectly connected and informed humanity. One example that immediately comes to mind is the evolution of the Internet or “the cloud”: an infrastructure where the traces of almost all human activities are stored, processed and presented back as “knowledge”.

This paper follows the metaphor “From Babel to the Cloud” in order to ask how the dream of universal information turns both into a utopia of perfect wisdom and into a dystopia of control, overload and inequality.

== Stage 1: Babel — The Dream of Total Connection ==
In this short story, ''the Library of Babel''<ref name=":0" /> represents a place where all possible information already exists (even though most of the books are total nonsense). The characters of the story were immediately fond of the idea and some of them put their whole life's work into searching for answers, everybody has different desires which leads people to act in ways where they're ready to risk everything just for some peace of mind. Some did succeed, but only in claiming that the library does in fact hold every book possible (which means every answer possible, even the way one dies). This only made people act more irrational and selfish, again as might be expected from many people.

So why does the idea of “knowing everything”, “having all the answers” manipulate humans so easily that they lose sense of their reality and their real self? Some might say it is because they are scared of the things they don't know, because they’re something they can't control.

Another interesting side of ''the Library of Babel''<ref name=":0" /> is that, depending on which point of view, it can be both a utopia or a dystopia.

* Utopia of total Information: we can be more cautious, intellectual, rational, etc.

In theory, a place like the Library could make people wiser. If every possible answer already exists somewhere, humans could avoid repeating the same mistakes over and over again…

* Dystopia of Despair: overflow of Information, chaos of emotions.

In practice, though, the characters in the story don’t become calmer or more reasonable…

This double face of the Library of Babel – as both a dream of total knowledge and a nightmare of confusion – is important for the whole idea of this cyberutopia.

Very similar promises and dangers appear again when one takes a look at the Internet and the modern ‘cloud’ as a kind of real-life universal library.

== Stage 2: The Cloud — Modern Cyberutopia ==
Slowly the fantasy of this story is starting to look more and more real in today's world, and that has started to happen since the invention of the internet. Instead of the infinite books in the library now there's billions of websites, social media posts and all the blueprints of humanity floating around for everybody's fast access. So all that can be perceived as a version of Babel.

When we focus on how the evolution of the internet went, we can notice the similarities between Borges’ Babel<ref name=":0" /> and the modern world. Authors in the field of the information society argue that our time is organised more and more around information flows and digital networks (Díaz-Nafría, 2014; Capurro, 2008).<ref>Díaz-Nafría, J. M. (2014). Ethics at the age of information. ''Systema, 2''(3), 43–52.</ref><ref>Capurro, R. (2008). Intercultural information ethics. In K. E. Himma & H. T. Tavani (Eds.), ''The handbook of information and computer ethics'' (pp. 639–665). Wiley.</ref>

'''The Servers'''

Starting on the physical matter: today's version of the Library itself. In reality the “cloud” is made of server farms, hard drives, cooling systems and cables, but in everyday life people hardly think about these buildings and machines. It feels like a weightless, invisible “cloud”: physical data centres are not actively in people's minds, the results just show up on screens, so the whole system appears like a library that is simply presented with open access.

'''The Web'''

Political scientists like Schulze (2018)<ref name=":1">Schulze, M. (2018). ''From cyber-utopia to cyber-war: Normative change in cyberspace'' (Doctoral dissertation, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Germany). <nowiki>https://doi.org/10.22032/DBT.35107</nowiki> revistas.pucsp.br</ref> have shown that the early discourse around the internet was strongly marked by cyber-utopian expectations. So now the web already holds most of the information “known to man”, which gives the feeling of total knowledge and puts it at the core of most of society today - The only main difference between this and Babel<ref name=":0" /> is that all of the information was created by people themselves and not from the idea of random character combinations. This is the “cyberutopian moment”: the belief that if almost everything is online and connected, then humanity is finally close to a kind of “perfect wisdom”. Imagine every question has already an answer on the web, that every problem could in theory be solved with enough information and connection.

Thinkers like Pierre Lévy call this the rise of “collective intelligence”: the idea that many minds connected through cyberspace can create new, shared forms of knowledge (Lévy, 1997)<ref>Lévy, P. (1997). ''Collective intelligence: Mankind’s emerging world in cyberspace'' (R. Bononno, Trans.). Perseus Books.</ref>. Yochai Benkler talks about “commons-based peer production”, where people collaborate online on projects like free software or Wikipedia instead of just passively consuming information (Benkler, 2006)<ref>Benkler, Y. (2006). ''The wealth of networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom''. Yale University Press.</ref>. A simple example of this dream is Wikipedia itself: an online encyclopedia that anyone can read and (almost) anyone can edit. It looks like the perfect symbol of the web as a universal library created “by everyone for everyone”.

At the same time, the web also gives individuals an unprecedented possibility to become visible. The existence of globally known celebrities, political figures, authors or scientists whose work you can follow directly online is proof that it is possible for a person, or a work of somebody, to be known worldwide. Social media accounts, personal websites, video channels or blogs amplify this feeling: the sense that, in principle, anyone could “publish a book in Babel<ref name=":0" />” and find an audience.

'''Social Media'''

Social media is one of the reasons for this form of “perfect connection” in our world today. It makes it possible to be up to date with the news, “new trends”, and interesting stuff happening around the world – by “interesting” is meant what people consider worthy of being trendy. Everyone processes all this, but they don’t experience most of it in their real life; instead it happens in their online life. People just perceive it on their screens, and sometimes they forget the feeling of that being reality and it becomes just another piece of news in their feed.

Social media also allows people to interact with people they would never have met without it. Usually it is because one ended up in the same community or the same “corner of the internet”. That already means more enhanced social interactions, where it's possible to skip getting to know each other beforehand, something that could be a little uncomfortable for some people. So, of course, social media is a crucial part of today's social lives of people.

Socialising is a very crucial part in the survival and development of humans as a species, so slowly one might say life is starting to sound impossible if the internet were not to exist. Some researchers even talk about “social media addiction”, when people feel they cannot disconnect without stress or fear of missing out<ref name=":2">Goldman, Bruce. 2021. “Addictive Potential of Social Media, Explained.” ''Stanford Medicine News Center'' (Insights), October 29, 2021. <nowiki>https://med.stanford.edu/news/insights/2021/10/addictive-potential-of-social-media-explained.html</nowiki></ref><ref>Kuss, D. J., & Griffiths, M. D. (2017). Social networking sites and addiction: Ten lessons learned. ''International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 14''(3), 311. <nowiki>https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph14030311</nowiki></ref>. This is why some authors describe the web and the cloud as central elements of the utopia of “perfect connection” and “perfect wisdom”, especially in the utopian families of “The Perfect Wisdom”<ref name=":4">[[Conceptual clarifications about "Utopias and the Information Society"]]</ref> and “The Perfect Social Order”<ref name=":4" />. So this is another similarity to Borges’ story: fear can create dependency, and it is exactly this fear that makes people attracted to digital systems that promise to store and predict everything.

== Stage 3: Cyber-dystopia — The Fall of the Dream ==
''“The internet has gone “from cyber-utopia to cyber-war””'' (Schulze, 2018)<ref name=":1" />. What once looked like a space of free information and connection is now increasingly described in terms of conflict, manipulation and control.

The “social media addiction”<ref name=":2" /> that many people experience today is something that is being taken advantage of by those who hold more power. This dependence is built into the algorithms behind almost every form of content consumption. These systems are also used to influence or even manipulate people in their political beliefs, for example in the time before elections and political campaigns. Sometimes this manipulation goes as far as spreading fake news<ref name=":3">Jardine, Eric. 2019. “Beware Fake News.” Centre for International Governance Innovation. April 2, 2019. <nowiki>https://www.cigionline.org/articles/beware-fake-news/</nowiki></ref> in order to achieve a specific goal. All of this shows a way of using the internet that is not morally good. So does this still sound so utopian in the end?

This leads us to the next main similarity with the Library of Babel: the dystopia. We are entering an era of the internet where some people have developed a kind of paranoia about the content we receive. Some no longer believe the news at all, since it could be fake news <ref name=":3" />– just like in Babel, where a book could always give you the wrong information or “knowledge”. These methods of manipulation are becoming more and more creative, especially with the development of AI<ref>[[Artificial Intelligence (Cyberutopias)]]</ref>. This starts to look very similar to the world of “Big Brother”<ref>Orwell, George. 1949. 1984. London: Secker & Warburg.</ref> and the dystopia of surveillance<ref>[[Draft:Orwell's "1984"]]</ref>.

The kind of world that is slowly emerging here is not completely new: writers, filmmakers, game designers and graphic artists have already imagined similar realities in cyberpunk universes such as those of Gibson, Stephenson, “Blade Runner”, “Ghost in the Shell” or “Cyberpunk 2077” or even comics such as w0rldtr33.

=== Cyberpunk universes ===
In these cyberpunk worlds, the dream of perfect connection has already collapsed. Most of them show societies that are far more chaotic, violent and unstable than our own, which makes them feel close to us and at the same time uncomfortable to watch. We see how people have lost the war to false hope and try different ways to compensate for it: drugs, implants, hacking or escaping into virtual realities. High technology is still very idealised, but it no longer appears as a solution; it is just the background of everyday struggle.

For example, in ''Neuromancer'' by William Gibson and ''Snow Crash'' by Neal Stephenson, the network is everywhere, but it does not lead to a better or fairer world. Instead, huge corporations and powerful AI’s dominate cyberspace, while most people live in poverty or chaos. This is often summed up as “high tech, low life”: technology is extremely advanced, but everyday life is unstable and dangerous. Hacking becomes both a survival strategy and one of the biggest forms of threat.

Then we have worlds like ''Cyberpunk 2077'', ''Blade Runner'' or ''Ghost in the Shell'', where not only are people deeply connected with each other, but the whole city is full of cyberutopian technology. Holograms, neon advertisements, cameras and data streams make the urban space look like a physical version of the cloud instead of something that only exists on the screens. There is also the idea of humans having machine parts, which means the dependency on the digital world is not only mental but also physical, through cybernetic implants and prosthetics <ref>Cyberware. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberware</ref>.

In most of these stories the protagonists are fragile figures of hope. They try to resist or at least survive within systems (like the corporations in power) that are much bigger than them. Their attitude often fits Borges’ <ref name=":0" /> words: <blockquote>''If honor and wisdom and happiness are not for me, let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my place be in hell.''</blockquote>All of these cyberpunk universes are reflections of the bad parts of the internet utopia. They exaggerate tendencies that can already be noticed: dependence on the digital world, manipulation of power through information, growing surveillance and a constant focus on conflict and destruction. In Borges’ Library of Babel there are also groups who try to control meaning by deciding which books are valuable and which should be destroyed <ref name=":0" />. In a similar way, in both cyberpunk worlds and in our own cloud-based reality, different powerful figures fight to control what information we see, trust and remember.

=== Ethical reflections ===
Looking back from the cyberpunk worlds to our own, one can recognize softer versions of the same problems. Many people feel strangely alone or empty even though they are constantly “connected”. Some are very dependent on the dopamine they get from simple online social interactions, trying to make everything look perfect for “the post”. Even without direct manipulation from outside, people sometimes build a false identity just to receive the best possible feedback and attention from their online social network. Once this identity is created, it becomes harder to find the way back to your real self. After one bad event, or when the feedback suddenly changes, their whole world can feel like it is collapsing, because they started to believe this constructed image too much.

Beside this, there are also the so-called figures of power. Throughout someone’s time on the internet, they will encounter hundreds of advertisements a day, which are most likely personalised for them from the data collected while they are surfing or doom-scrolling<ref>Doomscrolling. <nowiki>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomscrolling</nowiki></ref> online. This is already an indirect form of being under surveillance: clicks, pauses and searches are constantly observed in order to predict what one might want next. What looks like “free content” is often a system designed to guide people's attention and behaviour in subtle ways.

In a more positive sense, the more massive data collection becomes, the more people begin to notice the system’s imperfections. Mistrust grows, and some users become more cautious about what they share and how they present themselves online. This can have a good effect: it may push people to focus more on their offline lives instead of losing themselves in a carefully curated “fake” world. However, for those whose social and emotional lives already depend heavily on the internet, this shift can also create stress and mental strain—especially when their online identity starts to feel more real, or more valuable, than their offline self. At the same time, these effects are often difficult to see from the outside: friends and family in “real life” might not notice how strongly someone is being shaped by online feedback loops. This creates an ethical challenge, because the signs of manipulation and harm may only become visible within the cloud itself—through patterns of attention, behaviour, and self-presentation.

In other words, the task is to defend the possibility of a real self and a shared public truth inside digital space, so that the promise of collective intelligence does not collapse into collective manipulation.

== Conclusion ==
So, did Borges pinpoint the modern world? In a way, yes. Not because he could predict digital technology but his highly intellectual assumptions and ideas of the Total Knowledge say a lot more for modern society than anticipated. Not only he predicted patterns of the digital world (which he couldn't even imagine would've existed) but also human behaviour patterns.

The Cloud reflects very well on the metaphor of the Library of Babel: where we try to find meaning and trust but could end up losing ourselves in between. This is how the internet first appeared as a cyberutopia: a promise of global connection, harmony, and collective intelligence. Yet the same structure also produces the opposite—overload, mistrust, manipulation, and the risk of losing ourselves between endless information and constant performance.

Because cyber-dystopias exaggerate these tendencies, they can function as warnings rather than just entertainment. They remind us to ask why we wanted this “perfect connection” in the first place. The idea of being able to share your unique self with the world, your life work and motivations will most likely be appreciated from somebody (or even more than somebody) at some place in the world. To remember that maybe one simple like on the digital world, means more for somebody out there than we actually think.

These are just little things to think about and remember that we don't have to be as predictable and fall for the traps set into our world now. If we lose ourselves through it we should fall back to the people we trust and choose reality over the endless library.

== References ==
<references />*''Use of AI: Grammar check, Quotes accuracy check, correct format of References, reminder of some plot details of Snow Crash.''

From Babel to the Cloud

2025-12-19T13:34:57Z

Violafejza: /* Stage 2: The Cloud — Modern Cyberutopia */

= The Rise and Fall of Cyberutopia =
== Introduction ==
Did Jorge Luis Borges, in his short story ''The Library of Babel''<ref name=":0">Borges, J. L. (1998). ''The Library of Babel'' (A. Hurley, Trans.). In J. L. Borges, Collected fictions (pp. 112–118).

Penguin. (Original work published 1941)</ref>, get inspired by the limits of his own society at the time which led him to idealise the future and put it in the metaphor of human behaviour? Or did he somehow anticipate how humans would be in today’s digital environments? This contribution is based on the idea that human desires – especially the desire for total knowledge and connection – might be more predictable than one might think. Borges’ imaginary library, in which he fantasises the idea where all possible books already exist, says a great deal about our present information society and about human intentions.

Today society is moving deeper into what can be called the age of cyberutopias<ref>[[Cyberutopia (preliminary)]]</ref>, which means, technological dreams of a perfectly connected and informed humanity. One example that immediately comes to mind is the evolution of the Internet or “the cloud”: an infrastructure where the traces of almost all human activities are stored, processed and presented back as “knowledge”.

This paper follows the metaphor “From Babel to the Cloud” in order to ask how the dream of universal information turns both into a utopia of perfect wisdom and into a dystopia of control, overload and inequality.

== Stage 1: Babel — The Dream of Total Connection ==
In this short story, ''the Library of Babel''<ref name=":0" /> represents a place where all possible information already exists (even though most of the books are total nonsense). The characters of the story were immediately fond of the idea and some of them put their whole life's work into searching for answers, everybody has different desires which leads people to act in ways where they're ready to risk everything just for some peace of mind. Some did succeed, but only in claiming that the library does in fact hold every book possible (which means every answer possible, even the way one dies). This only made people act more irrational and selfish, again as might be expected from many people.

So why does the idea of “knowing everything”, “having all the answers” manipulate humans so easily that they lose sense of their reality and their real self? Some might say it is because they are scared of the things they don't know, because they’re something they can't control.

Another interesting side of ''the Library of Babel''<ref name=":0" /> is that, depending on which point of view, it can be both a utopia or a dystopia.

* Utopia of total Information: we can be more cautious, intellectual, rational, etc.

In theory, a place like the Library could make people wiser. If every possible answer already exists somewhere, humans could avoid repeating the same mistakes over and over again…

* Dystopia of Despair: overflow of Information, chaos of emotions.

In practice, though, the characters in the story don’t become calmer or more reasonable…

This double face of the Library of Babel – as both a dream of total knowledge and a nightmare of confusion – is important for the whole idea of this cyberutopia.

Very similar promises and dangers appear again when one takes a look at the Internet and the modern ‘cloud’ as a kind of real-life universal library.

== Stage 2: The Cloud — Modern Cyberutopia ==
Slowly the fantasy of this story is starting to look more and more real in today's world, and that has started to happen since the invention of the internet. Instead of the infinite books in the library now there's billions of websites, social media posts and all the blueprints of humanity floating around for everybody's fast access. So all that can be perceived as a version of Babel.

When we focus on how the evolution of the internet went, we can notice the similarities between Borges’ Babel<ref name=":0" /> and the modern world. Authors in the field of the information society argue that our time is organised more and more around information flows and digital networks (Díaz-Nafría, 2014; Capurro, 2008).<ref>Díaz-Nafría, J. M. (2014). Ethics at the age of information. ''Systema, 2''(3), 43–52.</ref><ref>Capurro, R. (2008). Intercultural information ethics. In K. E. Himma & H. T. Tavani (Eds.), ''The handbook of information and computer ethics'' (pp. 639–665). Wiley.</ref>

'''The Servers'''

Starting on the physical matter: today's version of the Library itself. In reality the “cloud” is made of server farms, hard drives, cooling systems and cables, but in everyday life people hardly think about these buildings and machines. It feels like a weightless, invisible “cloud”: physical data centres are not actively in people's minds, the results just show up on screens, so the whole system appears like a library that is simply presented with open access.

'''The Web'''

Political scientists like Schulze (2018)<ref name=":1">Schulze, M. (2018). ''From cyber-utopia to cyber-war: Normative change in cyberspace'' (Doctoral dissertation, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Germany). <nowiki>https://doi.org/10.22032/DBT.35107</nowiki> revistas.pucsp.br</ref> have shown that the early discourse around the internet was strongly marked by cyber-utopian expectations. So now the web already holds most of the information “known to man”, which gives the feeling of total knowledge and puts it at the core of most of society today - The only main difference between this and Babel<ref name=":0" /> is that all of the information was created by people themselves and not from the idea of random character combinations. This is the “cyberutopian moment”: the belief that if almost everything is online and connected, then humanity is finally close to a kind of “perfect wisdom”. Imagine every question has already an answer on the web, that every problem could in theory be solved with enough information and connection.

Thinkers like Pierre Lévy call this the rise of “collective intelligence”: the idea that many minds connected through cyberspace can create new, shared forms of knowledge (Lévy, 1997)<ref>Lévy, P. (1997). ''Collective intelligence: Mankind’s emerging world in cyberspace'' (R. Bononno, Trans.). Perseus Books.</ref>. Yochai Benkler talks about “commons-based peer production”, where people collaborate online on projects like free software or Wikipedia instead of just passively consuming information (Benkler, 2006)<ref>Benkler, Y. (2006). ''The wealth of networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom''. Yale University Press.</ref>. A simple example of this dream is Wikipedia itself: an online encyclopedia that anyone can read and (almost) anyone can edit. It looks like the perfect symbol of the web as a universal library created “by everyone for everyone”.

At the same time, the web also gives individuals an unprecedented possibility to become visible. The existence of globally known celebrities, political figures, authors or scientists whose work you can follow directly online is proof that it is possible for a person, or a work of somebody, to be known worldwide. Social media accounts, personal websites, video channels or blogs amplify this feeling: the sense that, in principle, anyone could “publish a book in Babel<ref name=":0" />” and find an audience.

'''Social Media'''

Social media is one of the reasons for this form of “perfect connection” in our world today. It makes it possible to be up to date with the news, “new trends”, and interesting stuff happening around the world – by “interesting” is meant what people consider worthy of being trendy. Everyone processes all this, but they don’t experience most of it in their real life; instead it happens in their online life. People just perceive it on their screens, and sometimes they forget the feeling of that being reality and it becomes just another piece of news in their feed.

Social media also allows people to interact with people they would never have met without it. Usually it is because one ended up in the same community or the same “corner of the internet”. That already means more enhanced social interactions, where it's possible to skip getting to know each other beforehand, something that could be a little uncomfortable for some people. So, of course, social media is a crucial part of today's social lives of people.

Socialising is a very crucial part in the survival and development of humans as a species, so slowly one might say life is starting to sound impossible if the internet were not to exist. Some researchers even talk about “social media addiction”, when people feel they cannot disconnect without stress or fear of missing out<ref name=":2">Goldman, Bruce. 2021. “Addictive Potential of Social Media, Explained.” ''Stanford Medicine News Center'' (Insights), October 29, 2021. <nowiki>https://med.stanford.edu/news/insights/2021/10/addictive-potential-of-social-media-explained.html</nowiki></ref><ref>Kuss, D. J., & Griffiths, M. D. (2017). Social networking sites and addiction: Ten lessons learned. ''International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 14''(3), 311. <nowiki>https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph14030311</nowiki></ref>. This is why some authors describe the web and the cloud as central elements of the utopia of “perfect connection” and “perfect wisdom”, especially in the utopian families of “The Perfect Wisdom” and “The Perfect Social Order”. So this is another similarity to Borges’ story: fear can create dependency, and it is exactly this fear that makes people attracted to digital systems that promise to store and predict everything.

== Stage 3: Cyber-dystopia — The Fall of the Dream ==
''“The internet has gone “from cyber-utopia to cyber-war””'' (Schulze, 2018)<ref name=":1" />. What once looked like a space of free information and connection is now increasingly described in terms of conflict, manipulation and control.

The “social media addiction”<ref name=":2" /> that many people experience today is something that is being taken advantage of by those who hold more power. This dependence is built into the algorithms behind almost every form of content consumption. These systems are also used to influence or even manipulate people in their political beliefs, for example in the time before elections and political campaigns. Sometimes this manipulation goes as far as spreading fake news<ref name=":3">Jardine, Eric. 2019. “Beware Fake News.” Centre for International Governance Innovation. April 2, 2019. <nowiki>https://www.cigionline.org/articles/beware-fake-news/</nowiki></ref> in order to achieve a specific goal. All of this shows a way of using the internet that is not morally good. So does this still sound so utopian in the end?

This leads us to the next main similarity with the Library of Babel: the dystopia. We are entering an era of the internet where some people have developed a kind of paranoia about the content we receive. Some no longer believe the news at all, since it could be fake news <ref name=":3" />– just like in Babel, where a book could always give you the wrong information or “knowledge”. These methods of manipulation are becoming more and more creative, especially with the development of AI<ref>[[Artificial Intelligence (Cyberutopias)]]</ref>. This starts to look very similar to the world of “Big Brother”<ref>Orwell, George. 1949. 1984. London: Secker & Warburg.</ref> and the dystopia of surveillance<ref>[[Draft:Orwell's "1984"]]</ref>.

The kind of world that is slowly emerging here is not completely new: writers, filmmakers, game designers and graphic artists have already imagined similar realities in cyberpunk universes such as those of Gibson, Stephenson, “Blade Runner”, “Ghost in the Shell” or “Cyberpunk 2077” or even comics such as w0rldtr33.

=== Cyberpunk universes ===
In these cyberpunk worlds, the dream of perfect connection has already collapsed. Most of them show societies that are far more chaotic, violent and unstable than our own, which makes them feel close to us and at the same time uncomfortable to watch. We see how people have lost the war to false hope and try different ways to compensate for it: drugs, implants, hacking or escaping into virtual realities. High technology is still very idealised, but it no longer appears as a solution; it is just the background of everyday struggle.

For example, in ''Neuromancer'' by William Gibson and ''Snow Crash'' by Neal Stephenson, the network is everywhere, but it does not lead to a better or fairer world. Instead, huge corporations and powerful AI’s dominate cyberspace, while most people live in poverty or chaos. This is often summed up as “high tech, low life”: technology is extremely advanced, but everyday life is unstable and dangerous. Hacking becomes both a survival strategy and one of the biggest forms of threat.

Then we have worlds like ''Cyberpunk 2077'', ''Blade Runner'' or ''Ghost in the Shell'', where not only are people deeply connected with each other, but the whole city is full of cyberutopian technology. Holograms, neon advertisements, cameras and data streams make the urban space look like a physical version of the cloud instead of something that only exists on the screens. There is also the idea of humans having machine parts, which means the dependency on the digital world is not only mental but also physical, through cybernetic implants and prosthetics <ref>Cyberware. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberware</ref>.

In most of these stories the protagonists are fragile figures of hope. They try to resist or at least survive within systems (like the corporations in power) that are much bigger than them. Their attitude often fits Borges’ <ref name=":0" /> words: <blockquote>''If honor and wisdom and happiness are not for me, let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my place be in hell.''</blockquote>All of these cyberpunk universes are reflections of the bad parts of the internet utopia. They exaggerate tendencies that can already be noticed: dependence on the digital world, manipulation of power through information, growing surveillance and a constant focus on conflict and destruction. In Borges’ Library of Babel there are also groups who try to control meaning by deciding which books are valuable and which should be destroyed <ref name=":0" />. In a similar way, in both cyberpunk worlds and in our own cloud-based reality, different powerful figures fight to control what information we see, trust and remember.

=== Ethical reflections ===
Looking back from the cyberpunk worlds to our own, one can recognize softer versions of the same problems. Many people feel strangely alone or empty even though they are constantly “connected”. Some are very dependent on the dopamine they get from simple online social interactions, trying to make everything look perfect for “the post”. Even without direct manipulation from outside, people sometimes build a false identity just to receive the best possible feedback and attention from their online social network. Once this identity is created, it becomes harder to find the way back to your real self. After one bad event, or when the feedback suddenly changes, their whole world can feel like it is collapsing, because they started to believe this constructed image too much.

Beside this, there are also the so-called figures of power. Throughout someone’s time on the internet, they will encounter hundreds of advertisements a day, which are most likely personalised for them from the data collected while they are surfing or doom-scrolling<ref>Doomscrolling. <nowiki>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomscrolling</nowiki></ref> online. This is already an indirect form of being under surveillance: clicks, pauses and searches are constantly observed in order to predict what one might want next. What looks like “free content” is often a system designed to guide people's attention and behaviour in subtle ways.

In a more positive sense, the more massive data collection becomes, the more people begin to notice the system’s imperfections. Mistrust grows, and some users become more cautious about what they share and how they present themselves online. This can have a good effect: it may push people to focus more on their offline lives instead of losing themselves in a carefully curated “fake” world. However, for those whose social and emotional lives already depend heavily on the internet, this shift can also create stress and mental strain—especially when their online identity starts to feel more real, or more valuable, than their offline self. At the same time, these effects are often difficult to see from the outside: friends and family in “real life” might not notice how strongly someone is being shaped by online feedback loops. This creates an ethical challenge, because the signs of manipulation and harm may only become visible within the cloud itself—through patterns of attention, behaviour, and self-presentation.

In other words, the task is to defend the possibility of a real self and a shared public truth inside digital space, so that the promise of collective intelligence does not collapse into collective manipulation.

== Conclusion ==
So, did Borges pinpoint the modern world? In a way, yes. Not because he could predict digital technology but his highly intellectual assumptions and ideas of the Total Knowledge say a lot more for modern society than anticipated. Not only he predicted patterns of the digital world (which he couldn't even imagine would've existed) but also human behaviour patterns.

The Cloud reflects very well on the metaphor of the Library of Babel: where we try to find meaning and trust but could end up losing ourselves in between. This is how the internet first appeared as a cyberutopia: a promise of global connection, harmony, and collective intelligence. Yet the same structure also produces the opposite—overload, mistrust, manipulation, and the risk of losing ourselves between endless information and constant performance.

Because cyber-dystopias exaggerate these tendencies, they can function as warnings rather than just entertainment. They remind us to ask why we wanted this “perfect connection” in the first place. The idea of being able to share your unique self with the world, your life work and motivations will most likely be appreciated from somebody (or even more than somebody) at some place in the world. To remember that maybe one simple like on the digital world, means more for somebody out there than we actually think.

These are just little things to think about and remember that we don't have to be as predictable and fall for the traps set into our world now. If we lose ourselves through it we should fall back to the people we trust and choose reality over the endless library.

== References ==
<references />*''Use of AI: Grammar check, Quotes accuracy check, correct format of References, reminder of some plot details of Snow Crash.''

From Babel to the Cloud

2025-12-19T13:33:36Z

Violafejza: /* Stage 2: The Cloud — Modern Cyberutopia */

= The Rise and Fall of Cyberutopia =
== Introduction ==
Did Jorge Luis Borges, in his short story ''The Library of Babel''<ref name=":0">Borges, J. L. (1998). ''The Library of Babel'' (A. Hurley, Trans.). In J. L. Borges, Collected fictions (pp. 112–118).

Penguin. (Original work published 1941)</ref>, get inspired by the limits of his own society at the time which led him to idealise the future and put it in the metaphor of human behaviour? Or did he somehow anticipate how humans would be in today’s digital environments? This contribution is based on the idea that human desires – especially the desire for total knowledge and connection – might be more predictable than one might think. Borges’ imaginary library, in which he fantasises the idea where all possible books already exist, says a great deal about our present information society and about human intentions.

Today society is moving deeper into what can be called the age of cyberutopias<ref>[[Cyberutopia (preliminary)]]</ref>, which means, technological dreams of a perfectly connected and informed humanity. One example that immediately comes to mind is the evolution of the Internet or “the cloud”: an infrastructure where the traces of almost all human activities are stored, processed and presented back as “knowledge”.

This paper follows the metaphor “From Babel to the Cloud” in order to ask how the dream of universal information turns both into a utopia of perfect wisdom and into a dystopia of control, overload and inequality.

== Stage 1: Babel — The Dream of Total Connection ==
In this short story, ''the Library of Babel''<ref name=":0" /> represents a place where all possible information already exists (even though most of the books are total nonsense). The characters of the story were immediately fond of the idea and some of them put their whole life's work into searching for answers, everybody has different desires which leads people to act in ways where they're ready to risk everything just for some peace of mind. Some did succeed, but only in claiming that the library does in fact hold every book possible (which means every answer possible, even the way one dies). This only made people act more irrational and selfish, again as might be expected from many people.

So why does the idea of “knowing everything”, “having all the answers” manipulate humans so easily that they lose sense of their reality and their real self? Some might say it is because they are scared of the things they don't know, because they’re something they can't control.

Another interesting side of ''the Library of Babel''<ref name=":0" /> is that, depending on which point of view, it can be both a utopia or a dystopia.

* Utopia of total Information: we can be more cautious, intellectual, rational, etc.

In theory, a place like the Library could make people wiser. If every possible answer already exists somewhere, humans could avoid repeating the same mistakes over and over again…

* Dystopia of Despair: overflow of Information, chaos of emotions.

In practice, though, the characters in the story don’t become calmer or more reasonable…

This double face of the Library of Babel – as both a dream of total knowledge and a nightmare of confusion – is important for the whole idea of this cyberutopia.

Very similar promises and dangers appear again when one takes a look at the Internet and the modern ‘cloud’ as a kind of real-life universal library.

== Stage 2: The Cloud — Modern Cyberutopia ==
Slowly the fantasy of this story is starting to look more and more real in today's world, and that has started to happen since the invention of the internet. Instead of the infinite books in the library now there's billions of websites, social media posts and all the blueprints of humanity floating around for everybody's fast access. So all that can be perceived as a version of Babel.

When we focus on how the evolution of the internet went, we can notice the similarities between Borges’ Babel<ref name=":0" /> and the modern world. Authors in the field of the information society argue that our time is organised more and more around information flows and digital networks (Díaz-Nafría, 2014; Capurro, 2008).<ref>Díaz-Nafría, J. M. (2014). Ethics at the age of information. ''Systema, 2''(3), 43–52.</ref><ref>Capurro, R. (2008). Intercultural information ethics. In K. E. Himma & H. T. Tavani (Eds.), ''The handbook of information and computer ethics'' (pp. 639–665). Wiley.</ref>

'''The Servers'''

Starting on the physical matter: today's version of the Library itself. In reality the “cloud” is made of server farms, hard drives, cooling systems and cables, but in everyday life people hardly think about these buildings and machines. It feels like a weightless, invisible “cloud”: physical data centres are not actively in people's minds, the results just show up on screens, so the whole system appears like a library that is simply presented with open access.

'''The Web'''

Political scientists like Schulze (2018)<ref name=":1">Schulze, M. (2018). ''From cyber-utopia to cyber-war: Normative change in cyberspace'' (Doctoral dissertation, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Germany). <nowiki>https://doi.org/10.22032/DBT.35107</nowiki> revistas.pucsp.br</ref> have shown that the early discourse around the internet was strongly marked by cyber-utopian expectations. So now the web already holds most of the information “known to man”, which gives the feeling of total knowledge and puts it at the core of most of society today - The only main difference between this and Babel<ref name=":0" /> is that all of the information was created by people themselves and not from the idea of random character combinations. This is the “cyberutopian moment”: the belief that if almost everything is online and connected, then humanity is finally close to a kind of “perfect wisdom”. Imagine every question has already an answer on the web, that every problem could in theory be solved with enough information and connection.

Thinkers like Pierre Lévy call this the rise of “collective intelligence”: the idea that many minds connected through cyberspace can create new, shared forms of knowledge (Lévy, 1997)<ref>Lévy, P. (1997). ''Collective intelligence: Mankind’s emerging world in cyberspace'' (R. Bononno, Trans.). Perseus Books.</ref>. Yochai Benkler talks about “commons-based peer production”, where people collaborate online on projects like free software or Wikipedia instead of just passively consuming information (Benkler, 2006)<ref>Benkler, Y. (2006). ''The wealth of networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom''. Yale University Press.</ref>. A simple example of this dream is Wikipedia itself: an online encyclopedia that anyone can read and (almost) anyone can edit. It looks like the perfect symbol of the web as a universal library created “by everyone for everyone”.

At the same time, the web also gives individuals an unprecedented possibility to become visible. The existence of globally known celebrities, political figures, authors or scientists whose work you can follow directly online is proof that it is possible for a person, or a work of somebody, to be known worldwide. Social media accounts, personal websites, video channels or blogs amplify this feeling: the sense that, in principle, anyone could “publish a book in Babel<ref name=":0" />” and find an audience.

'''Social Media'''

Social media is one of the reasons for this form of “perfect connection” in our world today. It makes it possible to be up to date with the news, “new trends”, and interesting stuff happening around the world – by “interesting” is meant what people consider worthy of being trendy. Everyone processes all this, but they don’t experience most of it in their real life; instead it happens in their online life. People just perceive it on their screens, and sometimes they forget the feeling of that being reality and it becomes just another piece of news in their feed.

Social media also allows people to interact with people they would never have met without it. Usually it is because one ended up in the same community or the same “corner of the internet”. That already means more enhanced social interactions, where it's possible to skip getting to know each other beforehand, something that could be a little uncomfortable for some people. So, of course, social media is a crucial part of today's social lives of people.

Socialising is a very crucial part in the survival and development of humans as a species, so slowly one might say life is starting to sound impossible if the internet were not to exist. Some researchers even talk about “social media addiction”, when people feel they cannot disconnect without stress or fear of missing out<ref name=":2">Goldman, Bruce. 2021. “Addictive Potential of Social Media, Explained.” ''Stanford Medicine News Center'' (Insights), October 29, 2021. <nowiki>https://med.stanford.edu/news/insights/2021/10/addictive-potential-of-social-media-explained.html</nowiki></ref><ref>Kuss, D. J., & Griffiths, M. D. (2017). Social networking sites and addiction: Ten lessons learned. ''International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 14''(3), 311. <nowiki>https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph14030311</nowiki></ref>. This is why some authors describe the web and the cloud as central elements of the utopia of “perfect connection” and “perfect wisdom”, especially in the utopian families of “The Perfect Wisdom” and “The Perfect Social Order”. So this is another similarity to Borges’ story: fear can create dependency, and it is exactly this fear that makes people attracted to digital systems that promise to store and predict everything.

== Stage 3: Cyber-dystopia — The Fall of the Dream ==
''“The internet has gone “from cyber-utopia to cyber-war””'' (Schulze, 2018)<ref name=":1" />. What once looked like a space of free information and connection is now increasingly described in terms of conflict, manipulation and control.

The “social media addiction”<ref name=":2" /> that many people experience today is something that is being taken advantage of by those who hold more power. This dependence is built into the algorithms behind almost every form of content consumption. These systems are also used to influence or even manipulate people in their political beliefs, for example in the time before elections and political campaigns. Sometimes this manipulation goes as far as spreading fake news<ref name=":3">Jardine, Eric. 2019. “Beware Fake News.” Centre for International Governance Innovation. April 2, 2019. <nowiki>https://www.cigionline.org/articles/beware-fake-news/</nowiki></ref> in order to achieve a specific goal. All of this shows a way of using the internet that is not morally good. So does this still sound so utopian in the end?

This leads us to the next main similarity with the Library of Babel: the dystopia. We are entering an era of the internet where some people have developed a kind of paranoia about the content we receive. Some no longer believe the news at all, since it could be fake news <ref name=":3" />– just like in Babel, where a book could always give you the wrong information or “knowledge”. These methods of manipulation are becoming more and more creative, especially with the development of AI<ref>[[Artificial Intelligence (Cyberutopias)]]</ref>. This starts to look very similar to the world of “Big Brother”<ref>Orwell, George. 1949. 1984. London: Secker & Warburg.</ref> and the dystopia of surveillance<ref>[[Draft:Orwell's "1984"]]</ref>.

The kind of world that is slowly emerging here is not completely new: writers, filmmakers, game designers and graphic artists have already imagined similar realities in cyberpunk universes such as those of Gibson, Stephenson, “Blade Runner”, “Ghost in the Shell” or “Cyberpunk 2077” or even comics such as w0rldtr33.

=== Cyberpunk universes ===
In these cyberpunk worlds, the dream of perfect connection has already collapsed. Most of them show societies that are far more chaotic, violent and unstable than our own, which makes them feel close to us and at the same time uncomfortable to watch. We see how people have lost the war to false hope and try different ways to compensate for it: drugs, implants, hacking or escaping into virtual realities. High technology is still very idealised, but it no longer appears as a solution; it is just the background of everyday struggle.

For example, in ''Neuromancer'' by William Gibson and ''Snow Crash'' by Neal Stephenson, the network is everywhere, but it does not lead to a better or fairer world. Instead, huge corporations and powerful AI’s dominate cyberspace, while most people live in poverty or chaos. This is often summed up as “high tech, low life”: technology is extremely advanced, but everyday life is unstable and dangerous. Hacking becomes both a survival strategy and one of the biggest forms of threat.

Then we have worlds like ''Cyberpunk 2077'', ''Blade Runner'' or ''Ghost in the Shell'', where not only are people deeply connected with each other, but the whole city is full of cyberutopian technology. Holograms, neon advertisements, cameras and data streams make the urban space look like a physical version of the cloud instead of something that only exists on the screens. There is also the idea of humans having machine parts, which means the dependency on the digital world is not only mental but also physical, through cybernetic implants and prosthetics <ref>Cyberware. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberware</ref>.

In most of these stories the protagonists are fragile figures of hope. They try to resist or at least survive within systems (like the corporations in power) that are much bigger than them. Their attitude often fits Borges’ <ref name=":0" /> words: <blockquote>''If honor and wisdom and happiness are not for me, let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my place be in hell.''</blockquote>All of these cyberpunk universes are reflections of the bad parts of the internet utopia. They exaggerate tendencies that can already be noticed: dependence on the digital world, manipulation of power through information, growing surveillance and a constant focus on conflict and destruction. In Borges’ Library of Babel there are also groups who try to control meaning by deciding which books are valuable and which should be destroyed <ref name=":0" />. In a similar way, in both cyberpunk worlds and in our own cloud-based reality, different powerful figures fight to control what information we see, trust and remember.

=== Ethical reflections ===
Looking back from the cyberpunk worlds to our own, one can recognize softer versions of the same problems. Many people feel strangely alone or empty even though they are constantly “connected”. Some are very dependent on the dopamine they get from simple online social interactions, trying to make everything look perfect for “the post”. Even without direct manipulation from outside, people sometimes build a false identity just to receive the best possible feedback and attention from their online social network. Once this identity is created, it becomes harder to find the way back to your real self. After one bad event, or when the feedback suddenly changes, their whole world can feel like it is collapsing, because they started to believe this constructed image too much.

Beside this, there are also the so-called figures of power. Throughout someone’s time on the internet, they will encounter hundreds of advertisements a day, which are most likely personalised for them from the data collected while they are surfing or doom-scrolling<ref>Doomscrolling. <nowiki>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomscrolling</nowiki></ref> online. This is already an indirect form of being under surveillance: clicks, pauses and searches are constantly observed in order to predict what one might want next. What looks like “free content” is often a system designed to guide people's attention and behaviour in subtle ways.

In a more positive sense, the more massive data collection becomes, the more people begin to notice the system’s imperfections. Mistrust grows, and some users become more cautious about what they share and how they present themselves online. This can have a good effect: it may push people to focus more on their offline lives instead of losing themselves in a carefully curated “fake” world. However, for those whose social and emotional lives already depend heavily on the internet, this shift can also create stress and mental strain—especially when their online identity starts to feel more real, or more valuable, than their offline self. At the same time, these effects are often difficult to see from the outside: friends and family in “real life” might not notice how strongly someone is being shaped by online feedback loops. This creates an ethical challenge, because the signs of manipulation and harm may only become visible within the cloud itself—through patterns of attention, behaviour, and self-presentation.

In other words, the task is to defend the possibility of a real self and a shared public truth inside digital space, so that the promise of collective intelligence does not collapse into collective manipulation.

== Conclusion ==
So, did Borges pinpoint the modern world? In a way, yes. Not because he could predict digital technology but his highly intellectual assumptions and ideas of the Total Knowledge say a lot more for modern society than anticipated. Not only he predicted patterns of the digital world (which he couldn't even imagine would've existed) but also human behaviour patterns.

The Cloud reflects very well on the metaphor of the Library of Babel: where we try to find meaning and trust but could end up losing ourselves in between. This is how the internet first appeared as a cyberutopia: a promise of global connection, harmony, and collective intelligence. Yet the same structure also produces the opposite—overload, mistrust, manipulation, and the risk of losing ourselves between endless information and constant performance.

Because cyber-dystopias exaggerate these tendencies, they can function as warnings rather than just entertainment. They remind us to ask why we wanted this “perfect connection” in the first place. The idea of being able to share your unique self with the world, your life work and motivations will most likely be appreciated from somebody (or even more than somebody) at some place in the world. To remember that maybe one simple like on the digital world, means more for somebody out there than we actually think.

These are just little things to think about and remember that we don't have to be as predictable and fall for the traps set into our world now. If we lose ourselves through it we should fall back to the people we trust and choose reality over the endless library.

== References ==
<references />*''Use of AI: Grammar check, Quotes accuracy check, correct format of References, reminder of some plot details of Snow Crash.''

From Babel to the Cloud

2025-12-19T13:27:37Z

Violafejza: /* Stage 2: The Cloud — Modern Cyberutopia */

= The Rise and Fall of Cyberutopia =
== Introduction ==
Did Jorge Luis Borges, in his short story ''The Library of Babel''<ref name=":0">Borges, J. L. (1998). ''The Library of Babel'' (A. Hurley, Trans.). In J. L. Borges, Collected fictions (pp. 112–118).

Penguin. (Original work published 1941)</ref>, get inspired by the limits of his own society at the time which led him to idealise the future and put it in the metaphor of human behaviour? Or did he somehow anticipate how humans would be in today’s digital environments? This contribution is based on the idea that human desires – especially the desire for total knowledge and connection – might be more predictable than one might think. Borges’ imaginary library, in which he fantasises the idea where all possible books already exist, says a great deal about our present information society and about human intentions.

Today society is moving deeper into what can be called the age of cyberutopias<ref>[[Cyberutopia (preliminary)]]</ref>, which means, technological dreams of a perfectly connected and informed humanity. One example that immediately comes to mind is the evolution of the Internet or “the cloud”: an infrastructure where the traces of almost all human activities are stored, processed and presented back as “knowledge”.

This paper follows the metaphor “From Babel to the Cloud” in order to ask how the dream of universal information turns both into a utopia of perfect wisdom and into a dystopia of control, overload and inequality.

== Stage 1: Babel — The Dream of Total Connection ==
In this short story, ''the Library of Babel''<ref name=":0" /> represents a place where all possible information already exists (even though most of the books are total nonsense). The characters of the story were immediately fond of the idea and some of them put their whole life's work into searching for answers, everybody has different desires which leads people to act in ways where they're ready to risk everything just for some peace of mind. Some did succeed, but only in claiming that the library does in fact hold every book possible (which means every answer possible, even the way one dies). This only made people act more irrational and selfish, again as might be expected from many people.

So why does the idea of “knowing everything”, “having all the answers” manipulate humans so easily that they lose sense of their reality and their real self? Some might say it is because they are scared of the things they don't know, because they’re something they can't control.

Another interesting side of ''the Library of Babel''<ref name=":0" /> is that, depending on which point of view, it can be both a utopia or a dystopia.

* Utopia of total Information: we can be more cautious, intellectual, rational, etc.

In theory, a place like the Library could make people wiser. If every possible answer already exists somewhere, humans could avoid repeating the same mistakes over and over again…

* Dystopia of Despair: overflow of Information, chaos of emotions.

In practice, though, the characters in the story don’t become calmer or more reasonable…

This double face of the Library of Babel – as both a dream of total knowledge and a nightmare of confusion – is important for the whole idea of this cyberutopia.

Very similar promises and dangers appear again when one takes a look at the Internet and the modern ‘cloud’ as a kind of real-life universal library.

== Stage 2: The Cloud — Modern Cyberutopia ==
Slowly the fantasy of this story is starting to look more and more real in today's world, and that has started to happen since the invention of the internet. Instead of the infinite books in the library now there's billions of websites, social media posts and all the blueprints of humanity floating around for everybody's fast access. So all that can be perceived as a version of Babel.

When we focus on how the evolution of the internet went, we can notice the similarities between Borges’ Babel<ref name=":0" /> and the modern world. Authors in the field of the information society argue that our time is organised more and more around information flows and digital networks (Díaz-Nafría, 2014; Capurro, 2008).<ref>Díaz-Nafría, J. M. (2014). Ethics at the age of information. ''Systema, 2''(3), 43–52.</ref><ref>Capurro, R. (2008). Intercultural information ethics. In K. E. Himma & H. T. Tavani (Eds.), ''The handbook of information and computer ethics'' (pp. 639–665). Wiley.</ref>

'''The Servers'''

Starting on the physical matter: today's version of the Library itself. In reality the “cloud” is made of server farms, hard drives, cooling systems and cables, but in everyday life people hardly think about these buildings and machines. It feels like a weightless, invisible “cloud”: physical data centres are not actively in people's minds, the results just show up on screens, so the whole system appears like a library that is simply presented with open access.

'''The Web'''

Political scientists like Schulze (2018)<ref name=":1">Schulze, M. (2018). ''From cyber-utopia to cyber-war: Normative change in cyberspace'' (Doctoral dissertation, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Germany). <nowiki>https://doi.org/10.22032/DBT.35107</nowiki> revistas.pucsp.br</ref> have shown that the early discourse around the internet was strongly marked by cyber-utopian expectations. So now the web already holds most of the information “known to man”, which gives the feeling of total knowledge and puts it at the core of most of society today - The only main difference between this and Babel<ref name=":0" /> is that all of the information was created by people themselves and not from the idea of random character combinations. This is the “cyberutopian moment”: the belief that if almost everything is online and connected, then humanity is finally close to a kind of “perfect wisdom”. Imagine every question has already an answer on the web, that every problem could in theory be solved with enough information and connection.

Thinkers like Pierre Lévy call this the rise of “collective intelligence”: the idea that many minds connected through cyberspace can create new, shared forms of knowledge (Lévy, 1997)<ref>Lévy, P. (1997). ''Collective intelligence: Mankind’s emerging world in cyberspace'' (R. Bononno, Trans.). Perseus Books.</ref>. Yochai Benkler talks about “commons-based peer production”, where people collaborate online on projects like free software or Wikipedia instead of just passively consuming information (Benkler, 2006)<ref>Benkler, Y. (2006). ''The wealth of networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom''. Yale University Press.</ref>. A simple example of this dream is Wikipedia itself: an online encyclopedia that anyone can read and (almost) anyone can edit. It looks like the perfect symbol of the web as a universal library created “by everyone for everyone”.

At the same time, the web also gives individuals an unprecedented possibility to become visible. The existence of globally known celebrities, political figures, authors or scientists whose work you can follow directly online is proof that it is possible for a person, or a work of somebody, to be known worldwide. Social media accounts, personal websites, video channels or blogs amplify this feeling: the sense that, in principle, anyone could “publish a book in Babel” and find an audience.

'''Social Media'''

Social media is one of the reasons for this form of “perfect connection” in our world today. It makes it possible to be up to date with the news, “new trends”, and interesting stuff happening around the world – by “interesting” is meant what people consider worthy of being trendy. We process all this, but we don’t experience most of it in our real life; instead it happens in our online life. We just perceive it on our screens, and sometimes we forget the feeling of that being reality and it becomes just another piece of news in our feed.

Social media also allows people to interact with people they would never have met without it. Usually it is because one ended up in the same community or the same “corner of the internet”. That already means more enhanced social interactions, where it's possible to skip getting to know each other beforehand, something that could be a little uncomfortable for some people. So, of course, social media is a crucial part of today's social lives of people.

Socialising is a very crucial part in the survival and development of humans as a species, so slowly one might say life is starting to sound impossible if the internet were not to exist. Some researchers even talk about “social media addiction”, when people feel they cannot disconnect without stress or fear of missing out<ref name=":2">Goldman, Bruce. 2021. “Addictive Potential of Social Media, Explained.” ''Stanford Medicine News Center'' (Insights), October 29, 2021. <nowiki>https://med.stanford.edu/news/insights/2021/10/addictive-potential-of-social-media-explained.html</nowiki></ref><ref>Kuss, D. J., & Griffiths, M. D. (2017). Social networking sites and addiction: Ten lessons learned. ''International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 14''(3), 311. <nowiki>https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph14030311</nowiki></ref>. This is why some authors describe the web and the cloud as central elements of the utopia of “perfect connection” and “perfect wisdom”, especially in the utopian families of “The Perfect Wisdom” and “The Perfect Social Order”. So this is another similarity to Borges’ story: fear can create dependency, and it is exactly this fear that makes people attracted to digital systems that promise to store and predict everything.

== Stage 3: Cyber-dystopia — The Fall of the Dream ==
''“The internet has gone “from cyber-utopia to cyber-war””'' (Schulze, 2018)<ref name=":1" />. What once looked like a space of free information and connection is now increasingly described in terms of conflict, manipulation and control.

The “social media addiction”<ref name=":2" /> that many people experience today is something that is being taken advantage of by those who hold more power. This dependence is built into the algorithms behind almost every form of content consumption. These systems are also used to influence or even manipulate people in their political beliefs, for example in the time before elections and political campaigns. Sometimes this manipulation goes as far as spreading fake news<ref name=":3">Jardine, Eric. 2019. “Beware Fake News.” Centre for International Governance Innovation. April 2, 2019. <nowiki>https://www.cigionline.org/articles/beware-fake-news/</nowiki></ref> in order to achieve a specific goal. All of this shows a way of using the internet that is not morally good. So does this still sound so utopian in the end?

This leads us to the next main similarity with the Library of Babel: the dystopia. We are entering an era of the internet where some people have developed a kind of paranoia about the content we receive. Some no longer believe the news at all, since it could be fake news <ref name=":3" />– just like in Babel, where a book could always give you the wrong information or “knowledge”. These methods of manipulation are becoming more and more creative, especially with the development of AI<ref>[[Artificial Intelligence (Cyberutopias)]]</ref>. This starts to look very similar to the world of “Big Brother”<ref>Orwell, George. 1949. 1984. London: Secker & Warburg.</ref> and the dystopia of surveillance<ref>[[Draft:Orwell's "1984"]]</ref>.

The kind of world that is slowly emerging here is not completely new: writers, filmmakers, game designers and graphic artists have already imagined similar realities in cyberpunk universes such as those of Gibson, Stephenson, “Blade Runner”, “Ghost in the Shell” or “Cyberpunk 2077” or even comics such as w0rldtr33.

=== Cyberpunk universes ===
In these cyberpunk worlds, the dream of perfect connection has already collapsed. Most of them show societies that are far more chaotic, violent and unstable than our own, which makes them feel close to us and at the same time uncomfortable to watch. We see how people have lost the war to false hope and try different ways to compensate for it: drugs, implants, hacking or escaping into virtual realities. High technology is still very idealised, but it no longer appears as a solution; it is just the background of everyday struggle.

For example, in ''Neuromancer'' by William Gibson and ''Snow Crash'' by Neal Stephenson, the network is everywhere, but it does not lead to a better or fairer world. Instead, huge corporations and powerful AI’s dominate cyberspace, while most people live in poverty or chaos. This is often summed up as “high tech, low life”: technology is extremely advanced, but everyday life is unstable and dangerous. Hacking becomes both a survival strategy and one of the biggest forms of threat.

Then we have worlds like ''Cyberpunk 2077'', ''Blade Runner'' or ''Ghost in the Shell'', where not only are people deeply connected with each other, but the whole city is full of cyberutopian technology. Holograms, neon advertisements, cameras and data streams make the urban space look like a physical version of the cloud instead of something that only exists on the screens. There is also the idea of humans having machine parts, which means the dependency on the digital world is not only mental but also physical, through cybernetic implants and prosthetics <ref>Cyberware. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberware</ref>.

In most of these stories the protagonists are fragile figures of hope. They try to resist or at least survive within systems (like the corporations in power) that are much bigger than them. Their attitude often fits Borges’ <ref name=":0" /> words: <blockquote>''If honor and wisdom and happiness are not for me, let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my place be in hell.''</blockquote>All of these cyberpunk universes are reflections of the bad parts of the internet utopia. They exaggerate tendencies that can already be noticed: dependence on the digital world, manipulation of power through information, growing surveillance and a constant focus on conflict and destruction. In Borges’ Library of Babel there are also groups who try to control meaning by deciding which books are valuable and which should be destroyed <ref name=":0" />. In a similar way, in both cyberpunk worlds and in our own cloud-based reality, different powerful figures fight to control what information we see, trust and remember.

=== Ethical reflections ===
Looking back from the cyberpunk worlds to our own, one can recognize softer versions of the same problems. Many people feel strangely alone or empty even though they are constantly “connected”. Some are very dependent on the dopamine they get from simple online social interactions, trying to make everything look perfect for “the post”. Even without direct manipulation from outside, people sometimes build a false identity just to receive the best possible feedback and attention from their online social network. Once this identity is created, it becomes harder to find the way back to your real self. After one bad event, or when the feedback suddenly changes, their whole world can feel like it is collapsing, because they started to believe this constructed image too much.

Beside this, there are also the so-called figures of power. Throughout someone’s time on the internet, they will encounter hundreds of advertisements a day, which are most likely personalised for them from the data collected while they are surfing or doom-scrolling<ref>Doomscrolling. <nowiki>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomscrolling</nowiki></ref> online. This is already an indirect form of being under surveillance: clicks, pauses and searches are constantly observed in order to predict what one might want next. What looks like “free content” is often a system designed to guide people's attention and behaviour in subtle ways.

In a more positive sense, the more massive data collection becomes, the more people begin to notice the system’s imperfections. Mistrust grows, and some users become more cautious about what they share and how they present themselves online. This can have a good effect: it may push people to focus more on their offline lives instead of losing themselves in a carefully curated “fake” world. However, for those whose social and emotional lives already depend heavily on the internet, this shift can also create stress and mental strain—especially when their online identity starts to feel more real, or more valuable, than their offline self. At the same time, these effects are often difficult to see from the outside: friends and family in “real life” might not notice how strongly someone is being shaped by online feedback loops. This creates an ethical challenge, because the signs of manipulation and harm may only become visible within the cloud itself—through patterns of attention, behaviour, and self-presentation.

In other words, the task is to defend the possibility of a real self and a shared public truth inside digital space, so that the promise of collective intelligence does not collapse into collective manipulation.

== Conclusion ==
So, did Borges pinpoint the modern world? In a way, yes. Not because he could predict digital technology but his highly intellectual assumptions and ideas of the Total Knowledge say a lot more for modern society than anticipated. Not only he predicted patterns of the digital world (which he couldn't even imagine would've existed) but also human behaviour patterns.

The Cloud reflects very well on the metaphor of the Library of Babel: where we try to find meaning and trust but could end up losing ourselves in between. This is how the internet first appeared as a cyberutopia: a promise of global connection, harmony, and collective intelligence. Yet the same structure also produces the opposite—overload, mistrust, manipulation, and the risk of losing ourselves between endless information and constant performance.

Because cyber-dystopias exaggerate these tendencies, they can function as warnings rather than just entertainment. They remind us to ask why we wanted this “perfect connection” in the first place. The idea of being able to share your unique self with the world, your life work and motivations will most likely be appreciated from somebody (or even more than somebody) at some place in the world. To remember that maybe one simple like on the digital world, means more for somebody out there than we actually think.

These are just little things to think about and remember that we don't have to be as predictable and fall for the traps set into our world now. If we lose ourselves through it we should fall back to the people we trust and choose reality over the endless library.

== References ==
<references />*''Use of AI: Grammar check, Quotes accuracy check, correct format of References, reminder of some plot details of Snow Crash.''

From Babel to the Cloud

2025-12-19T13:27:01Z

Violafejza: /* Stage 2: The Cloud — Modern Cyberutopia */

= The Rise and Fall of Cyberutopia =
== Introduction ==
Did Jorge Luis Borges, in his short story ''The Library of Babel''<ref name=":0">Borges, J. L. (1998). ''The Library of Babel'' (A. Hurley, Trans.). In J. L. Borges, Collected fictions (pp. 112–118).

Penguin. (Original work published 1941)</ref>, get inspired by the limits of his own society at the time which led him to idealise the future and put it in the metaphor of human behaviour? Or did he somehow anticipate how humans would be in today’s digital environments? This contribution is based on the idea that human desires – especially the desire for total knowledge and connection – might be more predictable than one might think. Borges’ imaginary library, in which he fantasises the idea where all possible books already exist, says a great deal about our present information society and about human intentions.

Today society is moving deeper into what can be called the age of cyberutopias<ref>[[Cyberutopia (preliminary)]]</ref>, which means, technological dreams of a perfectly connected and informed humanity. One example that immediately comes to mind is the evolution of the Internet or “the cloud”: an infrastructure where the traces of almost all human activities are stored, processed and presented back as “knowledge”.

This paper follows the metaphor “From Babel to the Cloud” in order to ask how the dream of universal information turns both into a utopia of perfect wisdom and into a dystopia of control, overload and inequality.

== Stage 1: Babel — The Dream of Total Connection ==
In this short story, ''the Library of Babel''<ref name=":0" /> represents a place where all possible information already exists (even though most of the books are total nonsense). The characters of the story were immediately fond of the idea and some of them put their whole life's work into searching for answers, everybody has different desires which leads people to act in ways where they're ready to risk everything just for some peace of mind. Some did succeed, but only in claiming that the library does in fact hold every book possible (which means every answer possible, even the way one dies). This only made people act more irrational and selfish, again as might be expected from many people.

So why does the idea of “knowing everything”, “having all the answers” manipulate humans so easily that they lose sense of their reality and their real self? Some might say it is because they are scared of the things they don't know, because they’re something they can't control.

Another interesting side of ''the Library of Babel''<ref name=":0" /> is that, depending on which point of view, it can be both a utopia or a dystopia.

* Utopia of total Information: we can be more cautious, intellectual, rational, etc.

In theory, a place like the Library could make people wiser. If every possible answer already exists somewhere, humans could avoid repeating the same mistakes over and over again…

* Dystopia of Despair: overflow of Information, chaos of emotions.

In practice, though, the characters in the story don’t become calmer or more reasonable…

This double face of the Library of Babel – as both a dream of total knowledge and a nightmare of confusion – is important for the whole idea of this cyberutopia.

Very similar promises and dangers appear again when one takes a look at the Internet and the modern ‘cloud’ as a kind of real-life universal library.

== Stage 2: The Cloud — Modern Cyberutopia ==
Slowly the fantasy of this story is starting to look more and more real in today's world, and that has started to happen since the invention of the internet. Instead of the infinite books in the library now there's billions of websites, social media posts and all the blueprints of humanity floating around for everybody's fast access. So all that can be perceived as a version of Babel.

When we focus on how the evolution of the internet went, we can notice the similarities between Borges’ Babel<ref name=":0" /> and the modern world. Authors in the field of the information society argue that our time is organised more and more around information flows and digital networks (Díaz-Nafría, 2014; Capurro, 2008).<ref>Díaz-Nafría, J. M. (2014). Ethics at the age of information. ''Systema, 2''(3), 43–52.</ref><ref>Capurro, R. (2008). Intercultural information ethics. In K. E. Himma & H. T. Tavani (Eds.), ''The handbook of information and computer ethics'' (pp. 639–665). Wiley.</ref>

'''The Servers'''

Starting on the physical matter: today's version of the Library itself. In reality the “cloud” is made of server farms, hard drives, cooling systems and cables, but in everyday life people hardly think about these buildings and machines. It feels like a weightless, invisible “cloud”: physical data centres are not actively in people's minds, the results just show up on screens, so the whole system appears like a library that is simply presented with open access.

'''The Web'''

Political scientists like Schulze (2018)<ref name=":1">Schulze, M. (2018). ''From cyber-utopia to cyber-war: Normative change in cyberspace'' (Doctoral dissertation, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Germany). <nowiki>https://doi.org/10.22032/DBT.35107</nowiki> revistas.pucsp.br</ref> have shown that the early discourse around the internet was strongly marked by cyber-utopian expectations. So now the web already holds most of the information “known to man”, which gives the feeling of total knowledge and puts it at the core of most of society today (the only main difference between this and Babel<ref name=":0" /> is that all of the information was created by people themselves and not from the idea of random character combinations. This is the “cyberutopian moment”: the belief that if almost everything is online and connected, then humanity is finally close to a kind of “perfect wisdom”. Imagine every question has already an answer on the web, that every problem could in theory be solved with enough information and connection.

Thinkers like Pierre Lévy call this the rise of “collective intelligence”: the idea that many minds connected through cyberspace can create new, shared forms of knowledge (Lévy, 1997)<ref>Lévy, P. (1997). ''Collective intelligence: Mankind’s emerging world in cyberspace'' (R. Bononno, Trans.). Perseus Books.</ref>. Yochai Benkler talks about “commons-based peer production”, where people collaborate online on projects like free software or Wikipedia instead of just passively consuming information (Benkler, 2006)<ref>Benkler, Y. (2006). ''The wealth of networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom''. Yale University Press.</ref>. A simple example of this dream is Wikipedia itself: an online encyclopedia that anyone can read and (almost) anyone can edit. It looks like the perfect symbol of the web as a universal library created “by everyone for everyone”.

At the same time, the web also gives individuals an unprecedented possibility to become visible. The existence of globally known celebrities, political figures, authors or scientists whose work you can follow directly online is proof that it is possible for a person, or a work of somebody, to be known worldwide. Social media accounts, personal websites, video channels or blogs amplify this feeling: the sense that, in principle, anyone could “publish a book in Babel” and find an audience.

'''Social Media'''

Social media is one of the reasons for this form of “perfect connection” in our world today. It makes it possible to be up to date with the news, “new trends”, and interesting stuff happening around the world – by “interesting” is meant what people consider worthy of being trendy. We process all this, but we don’t experience most of it in our real life; instead it happens in our online life. We just perceive it on our screens, and sometimes we forget the feeling of that being reality and it becomes just another piece of news in our feed.

Social media also allows people to interact with people they would never have met without it. Usually it is because one ended up in the same community or the same “corner of the internet”. That already means more enhanced social interactions, where it's possible to skip getting to know each other beforehand, something that could be a little uncomfortable for some people. So, of course, social media is a crucial part of today's social lives of people.

Socialising is a very crucial part in the survival and development of humans as a species, so slowly one might say life is starting to sound impossible if the internet were not to exist. Some researchers even talk about “social media addiction”, when people feel they cannot disconnect without stress or fear of missing out<ref name=":2">Goldman, Bruce. 2021. “Addictive Potential of Social Media, Explained.” ''Stanford Medicine News Center'' (Insights), October 29, 2021. <nowiki>https://med.stanford.edu/news/insights/2021/10/addictive-potential-of-social-media-explained.html</nowiki></ref><ref>Kuss, D. J., & Griffiths, M. D. (2017). Social networking sites and addiction: Ten lessons learned. ''International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 14''(3), 311. <nowiki>https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph14030311</nowiki></ref>. This is why some authors describe the web and the cloud as central elements of the utopia of “perfect connection” and “perfect wisdom”, especially in the utopian families of “The Perfect Wisdom” and “The Perfect Social Order”. So this is another similarity to Borges’ story: fear can create dependency, and it is exactly this fear that makes people attracted to digital systems that promise to store and predict everything.

== Stage 3: Cyber-dystopia — The Fall of the Dream ==
''“The internet has gone “from cyber-utopia to cyber-war””'' (Schulze, 2018)<ref name=":1" />. What once looked like a space of free information and connection is now increasingly described in terms of conflict, manipulation and control.

The “social media addiction”<ref name=":2" /> that many people experience today is something that is being taken advantage of by those who hold more power. This dependence is built into the algorithms behind almost every form of content consumption. These systems are also used to influence or even manipulate people in their political beliefs, for example in the time before elections and political campaigns. Sometimes this manipulation goes as far as spreading fake news<ref name=":3">Jardine, Eric. 2019. “Beware Fake News.” Centre for International Governance Innovation. April 2, 2019. <nowiki>https://www.cigionline.org/articles/beware-fake-news/</nowiki></ref> in order to achieve a specific goal. All of this shows a way of using the internet that is not morally good. So does this still sound so utopian in the end?

This leads us to the next main similarity with the Library of Babel: the dystopia. We are entering an era of the internet where some people have developed a kind of paranoia about the content we receive. Some no longer believe the news at all, since it could be fake news <ref name=":3" />– just like in Babel, where a book could always give you the wrong information or “knowledge”. These methods of manipulation are becoming more and more creative, especially with the development of AI<ref>[[Artificial Intelligence (Cyberutopias)]]</ref>. This starts to look very similar to the world of “Big Brother”<ref>Orwell, George. 1949. 1984. London: Secker & Warburg.</ref> and the dystopia of surveillance<ref>[[Draft:Orwell's "1984"]]</ref>.

The kind of world that is slowly emerging here is not completely new: writers, filmmakers, game designers and graphic artists have already imagined similar realities in cyberpunk universes such as those of Gibson, Stephenson, “Blade Runner”, “Ghost in the Shell” or “Cyberpunk 2077” or even comics such as w0rldtr33.

=== Cyberpunk universes ===
In these cyberpunk worlds, the dream of perfect connection has already collapsed. Most of them show societies that are far more chaotic, violent and unstable than our own, which makes them feel close to us and at the same time uncomfortable to watch. We see how people have lost the war to false hope and try different ways to compensate for it: drugs, implants, hacking or escaping into virtual realities. High technology is still very idealised, but it no longer appears as a solution; it is just the background of everyday struggle.

For example, in ''Neuromancer'' by William Gibson and ''Snow Crash'' by Neal Stephenson, the network is everywhere, but it does not lead to a better or fairer world. Instead, huge corporations and powerful AI’s dominate cyberspace, while most people live in poverty or chaos. This is often summed up as “high tech, low life”: technology is extremely advanced, but everyday life is unstable and dangerous. Hacking becomes both a survival strategy and one of the biggest forms of threat.

Then we have worlds like ''Cyberpunk 2077'', ''Blade Runner'' or ''Ghost in the Shell'', where not only are people deeply connected with each other, but the whole city is full of cyberutopian technology. Holograms, neon advertisements, cameras and data streams make the urban space look like a physical version of the cloud instead of something that only exists on the screens. There is also the idea of humans having machine parts, which means the dependency on the digital world is not only mental but also physical, through cybernetic implants and prosthetics <ref>Cyberware. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberware</ref>.

In most of these stories the protagonists are fragile figures of hope. They try to resist or at least survive within systems (like the corporations in power) that are much bigger than them. Their attitude often fits Borges’ <ref name=":0" /> words: <blockquote>''If honor and wisdom and happiness are not for me, let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my place be in hell.''</blockquote>All of these cyberpunk universes are reflections of the bad parts of the internet utopia. They exaggerate tendencies that can already be noticed: dependence on the digital world, manipulation of power through information, growing surveillance and a constant focus on conflict and destruction. In Borges’ Library of Babel there are also groups who try to control meaning by deciding which books are valuable and which should be destroyed <ref name=":0" />. In a similar way, in both cyberpunk worlds and in our own cloud-based reality, different powerful figures fight to control what information we see, trust and remember.

=== Ethical reflections ===
Looking back from the cyberpunk worlds to our own, one can recognize softer versions of the same problems. Many people feel strangely alone or empty even though they are constantly “connected”. Some are very dependent on the dopamine they get from simple online social interactions, trying to make everything look perfect for “the post”. Even without direct manipulation from outside, people sometimes build a false identity just to receive the best possible feedback and attention from their online social network. Once this identity is created, it becomes harder to find the way back to your real self. After one bad event, or when the feedback suddenly changes, their whole world can feel like it is collapsing, because they started to believe this constructed image too much.

Beside this, there are also the so-called figures of power. Throughout someone’s time on the internet, they will encounter hundreds of advertisements a day, which are most likely personalised for them from the data collected while they are surfing or doom-scrolling<ref>Doomscrolling. <nowiki>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomscrolling</nowiki></ref> online. This is already an indirect form of being under surveillance: clicks, pauses and searches are constantly observed in order to predict what one might want next. What looks like “free content” is often a system designed to guide people's attention and behaviour in subtle ways.

In a more positive sense, the more massive data collection becomes, the more people begin to notice the system’s imperfections. Mistrust grows, and some users become more cautious about what they share and how they present themselves online. This can have a good effect: it may push people to focus more on their offline lives instead of losing themselves in a carefully curated “fake” world. However, for those whose social and emotional lives already depend heavily on the internet, this shift can also create stress and mental strain—especially when their online identity starts to feel more real, or more valuable, than their offline self. At the same time, these effects are often difficult to see from the outside: friends and family in “real life” might not notice how strongly someone is being shaped by online feedback loops. This creates an ethical challenge, because the signs of manipulation and harm may only become visible within the cloud itself—through patterns of attention, behaviour, and self-presentation.

In other words, the task is to defend the possibility of a real self and a shared public truth inside digital space, so that the promise of collective intelligence does not collapse into collective manipulation.

== Conclusion ==
So, did Borges pinpoint the modern world? In a way, yes. Not because he could predict digital technology but his highly intellectual assumptions and ideas of the Total Knowledge say a lot more for modern society than anticipated. Not only he predicted patterns of the digital world (which he couldn't even imagine would've existed) but also human behaviour patterns.

The Cloud reflects very well on the metaphor of the Library of Babel: where we try to find meaning and trust but could end up losing ourselves in between. This is how the internet first appeared as a cyberutopia: a promise of global connection, harmony, and collective intelligence. Yet the same structure also produces the opposite—overload, mistrust, manipulation, and the risk of losing ourselves between endless information and constant performance.

Because cyber-dystopias exaggerate these tendencies, they can function as warnings rather than just entertainment. They remind us to ask why we wanted this “perfect connection” in the first place. The idea of being able to share your unique self with the world, your life work and motivations will most likely be appreciated from somebody (or even more than somebody) at some place in the world. To remember that maybe one simple like on the digital world, means more for somebody out there than we actually think.

These are just little things to think about and remember that we don't have to be as predictable and fall for the traps set into our world now. If we lose ourselves through it we should fall back to the people we trust and choose reality over the endless library.

== References ==
<references />*''Use of AI: Grammar check, Quotes accuracy check, correct format of References, reminder of some plot details of Snow Crash.''

From Babel to the Cloud

2025-12-19T13:25:48Z

Violafejza: /* Stage 2: The Cloud — Modern Cyberutopia */

= The Rise and Fall of Cyberutopia =
== Introduction ==
Did Jorge Luis Borges, in his short story ''The Library of Babel''<ref name=":0">Borges, J. L. (1998). ''The Library of Babel'' (A. Hurley, Trans.). In J. L. Borges, Collected fictions (pp. 112–118).

Penguin. (Original work published 1941)</ref>, get inspired by the limits of his own society at the time which led him to idealise the future and put it in the metaphor of human behaviour? Or did he somehow anticipate how humans would be in today’s digital environments? This contribution is based on the idea that human desires – especially the desire for total knowledge and connection – might be more predictable than one might think. Borges’ imaginary library, in which he fantasises the idea where all possible books already exist, says a great deal about our present information society and about human intentions.

Today society is moving deeper into what can be called the age of cyberutopias<ref>[[Cyberutopia (preliminary)]]</ref>, which means, technological dreams of a perfectly connected and informed humanity. One example that immediately comes to mind is the evolution of the Internet or “the cloud”: an infrastructure where the traces of almost all human activities are stored, processed and presented back as “knowledge”.

This paper follows the metaphor “From Babel to the Cloud” in order to ask how the dream of universal information turns both into a utopia of perfect wisdom and into a dystopia of control, overload and inequality.

== Stage 1: Babel — The Dream of Total Connection ==
In this short story, ''the Library of Babel''<ref name=":0" /> represents a place where all possible information already exists (even though most of the books are total nonsense). The characters of the story were immediately fond of the idea and some of them put their whole life's work into searching for answers, everybody has different desires which leads people to act in ways where they're ready to risk everything just for some peace of mind. Some did succeed, but only in claiming that the library does in fact hold every book possible (which means every answer possible, even the way one dies). This only made people act more irrational and selfish, again as might be expected from many people.

So why does the idea of “knowing everything”, “having all the answers” manipulate humans so easily that they lose sense of their reality and their real self? Some might say it is because they are scared of the things they don't know, because they’re something they can't control.

Another interesting side of ''the Library of Babel''<ref name=":0" /> is that, depending on which point of view, it can be both a utopia or a dystopia.

* Utopia of total Information: we can be more cautious, intellectual, rational, etc.

In theory, a place like the Library could make people wiser. If every possible answer already exists somewhere, humans could avoid repeating the same mistakes over and over again…

* Dystopia of Despair: overflow of Information, chaos of emotions.

In practice, though, the characters in the story don’t become calmer or more reasonable…

This double face of the Library of Babel – as both a dream of total knowledge and a nightmare of confusion – is important for the whole idea of this cyberutopia.

Very similar promises and dangers appear again when one takes a look at the Internet and the modern ‘cloud’ as a kind of real-life universal library.

== Stage 2: The Cloud — Modern Cyberutopia ==
Slowly the fantasy of this story is starting to look more and more real in today's world, and that has started to happen since the invention of the internet. Instead of the infinite books in the library now there's billions of websites, social media posts and all the blueprints of humanity floating around for everybody's fast access. So all that can be perceived as a version of Babel.

When we focus on how the evolution of the internet went, we can notice the similarities between Borges’ Babel<ref name=":0" /> and the modern world. Authors in the field of the information society argue that our time is organised more and more around information flows and digital networks (Díaz-Nafría, 2014; Capurro, 2008).<ref>Díaz-Nafría, J. M. (2014). Ethics at the age of information. ''Systema, 2''(3), 43–52.</ref><ref>Capurro, R. (2008). Intercultural information ethics. In K. E. Himma & H. T. Tavani (Eds.), ''The handbook of information and computer ethics'' (pp. 639–665). Wiley.</ref>

'''The Servers'''

Starting on the physical matter: today's version of the Library itself. In reality the “cloud” is made of server farms, hard drives, cooling systems and cables, but in everyday life people hardly think about these buildings and machines. It feels like a weightless, invisible “cloud”: physical data centres are not actively in people's minds, the results just show up on screens, so the whole system appears like a library that is simply presented with open access.

'''The Web'''

Political scientists like Schulze (2018)<ref name=":1">Schulze, M. (2018). ''From cyber-utopia to cyber-war: Normative change in cyberspace'' (Doctoral dissertation, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Germany). <nowiki>https://doi.org/10.22032/DBT.35107</nowiki> revistas.pucsp.br</ref> have shown that the early discourse around the internet was strongly marked by cyber-utopian expectations. So now the web already holds most of the information “known to man”, which gives the feeling of total knowledge and puts it at the core of most of society today (the only main difference between this and Babel is that all of the information was created by people themselves and not from the idea of random character combinations. This is the “cyberutopian moment”: the belief that if almost everything is online and connected, then humanity is finally close to a kind of “perfect wisdom”. Imagine every question has already an answer on the web, that every problem could in theory be solved with enough information and connection.

Thinkers like Pierre Lévy call this the rise of “collective intelligence”: the idea that many minds connected through cyberspace can create new, shared forms of knowledge (Lévy, 1997)<ref>Lévy, P. (1997). ''Collective intelligence: Mankind’s emerging world in cyberspace'' (R. Bononno, Trans.). Perseus Books.</ref>. Yochai Benkler talks about “commons-based peer production”, where people collaborate online on projects like free software or Wikipedia instead of just passively consuming information (Benkler, 2006)<ref>Benkler, Y. (2006). ''The wealth of networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom''. Yale University Press.</ref>. A simple example of this dream is Wikipedia itself: an online encyclopedia that anyone can read and (almost) anyone can edit. It looks like the perfect symbol of the web as a universal library created “by everyone for everyone”.

At the same time, the web also gives individuals an unprecedented possibility to become visible. The existence of globally known celebrities, political figures, authors or scientists whose work you can follow directly online is proof that it is possible for a person, or a work of somebody, to be known worldwide. Social media accounts, personal websites, video channels or blogs amplify this feeling: the sense that, in principle, anyone could “publish a book in Babel” and find an audience.

'''Social Media'''

Social media is one of the reasons for this form of “perfect connection” in our world today. It makes it possible to be up to date with the news, “new trends”, and interesting stuff happening around the world – by “interesting” is meant what people consider worthy of being trendy. We process all this, but we don’t experience most of it in our real life; instead it happens in our online life. We just perceive it on our screens, and sometimes we forget the feeling of that being reality and it becomes just another piece of news in our feed.

Social media also allows people to interact with people they would never have met without it. Usually it is because one ended up in the same community or the same “corner of the internet”. That already means more enhanced social interactions, where it's possible to skip getting to know each other beforehand, something that could be a little uncomfortable for some people. So, of course, social media is a crucial part of today's social lives of people.

Socialising is a very crucial part in the survival and development of humans as a species, so slowly one might say life is starting to sound impossible if the internet were not to exist. Some researchers even talk about “social media addiction”, when people feel they cannot disconnect without stress or fear of missing out<ref name=":2">Goldman, Bruce. 2021. “Addictive Potential of Social Media, Explained.” ''Stanford Medicine News Center'' (Insights), October 29, 2021. <nowiki>https://med.stanford.edu/news/insights/2021/10/addictive-potential-of-social-media-explained.html</nowiki></ref><ref>Kuss, D. J., & Griffiths, M. D. (2017). Social networking sites and addiction: Ten lessons learned. ''International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 14''(3), 311. <nowiki>https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph14030311</nowiki></ref>. This is why some authors describe the web and the cloud as central elements of the utopia of “perfect connection” and “perfect wisdom”, especially in the utopian families of “The Perfect Wisdom” and “The Perfect Social Order”. So this is another similarity to Borges’ story: fear can create dependency, and it is exactly this fear that makes people attracted to digital systems that promise to store and predict everything.

== Stage 3: Cyber-dystopia — The Fall of the Dream ==
''“The internet has gone “from cyber-utopia to cyber-war””'' (Schulze, 2018)<ref name=":1" />. What once looked like a space of free information and connection is now increasingly described in terms of conflict, manipulation and control.

The “social media addiction”<ref name=":2" /> that many people experience today is something that is being taken advantage of by those who hold more power. This dependence is built into the algorithms behind almost every form of content consumption. These systems are also used to influence or even manipulate people in their political beliefs, for example in the time before elections and political campaigns. Sometimes this manipulation goes as far as spreading fake news<ref name=":3">Jardine, Eric. 2019. “Beware Fake News.” Centre for International Governance Innovation. April 2, 2019. <nowiki>https://www.cigionline.org/articles/beware-fake-news/</nowiki></ref> in order to achieve a specific goal. All of this shows a way of using the internet that is not morally good. So does this still sound so utopian in the end?

This leads us to the next main similarity with the Library of Babel: the dystopia. We are entering an era of the internet where some people have developed a kind of paranoia about the content we receive. Some no longer believe the news at all, since it could be fake news <ref name=":3" />– just like in Babel, where a book could always give you the wrong information or “knowledge”. These methods of manipulation are becoming more and more creative, especially with the development of AI<ref>[[Artificial Intelligence (Cyberutopias)]]</ref>. This starts to look very similar to the world of “Big Brother”<ref>Orwell, George. 1949. 1984. London: Secker & Warburg.</ref> and the dystopia of surveillance<ref>[[Draft:Orwell's "1984"]]</ref>.

The kind of world that is slowly emerging here is not completely new: writers, filmmakers, game designers and graphic artists have already imagined similar realities in cyberpunk universes such as those of Gibson, Stephenson, “Blade Runner”, “Ghost in the Shell” or “Cyberpunk 2077” or even comics such as w0rldtr33.

=== Cyberpunk universes ===
In these cyberpunk worlds, the dream of perfect connection has already collapsed. Most of them show societies that are far more chaotic, violent and unstable than our own, which makes them feel close to us and at the same time uncomfortable to watch. We see how people have lost the war to false hope and try different ways to compensate for it: drugs, implants, hacking or escaping into virtual realities. High technology is still very idealised, but it no longer appears as a solution; it is just the background of everyday struggle.

For example, in ''Neuromancer'' by William Gibson and ''Snow Crash'' by Neal Stephenson, the network is everywhere, but it does not lead to a better or fairer world. Instead, huge corporations and powerful AI’s dominate cyberspace, while most people live in poverty or chaos. This is often summed up as “high tech, low life”: technology is extremely advanced, but everyday life is unstable and dangerous. Hacking becomes both a survival strategy and one of the biggest forms of threat.

Then we have worlds like ''Cyberpunk 2077'', ''Blade Runner'' or ''Ghost in the Shell'', where not only are people deeply connected with each other, but the whole city is full of cyberutopian technology. Holograms, neon advertisements, cameras and data streams make the urban space look like a physical version of the cloud instead of something that only exists on the screens. There is also the idea of humans having machine parts, which means the dependency on the digital world is not only mental but also physical, through cybernetic implants and prosthetics <ref>Cyberware. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberware</ref>.

In most of these stories the protagonists are fragile figures of hope. They try to resist or at least survive within systems (like the corporations in power) that are much bigger than them. Their attitude often fits Borges’ <ref name=":0" /> words: <blockquote>''If honor and wisdom and happiness are not for me, let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my place be in hell.''</blockquote>All of these cyberpunk universes are reflections of the bad parts of the internet utopia. They exaggerate tendencies that can already be noticed: dependence on the digital world, manipulation of power through information, growing surveillance and a constant focus on conflict and destruction. In Borges’ Library of Babel there are also groups who try to control meaning by deciding which books are valuable and which should be destroyed <ref name=":0" />. In a similar way, in both cyberpunk worlds and in our own cloud-based reality, different powerful figures fight to control what information we see, trust and remember.

=== Ethical reflections ===
Looking back from the cyberpunk worlds to our own, one can recognize softer versions of the same problems. Many people feel strangely alone or empty even though they are constantly “connected”. Some are very dependent on the dopamine they get from simple online social interactions, trying to make everything look perfect for “the post”. Even without direct manipulation from outside, people sometimes build a false identity just to receive the best possible feedback and attention from their online social network. Once this identity is created, it becomes harder to find the way back to your real self. After one bad event, or when the feedback suddenly changes, their whole world can feel like it is collapsing, because they started to believe this constructed image too much.

Beside this, there are also the so-called figures of power. Throughout someone’s time on the internet, they will encounter hundreds of advertisements a day, which are most likely personalised for them from the data collected while they are surfing or doom-scrolling<ref>Doomscrolling. <nowiki>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomscrolling</nowiki></ref> online. This is already an indirect form of being under surveillance: clicks, pauses and searches are constantly observed in order to predict what one might want next. What looks like “free content” is often a system designed to guide people's attention and behaviour in subtle ways.

In a more positive sense, the more massive data collection becomes, the more people begin to notice the system’s imperfections. Mistrust grows, and some users become more cautious about what they share and how they present themselves online. This can have a good effect: it may push people to focus more on their offline lives instead of losing themselves in a carefully curated “fake” world. However, for those whose social and emotional lives already depend heavily on the internet, this shift can also create stress and mental strain—especially when their online identity starts to feel more real, or more valuable, than their offline self. At the same time, these effects are often difficult to see from the outside: friends and family in “real life” might not notice how strongly someone is being shaped by online feedback loops. This creates an ethical challenge, because the signs of manipulation and harm may only become visible within the cloud itself—through patterns of attention, behaviour, and self-presentation.

In other words, the task is to defend the possibility of a real self and a shared public truth inside digital space, so that the promise of collective intelligence does not collapse into collective manipulation.

== Conclusion ==
So, did Borges pinpoint the modern world? In a way, yes. Not because he could predict digital technology but his highly intellectual assumptions and ideas of the Total Knowledge say a lot more for modern society than anticipated. Not only he predicted patterns of the digital world (which he couldn't even imagine would've existed) but also human behaviour patterns.

The Cloud reflects very well on the metaphor of the Library of Babel: where we try to find meaning and trust but could end up losing ourselves in between. This is how the internet first appeared as a cyberutopia: a promise of global connection, harmony, and collective intelligence. Yet the same structure also produces the opposite—overload, mistrust, manipulation, and the risk of losing ourselves between endless information and constant performance.

Because cyber-dystopias exaggerate these tendencies, they can function as warnings rather than just entertainment. They remind us to ask why we wanted this “perfect connection” in the first place. The idea of being able to share your unique self with the world, your life work and motivations will most likely be appreciated from somebody (or even more than somebody) at some place in the world. To remember that maybe one simple like on the digital world, means more for somebody out there than we actually think.

These are just little things to think about and remember that we don't have to be as predictable and fall for the traps set into our world now. If we lose ourselves through it we should fall back to the people we trust and choose reality over the endless library.

== References ==
<references />*''Use of AI: Grammar check, Quotes accuracy check, correct format of References, reminder of some plot details of Snow Crash.''

From Babel to the Cloud

2025-12-19T13:23:20Z

Violafejza: /* Introduction */

= The Rise and Fall of Cyberutopia =
== Introduction ==
Did Jorge Luis Borges, in his short story ''The Library of Babel''<ref name=":0">Borges, J. L. (1998). ''The Library of Babel'' (A. Hurley, Trans.). In J. L. Borges, Collected fictions (pp. 112–118).

Penguin. (Original work published 1941)</ref>, get inspired by the limits of his own society at the time which led him to idealise the future and put it in the metaphor of human behaviour? Or did he somehow anticipate how humans would be in today’s digital environments? This contribution is based on the idea that human desires – especially the desire for total knowledge and connection – might be more predictable than one might think. Borges’ imaginary library, in which he fantasises the idea where all possible books already exist, says a great deal about our present information society and about human intentions.

Today society is moving deeper into what can be called the age of cyberutopias<ref>[[Cyberutopia (preliminary)]]</ref>, which means, technological dreams of a perfectly connected and informed humanity. One example that immediately comes to mind is the evolution of the Internet or “the cloud”: an infrastructure where the traces of almost all human activities are stored, processed and presented back as “knowledge”.

This paper follows the metaphor “From Babel to the Cloud” in order to ask how the dream of universal information turns both into a utopia of perfect wisdom and into a dystopia of control, overload and inequality.

== Stage 1: Babel — The Dream of Total Connection ==
In this short story, ''the Library of Babel''<ref name=":0" /> represents a place where all possible information already exists (even though most of the books are total nonsense). The characters of the story were immediately fond of the idea and some of them put their whole life's work into searching for answers, everybody has different desires which leads people to act in ways where they're ready to risk everything just for some peace of mind. Some did succeed, but only in claiming that the library does in fact hold every book possible (which means every answer possible, even the way one dies). This only made people act more irrational and selfish, again as might be expected from many people.

So why does the idea of “knowing everything”, “having all the answers” manipulate humans so easily that they lose sense of their reality and their real self? Some might say it is because they are scared of the things they don't know, because they’re something they can't control.

Another interesting side of ''the Library of Babel''<ref name=":0" /> is that, depending on which point of view, it can be both a utopia or a dystopia.

* Utopia of total Information: we can be more cautious, intellectual, rational, etc.

In theory, a place like the Library could make people wiser. If every possible answer already exists somewhere, humans could avoid repeating the same mistakes over and over again…

* Dystopia of Despair: overflow of Information, chaos of emotions.

In practice, though, the characters in the story don’t become calmer or more reasonable…

This double face of the Library of Babel – as both a dream of total knowledge and a nightmare of confusion – is important for the whole idea of this cyberutopia.

Very similar promises and dangers appear again when one takes a look at the Internet and the modern ‘cloud’ as a kind of real-life universal library.

== Stage 2: The Cloud — Modern Cyberutopia ==
Slowly the fantasy of this story is starting to look more and more real in today's world, and that has started to happen since the invention of the internet. Instead of the infinite books in the library now there's billions of websites, social media posts and all the blueprints of humanity floating around for everybody's fast access. So all that can be perceived as a version of Babel.

When we focus on how the evolution of the internet went, we can notice the similarities between Borges’ Babel and the modern world. Authors in the field of the information society argue that our time is organised more and more around information flows and digital networks (Díaz-Nafría, 2014; Capurro, 2008).<ref>Díaz-Nafría, J. M. (2014). Ethics at the age of information. ''Systema, 2''(3), 43–52.</ref><ref>Capurro, R. (2008). Intercultural information ethics. In K. E. Himma & H. T. Tavani (Eds.), ''The handbook of information and computer ethics'' (pp. 639–665). Wiley.</ref>

'''The Servers'''

Starting on the physical matter: today's version of the Library itself. In reality the “cloud” is made of server farms, hard drives, cooling systems and cables, but in everyday life people hardly think about these buildings and machines. It feels like a weightless, invisible “cloud”: physical data centres are not actively in people's minds, the results just show up on screens, so the whole system appears like a library that is simply presented with open access.

'''The Web'''

Political scientists like Schulze (2018)<ref name=":1">Schulze, M. (2018). ''From cyber-utopia to cyber-war: Normative change in cyberspace'' (Doctoral dissertation, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Germany). <nowiki>https://doi.org/10.22032/DBT.35107</nowiki> revistas.pucsp.br</ref> have shown that the early discourse around the internet was strongly marked by cyber-utopian expectations. So now the web already holds most of the information “known to man”, which gives the feeling of total knowledge and puts it at the core of most of society today (the only main difference between this and Babel is that all of the information was created by people themselves and not from the idea of random character combinations. This is the “cyberutopian moment”: the belief that if almost everything is online and connected, then humanity is finally close to a kind of “perfect wisdom”. Imagine every question has already an answer on the web, that every problem could in theory be solved with enough information and connection.

Thinkers like Pierre Lévy call this the rise of “collective intelligence”: the idea that many minds connected through cyberspace can create new, shared forms of knowledge (Lévy, 1997)<ref>Lévy, P. (1997). ''Collective intelligence: Mankind’s emerging world in cyberspace'' (R. Bononno, Trans.). Perseus Books.</ref>. Yochai Benkler talks about “commons-based peer production”, where people collaborate online on projects like free software or Wikipedia instead of just passively consuming information (Benkler, 2006)<ref>Benkler, Y. (2006). ''The wealth of networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom''. Yale University Press.</ref>. A simple example of this dream is Wikipedia itself: an online encyclopedia that anyone can read and (almost) anyone can edit. It looks like the perfect symbol of the web as a universal library created “by everyone for everyone”.

At the same time, the web also gives individuals an unprecedented possibility to become visible. The existence of globally known celebrities, political figures, authors or scientists whose work you can follow directly online is proof that it is possible for a person, or a work of somebody, to be known worldwide. Social media accounts, personal websites, video channels or blogs amplify this feeling: the sense that, in principle, anyone could “publish a book in Babel” and find an audience.

'''Social Media'''

Social media is one of the reasons for this form of “perfect connection” in our world today. It makes it possible to be up to date with the news, “new trends”, and interesting stuff happening around the world – by “interesting” is meant what people consider worthy of being trendy. We process all this, but we don’t experience most of it in our real life; instead it happens in our online life. We just perceive it on our screens, and sometimes we forget the feeling of that being reality and it becomes just another piece of news in our feed.

Social media also allows people to interact with people they would never have met without it. Usually it is because one ended up in the same community or the same “corner of the internet”. That already means more enhanced social interactions, where it's possible to skip getting to know each other beforehand, something that could be a little uncomfortable for some people. So, of course, social media is a crucial part of today's social lives of people.

Socialising is a very crucial part in the survival and development of humans as a species, so slowly one might say life is starting to sound impossible if the internet were not to exist. Some researchers even talk about “social media addiction”, when people feel they cannot disconnect without stress or fear of missing out<ref name=":2">Goldman, Bruce. 2021. “Addictive Potential of Social Media, Explained.” ''Stanford Medicine News Center'' (Insights), October 29, 2021. <nowiki>https://med.stanford.edu/news/insights/2021/10/addictive-potential-of-social-media-explained.html</nowiki></ref><ref>Kuss, D. J., & Griffiths, M. D. (2017). Social networking sites and addiction: Ten lessons learned. ''International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 14''(3), 311. <nowiki>https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph14030311</nowiki></ref>. This is why some authors describe the web and the cloud as central elements of the utopia of “perfect connection” and “perfect wisdom”, especially in the utopian families of “The Perfect Wisdom” and “The Perfect Social Order”. So this is another similarity to Borges’ story: fear can create dependency, and it is exactly this fear that makes people attracted to digital systems that promise to store and predict everything.

== Stage 3: Cyber-dystopia — The Fall of the Dream ==
''“The internet has gone “from cyber-utopia to cyber-war””'' (Schulze, 2018)<ref name=":1" />. What once looked like a space of free information and connection is now increasingly described in terms of conflict, manipulation and control.

The “social media addiction”<ref name=":2" /> that many people experience today is something that is being taken advantage of by those who hold more power. This dependence is built into the algorithms behind almost every form of content consumption. These systems are also used to influence or even manipulate people in their political beliefs, for example in the time before elections and political campaigns. Sometimes this manipulation goes as far as spreading fake news<ref name=":3">Jardine, Eric. 2019. “Beware Fake News.” Centre for International Governance Innovation. April 2, 2019. <nowiki>https://www.cigionline.org/articles/beware-fake-news/</nowiki></ref> in order to achieve a specific goal. All of this shows a way of using the internet that is not morally good. So does this still sound so utopian in the end?

This leads us to the next main similarity with the Library of Babel: the dystopia. We are entering an era of the internet where some people have developed a kind of paranoia about the content we receive. Some no longer believe the news at all, since it could be fake news <ref name=":3" />– just like in Babel, where a book could always give you the wrong information or “knowledge”. These methods of manipulation are becoming more and more creative, especially with the development of AI<ref>[[Artificial Intelligence (Cyberutopias)]]</ref>. This starts to look very similar to the world of “Big Brother”<ref>Orwell, George. 1949. 1984. London: Secker & Warburg.</ref> and the dystopia of surveillance<ref>[[Draft:Orwell's "1984"]]</ref>.

The kind of world that is slowly emerging here is not completely new: writers, filmmakers, game designers and graphic artists have already imagined similar realities in cyberpunk universes such as those of Gibson, Stephenson, “Blade Runner”, “Ghost in the Shell” or “Cyberpunk 2077” or even comics such as w0rldtr33.

=== Cyberpunk universes ===
In these cyberpunk worlds, the dream of perfect connection has already collapsed. Most of them show societies that are far more chaotic, violent and unstable than our own, which makes them feel close to us and at the same time uncomfortable to watch. We see how people have lost the war to false hope and try different ways to compensate for it: drugs, implants, hacking or escaping into virtual realities. High technology is still very idealised, but it no longer appears as a solution; it is just the background of everyday struggle.

For example, in ''Neuromancer'' by William Gibson and ''Snow Crash'' by Neal Stephenson, the network is everywhere, but it does not lead to a better or fairer world. Instead, huge corporations and powerful AI’s dominate cyberspace, while most people live in poverty or chaos. This is often summed up as “high tech, low life”: technology is extremely advanced, but everyday life is unstable and dangerous. Hacking becomes both a survival strategy and one of the biggest forms of threat.

Then we have worlds like ''Cyberpunk 2077'', ''Blade Runner'' or ''Ghost in the Shell'', where not only are people deeply connected with each other, but the whole city is full of cyberutopian technology. Holograms, neon advertisements, cameras and data streams make the urban space look like a physical version of the cloud instead of something that only exists on the screens. There is also the idea of humans having machine parts, which means the dependency on the digital world is not only mental but also physical, through cybernetic implants and prosthetics <ref>Cyberware. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberware</ref>.

In most of these stories the protagonists are fragile figures of hope. They try to resist or at least survive within systems (like the corporations in power) that are much bigger than them. Their attitude often fits Borges’ <ref name=":0" /> words: <blockquote>''If honor and wisdom and happiness are not for me, let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my place be in hell.''</blockquote>All of these cyberpunk universes are reflections of the bad parts of the internet utopia. They exaggerate tendencies that can already be noticed: dependence on the digital world, manipulation of power through information, growing surveillance and a constant focus on conflict and destruction. In Borges’ Library of Babel there are also groups who try to control meaning by deciding which books are valuable and which should be destroyed <ref name=":0" />. In a similar way, in both cyberpunk worlds and in our own cloud-based reality, different powerful figures fight to control what information we see, trust and remember.

=== Ethical reflections ===
Looking back from the cyberpunk worlds to our own, one can recognize softer versions of the same problems. Many people feel strangely alone or empty even though they are constantly “connected”. Some are very dependent on the dopamine they get from simple online social interactions, trying to make everything look perfect for “the post”. Even without direct manipulation from outside, people sometimes build a false identity just to receive the best possible feedback and attention from their online social network. Once this identity is created, it becomes harder to find the way back to your real self. After one bad event, or when the feedback suddenly changes, their whole world can feel like it is collapsing, because they started to believe this constructed image too much.

Beside this, there are also the so-called figures of power. Throughout someone’s time on the internet, they will encounter hundreds of advertisements a day, which are most likely personalised for them from the data collected while they are surfing or doom-scrolling<ref>Doomscrolling. <nowiki>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomscrolling</nowiki></ref> online. This is already an indirect form of being under surveillance: clicks, pauses and searches are constantly observed in order to predict what one might want next. What looks like “free content” is often a system designed to guide people's attention and behaviour in subtle ways.

In a more positive sense, the more massive data collection becomes, the more people begin to notice the system’s imperfections. Mistrust grows, and some users become more cautious about what they share and how they present themselves online. This can have a good effect: it may push people to focus more on their offline lives instead of losing themselves in a carefully curated “fake” world. However, for those whose social and emotional lives already depend heavily on the internet, this shift can also create stress and mental strain—especially when their online identity starts to feel more real, or more valuable, than their offline self. At the same time, these effects are often difficult to see from the outside: friends and family in “real life” might not notice how strongly someone is being shaped by online feedback loops. This creates an ethical challenge, because the signs of manipulation and harm may only become visible within the cloud itself—through patterns of attention, behaviour, and self-presentation.

In other words, the task is to defend the possibility of a real self and a shared public truth inside digital space, so that the promise of collective intelligence does not collapse into collective manipulation.

== Conclusion ==
So, did Borges pinpoint the modern world? In a way, yes. Not because he could predict digital technology but his highly intellectual assumptions and ideas of the Total Knowledge say a lot more for modern society than anticipated. Not only he predicted patterns of the digital world (which he couldn't even imagine would've existed) but also human behaviour patterns.

The Cloud reflects very well on the metaphor of the Library of Babel: where we try to find meaning and trust but could end up losing ourselves in between. This is how the internet first appeared as a cyberutopia: a promise of global connection, harmony, and collective intelligence. Yet the same structure also produces the opposite—overload, mistrust, manipulation, and the risk of losing ourselves between endless information and constant performance.

Because cyber-dystopias exaggerate these tendencies, they can function as warnings rather than just entertainment. They remind us to ask why we wanted this “perfect connection” in the first place. The idea of being able to share your unique self with the world, your life work and motivations will most likely be appreciated from somebody (or even more than somebody) at some place in the world. To remember that maybe one simple like on the digital world, means more for somebody out there than we actually think.

These are just little things to think about and remember that we don't have to be as predictable and fall for the traps set into our world now. If we lose ourselves through it we should fall back to the people we trust and choose reality over the endless library.

== References ==
<references />*''Use of AI: Grammar check, Quotes accuracy check, correct format of References, reminder of some plot details of Snow Crash.''

From Babel to the Cloud

2025-12-19T13:21:45Z

Violafejza: /* Stage 3: Cyber-dystopia — The Fall of the Dream */

= The Rise and Fall of Cyberutopia =
== Introduction ==
Did Jorge Luis Borges, in his short story ''The Library of Babel''<ref name=":0">Borges, J. L. (1998). ''The Library of Babel'' (A. Hurley, Trans.). In J. L. Borges, Collected fictions (pp. 112–118).

Penguin. (Original work published 1941)</ref>, get inspired by the limits of his own society at the time which led him to idealise the future and put it in the metaphor of human behaviour? Or did he somehow anticipate how humans would be in today’s digital environments? This contribution is based on the idea that human desires – especially the desire for total knowledge and connection – might be more predictable than one might think. Borges’ imaginary library, in which he fantasises the idea where all possible books already exist, says a great deal about our present information society and about human intentions.

Today society is moving deeper into what can be called the age of cyberutopias<ref>[[Cyberutopia (preliminary)]]</ref>, which means, technological dreams of a perfectly connected and informed humanity. One example that immediately comes to mind is the evolution of the Internet or “the cloud”: an infrastructure where the traces of almost all human activities are stored, processed and presented back as “knowledge”.

This paper follows the metaphor “From Babel to the Cloud” in order to ask how the dream of universal information turns both into a utopia of perfect wisdom and into a dystopia of control, overload and inequality.

== Stage 1: Babel — The Dream of Total Connection ==
In this short story, ''the Library of Babel''<ref name=":0" /> represents a place where all possible information already exists (even though most of the books are total nonsense). The characters of the story were immediately fond of the idea and some of them put their whole life's work into searching for answers, everybody has different desires which leads people to act in ways where they're ready to risk everything just for some peace of mind. Some did succeed, but only in claiming that the library does in fact hold every book possible (which means every answer possible, even the way one dies). This only made people act more irrational and selfish, again as might be expected from many people.

So why does the idea of “knowing everything”, “having all the answers” manipulate humans so easily that they lose sense of their reality and their real self? Some might say it is because they are scared of the things they don't know, because they’re something they can't control.

Another interesting side of ''the Library of Babel''<ref name=":0" /> is that, depending on which point of view, it can be both a utopia or a dystopia.

* Utopia of total Information: we can be more cautious, intellectual, rational, etc.

In theory, a place like the Library could make people wiser. If every possible answer already exists somewhere, humans could avoid repeating the same mistakes over and over again…

* Dystopia of Despair: overflow of Information, chaos of emotions.

In practice, though, the characters in the story don’t become calmer or more reasonable…

This double face of the Library of Babel – as both a dream of total knowledge and a nightmare of confusion – is important for the whole idea of this cyberutopia.

Very similar promises and dangers appear again when one takes a look at the Internet and the modern ‘cloud’ as a kind of real-life universal library.

== Stage 2: The Cloud — Modern Cyberutopia ==
Slowly the fantasy of this story is starting to look more and more real in today's world, and that has started to happen since the invention of the internet. Instead of the infinite books in the library now there's billions of websites, social media posts and all the blueprints of humanity floating around for everybody's fast access. So all that can be perceived as a version of Babel.

When we focus on how the evolution of the internet went, we can notice the similarities between Borges’ Babel and the modern world. Authors in the field of the information society argue that our time is organised more and more around information flows and digital networks (Díaz-Nafría, 2014; Capurro, 2008).<ref>Díaz-Nafría, J. M. (2014). Ethics at the age of information. ''Systema, 2''(3), 43–52.</ref><ref>Capurro, R. (2008). Intercultural information ethics. In K. E. Himma & H. T. Tavani (Eds.), ''The handbook of information and computer ethics'' (pp. 639–665). Wiley.</ref>

'''The Servers'''

Starting on the physical matter: today's version of the Library itself. In reality the “cloud” is made of server farms, hard drives, cooling systems and cables, but in everyday life people hardly think about these buildings and machines. It feels like a weightless, invisible “cloud”: physical data centres are not actively in people's minds, the results just show up on screens, so the whole system appears like a library that is simply presented with open access.

'''The Web'''

Political scientists like Schulze (2018)<ref name=":1">Schulze, M. (2018). ''From cyber-utopia to cyber-war: Normative change in cyberspace'' (Doctoral dissertation, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Germany). <nowiki>https://doi.org/10.22032/DBT.35107</nowiki> revistas.pucsp.br</ref> have shown that the early discourse around the internet was strongly marked by cyber-utopian expectations. So now the web already holds most of the information “known to man”, which gives the feeling of total knowledge and puts it at the core of most of society today (the only main difference between this and Babel is that all of the information was created by people themselves and not from the idea of random character combinations. This is the “cyberutopian moment”: the belief that if almost everything is online and connected, then humanity is finally close to a kind of “perfect wisdom”. Imagine every question has already an answer on the web, that every problem could in theory be solved with enough information and connection.

Thinkers like Pierre Lévy call this the rise of “collective intelligence”: the idea that many minds connected through cyberspace can create new, shared forms of knowledge (Lévy, 1997)<ref>Lévy, P. (1997). ''Collective intelligence: Mankind’s emerging world in cyberspace'' (R. Bononno, Trans.). Perseus Books.</ref>. Yochai Benkler talks about “commons-based peer production”, where people collaborate online on projects like free software or Wikipedia instead of just passively consuming information (Benkler, 2006)<ref>Benkler, Y. (2006). ''The wealth of networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom''. Yale University Press.</ref>. A simple example of this dream is Wikipedia itself: an online encyclopedia that anyone can read and (almost) anyone can edit. It looks like the perfect symbol of the web as a universal library created “by everyone for everyone”.

At the same time, the web also gives individuals an unprecedented possibility to become visible. The existence of globally known celebrities, political figures, authors or scientists whose work you can follow directly online is proof that it is possible for a person, or a work of somebody, to be known worldwide. Social media accounts, personal websites, video channels or blogs amplify this feeling: the sense that, in principle, anyone could “publish a book in Babel” and find an audience.

'''Social Media'''

Social media is one of the reasons for this form of “perfect connection” in our world today. It makes it possible to be up to date with the news, “new trends”, and interesting stuff happening around the world – by “interesting” is meant what people consider worthy of being trendy. We process all this, but we don’t experience most of it in our real life; instead it happens in our online life. We just perceive it on our screens, and sometimes we forget the feeling of that being reality and it becomes just another piece of news in our feed.

Social media also allows people to interact with people they would never have met without it. Usually it is because one ended up in the same community or the same “corner of the internet”. That already means more enhanced social interactions, where it's possible to skip getting to know each other beforehand, something that could be a little uncomfortable for some people. So, of course, social media is a crucial part of today's social lives of people.

Socialising is a very crucial part in the survival and development of humans as a species, so slowly one might say life is starting to sound impossible if the internet were not to exist. Some researchers even talk about “social media addiction”, when people feel they cannot disconnect without stress or fear of missing out<ref name=":2">Goldman, Bruce. 2021. “Addictive Potential of Social Media, Explained.” ''Stanford Medicine News Center'' (Insights), October 29, 2021. <nowiki>https://med.stanford.edu/news/insights/2021/10/addictive-potential-of-social-media-explained.html</nowiki></ref><ref>Kuss, D. J., & Griffiths, M. D. (2017). Social networking sites and addiction: Ten lessons learned. ''International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 14''(3), 311. <nowiki>https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph14030311</nowiki></ref>. This is why some authors describe the web and the cloud as central elements of the utopia of “perfect connection” and “perfect wisdom”, especially in the utopian families of “The Perfect Wisdom” and “The Perfect Social Order”. So this is another similarity to Borges’ story: fear can create dependency, and it is exactly this fear that makes people attracted to digital systems that promise to store and predict everything.

== Stage 3: Cyber-dystopia — The Fall of the Dream ==
''“The internet has gone “from cyber-utopia to cyber-war””'' (Schulze, 2018)<ref name=":1" />. What once looked like a space of free information and connection is now increasingly described in terms of conflict, manipulation and control.

The “social media addiction”<ref name=":2" /> that many people experience today is something that is being taken advantage of by those who hold more power. This dependence is built into the algorithms behind almost every form of content consumption. These systems are also used to influence or even manipulate people in their political beliefs, for example in the time before elections and political campaigns. Sometimes this manipulation goes as far as spreading fake news<ref name=":3">Jardine, Eric. 2019. “Beware Fake News.” Centre for International Governance Innovation. April 2, 2019. <nowiki>https://www.cigionline.org/articles/beware-fake-news/</nowiki></ref> in order to achieve a specific goal. All of this shows a way of using the internet that is not morally good. So does this still sound so utopian in the end?

This leads us to the next main similarity with the Library of Babel: the dystopia. We are entering an era of the internet where some people have developed a kind of paranoia about the content we receive. Some no longer believe the news at all, since it could be fake news <ref name=":3" />– just like in Babel, where a book could always give you the wrong information or “knowledge”. These methods of manipulation are becoming more and more creative, especially with the development of AI<ref>[[Artificial Intelligence (Cyberutopias)]]</ref>. This starts to look very similar to the world of “Big Brother”<ref>Orwell, George. 1949. 1984. London: Secker & Warburg.</ref> and the dystopia of surveillance<ref>[[Draft:Orwell's "1984"]]</ref>.

The kind of world that is slowly emerging here is not completely new: writers, filmmakers, game designers and graphic artists have already imagined similar realities in cyberpunk universes such as those of Gibson, Stephenson, “Blade Runner”, “Ghost in the Shell” or “Cyberpunk 2077” or even comics such as w0rldtr33.

=== Cyberpunk universes ===
In these cyberpunk worlds, the dream of perfect connection has already collapsed. Most of them show societies that are far more chaotic, violent and unstable than our own, which makes them feel close to us and at the same time uncomfortable to watch. We see how people have lost the war to false hope and try different ways to compensate for it: drugs, implants, hacking or escaping into virtual realities. High technology is still very idealised, but it no longer appears as a solution; it is just the background of everyday struggle.

For example, in ''Neuromancer'' by William Gibson and ''Snow Crash'' by Neal Stephenson, the network is everywhere, but it does not lead to a better or fairer world. Instead, huge corporations and powerful AI’s dominate cyberspace, while most people live in poverty or chaos. This is often summed up as “high tech, low life”: technology is extremely advanced, but everyday life is unstable and dangerous. Hacking becomes both a survival strategy and one of the biggest forms of threat.

Then we have worlds like ''Cyberpunk 2077'', ''Blade Runner'' or ''Ghost in the Shell'', where not only are people deeply connected with each other, but the whole city is full of cyberutopian technology. Holograms, neon advertisements, cameras and data streams make the urban space look like a physical version of the cloud instead of something that only exists on the screens. There is also the idea of humans having machine parts, which means the dependency on the digital world is not only mental but also physical, through cybernetic implants and prosthetics <ref>Cyberware. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberware</ref>.

In most of these stories the protagonists are fragile figures of hope. They try to resist or at least survive within systems (like the corporations in power) that are much bigger than them. Their attitude often fits Borges’ <ref name=":0" /> words: <blockquote>''If honor and wisdom and happiness are not for me, let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my place be in hell.''</blockquote>All of these cyberpunk universes are reflections of the bad parts of the internet utopia. They exaggerate tendencies that can already be noticed: dependence on the digital world, manipulation of power through information, growing surveillance and a constant focus on conflict and destruction. In Borges’ Library of Babel there are also groups who try to control meaning by deciding which books are valuable and which should be destroyed <ref name=":0" />. In a similar way, in both cyberpunk worlds and in our own cloud-based reality, different powerful figures fight to control what information we see, trust and remember.

=== Ethical reflections ===
Looking back from the cyberpunk worlds to our own, one can recognize softer versions of the same problems. Many people feel strangely alone or empty even though they are constantly “connected”. Some are very dependent on the dopamine they get from simple online social interactions, trying to make everything look perfect for “the post”. Even without direct manipulation from outside, people sometimes build a false identity just to receive the best possible feedback and attention from their online social network. Once this identity is created, it becomes harder to find the way back to your real self. After one bad event, or when the feedback suddenly changes, their whole world can feel like it is collapsing, because they started to believe this constructed image too much.

Beside this, there are also the so-called figures of power. Throughout someone’s time on the internet, they will encounter hundreds of advertisements a day, which are most likely personalised for them from the data collected while they are surfing or doom-scrolling<ref>Doomscrolling. <nowiki>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomscrolling</nowiki></ref> online. This is already an indirect form of being under surveillance: clicks, pauses and searches are constantly observed in order to predict what one might want next. What looks like “free content” is often a system designed to guide people's attention and behaviour in subtle ways.

In a more positive sense, the more massive data collection becomes, the more people begin to notice the system’s imperfections. Mistrust grows, and some users become more cautious about what they share and how they present themselves online. This can have a good effect: it may push people to focus more on their offline lives instead of losing themselves in a carefully curated “fake” world. However, for those whose social and emotional lives already depend heavily on the internet, this shift can also create stress and mental strain—especially when their online identity starts to feel more real, or more valuable, than their offline self. At the same time, these effects are often difficult to see from the outside: friends and family in “real life” might not notice how strongly someone is being shaped by online feedback loops. This creates an ethical challenge, because the signs of manipulation and harm may only become visible within the cloud itself—through patterns of attention, behaviour, and self-presentation.

In other words, the task is to defend the possibility of a real self and a shared public truth inside digital space, so that the promise of collective intelligence does not collapse into collective manipulation.

== Conclusion ==
So, did Borges pinpoint the modern world? In a way, yes. Not because he could predict digital technology but his highly intellectual assumptions and ideas of the Total Knowledge say a lot more for modern society than anticipated. Not only he predicted patterns of the digital world (which he couldn't even imagine would've existed) but also human behaviour patterns.

The Cloud reflects very well on the metaphor of the Library of Babel: where we try to find meaning and trust but could end up losing ourselves in between. This is how the internet first appeared as a cyberutopia: a promise of global connection, harmony, and collective intelligence. Yet the same structure also produces the opposite—overload, mistrust, manipulation, and the risk of losing ourselves between endless information and constant performance.

Because cyber-dystopias exaggerate these tendencies, they can function as warnings rather than just entertainment. They remind us to ask why we wanted this “perfect connection” in the first place. The idea of being able to share your unique self with the world, your life work and motivations will most likely be appreciated from somebody (or even more than somebody) at some place in the world. To remember that maybe one simple like on the digital world, means more for somebody out there than we actually think.

These are just little things to think about and remember that we don't have to be as predictable and fall for the traps set into our world now. If we lose ourselves through it we should fall back to the people we trust and choose reality over the endless library.

== References ==
<references />*''Use of AI: Grammar check, Quotes accuracy check, correct format of References, reminder of some plot details of Snow Crash.''

From Babel to the Cloud

2025-12-19T13:08:44Z

Violafejza: Cites

= The Rise and Fall of Cyberutopia =
== Introduction ==
Did Jorge Luis Borges, in his short story ''The Library of Babel''<ref name=":0">Borges, J. L. (1998). ''The Library of Babel'' (A. Hurley, Trans.). In J. L. Borges, Collected fictions (pp. 112–118).

Penguin. (Original work published 1941)</ref>, get inspired by the limits of his own society at the time which led him to idealise the future and put it in the metaphor of human behaviour? Or did he somehow anticipate how humans would be in today’s digital environments? This contribution is based on the idea that human desires – especially the desire for total knowledge and connection – might be more predictable than one might think. Borges’ imaginary library, in which he fantasises the idea where all possible books already exist, says a great deal about our present information society and about human intentions.

Today society is moving deeper into what can be called the age of cyberutopias<ref>[[Cyberutopia (preliminary)]]</ref>, which means, technological dreams of a perfectly connected and informed humanity. One example that immediately comes to mind is the evolution of the Internet or “the cloud”: an infrastructure where the traces of almost all human activities are stored, processed and presented back as “knowledge”.

This paper follows the metaphor “From Babel to the Cloud” in order to ask how the dream of universal information turns both into a utopia of perfect wisdom and into a dystopia of control, overload and inequality.

== Stage 1: Babel — The Dream of Total Connection ==
In this short story, ''the Library of Babel''<ref name=":0" /> represents a place where all possible information already exists (even though most of the books are total nonsense). The characters of the story were immediately fond of the idea and some of them put their whole life's work into searching for answers, everybody has different desires which leads people to act in ways where they're ready to risk everything just for some peace of mind. Some did succeed, but only in claiming that the library does in fact hold every book possible (which means every answer possible, even the way one dies). This only made people act more irrational and selfish, again as might be expected from many people.

So why does the idea of “knowing everything”, “having all the answers” manipulate humans so easily that they lose sense of their reality and their real self? Some might say it is because they are scared of the things they don't know, because they’re something they can't control.

Another interesting side of ''the Library of Babel''<ref name=":0" /> is that, depending on which point of view, it can be both a utopia or a dystopia.

* Utopia of total Information: we can be more cautious, intellectual, rational, etc.

In theory, a place like the Library could make people wiser. If every possible answer already exists somewhere, humans could avoid repeating the same mistakes over and over again…

* Dystopia of Despair: overflow of Information, chaos of emotions.

In practice, though, the characters in the story don’t become calmer or more reasonable…

This double face of the Library of Babel – as both a dream of total knowledge and a nightmare of confusion – is important for the whole idea of this cyberutopia.

Very similar promises and dangers appear again when one takes a look at the Internet and the modern ‘cloud’ as a kind of real-life universal library.

== Stage 2: The Cloud — Modern Cyberutopia ==
Slowly the fantasy of this story is starting to look more and more real in today's world, and that has started to happen since the invention of the internet. Instead of the infinite books in the library now there's billions of websites, social media posts and all the blueprints of humanity floating around for everybody's fast access. So all that can be perceived as a version of Babel.

When we focus on how the evolution of the internet went, we can notice the similarities between Borges’ Babel and the modern world. Authors in the field of the information society argue that our time is organised more and more around information flows and digital networks (Díaz-Nafría, 2014; Capurro, 2008).<ref>Díaz-Nafría, J. M. (2014). Ethics at the age of information. ''Systema, 2''(3), 43–52.</ref><ref>Capurro, R. (2008). Intercultural information ethics. In K. E. Himma & H. T. Tavani (Eds.), ''The handbook of information and computer ethics'' (pp. 639–665). Wiley.</ref>

'''The Servers'''

Starting on the physical matter: today's version of the Library itself. In reality the “cloud” is made of server farms, hard drives, cooling systems and cables, but in everyday life people hardly think about these buildings and machines. It feels like a weightless, invisible “cloud”: physical data centres are not actively in people's minds, the results just show up on screens, so the whole system appears like a library that is simply presented with open access.

'''The Web'''

Political scientists like Schulze (2018)<ref name=":1">Schulze, M. (2018). ''From cyber-utopia to cyber-war: Normative change in cyberspace'' (Doctoral dissertation, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Germany). <nowiki>https://doi.org/10.22032/DBT.35107</nowiki> revistas.pucsp.br</ref> have shown that the early discourse around the internet was strongly marked by cyber-utopian expectations. So now the web already holds most of the information “known to man”, which gives the feeling of total knowledge and puts it at the core of most of society today (the only main difference between this and Babel is that all of the information was created by people themselves and not from the idea of random character combinations. This is the “cyberutopian moment”: the belief that if almost everything is online and connected, then humanity is finally close to a kind of “perfect wisdom”. Imagine every question has already an answer on the web, that every problem could in theory be solved with enough information and connection.

Thinkers like Pierre Lévy call this the rise of “collective intelligence”: the idea that many minds connected through cyberspace can create new, shared forms of knowledge (Lévy, 1997)<ref>Lévy, P. (1997). ''Collective intelligence: Mankind’s emerging world in cyberspace'' (R. Bononno, Trans.). Perseus Books.</ref>. Yochai Benkler talks about “commons-based peer production”, where people collaborate online on projects like free software or Wikipedia instead of just passively consuming information (Benkler, 2006)<ref>Benkler, Y. (2006). ''The wealth of networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom''. Yale University Press.</ref>. A simple example of this dream is Wikipedia itself: an online encyclopedia that anyone can read and (almost) anyone can edit. It looks like the perfect symbol of the web as a universal library created “by everyone for everyone”.

At the same time, the web also gives individuals an unprecedented possibility to become visible. The existence of globally known celebrities, political figures, authors or scientists whose work you can follow directly online is proof that it is possible for a person, or a work of somebody, to be known worldwide. Social media accounts, personal websites, video channels or blogs amplify this feeling: the sense that, in principle, anyone could “publish a book in Babel” and find an audience.

'''Social Media'''

Social media is one of the reasons for this form of “perfect connection” in our world today. It makes it possible to be up to date with the news, “new trends”, and interesting stuff happening around the world – by “interesting” is meant what people consider worthy of being trendy. We process all this, but we don’t experience most of it in our real life; instead it happens in our online life. We just perceive it on our screens, and sometimes we forget the feeling of that being reality and it becomes just another piece of news in our feed.

Social media also allows people to interact with people they would never have met without it. Usually it is because one ended up in the same community or the same “corner of the internet”. That already means more enhanced social interactions, where it's possible to skip getting to know each other beforehand, something that could be a little uncomfortable for some people. So, of course, social media is a crucial part of today's social lives of people.

Socialising is a very crucial part in the survival and development of humans as a species, so slowly one might say life is starting to sound impossible if the internet were not to exist. Some researchers even talk about “social media addiction”, when people feel they cannot disconnect without stress or fear of missing out<ref name=":2">Goldman, Bruce. 2021. “Addictive Potential of Social Media, Explained.” ''Stanford Medicine News Center'' (Insights), October 29, 2021. <nowiki>https://med.stanford.edu/news/insights/2021/10/addictive-potential-of-social-media-explained.html</nowiki></ref><ref>Kuss, D. J., & Griffiths, M. D. (2017). Social networking sites and addiction: Ten lessons learned. ''International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 14''(3), 311. <nowiki>https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph14030311</nowiki></ref>. This is why some authors describe the web and the cloud as central elements of the utopia of “perfect connection” and “perfect wisdom”, especially in the utopian families of “The Perfect Wisdom” and “The Perfect Social Order”. So this is another similarity to Borges’ story: fear can create dependency, and it is exactly this fear that makes people attracted to digital systems that promise to store and predict everything.

== Stage 3: Cyber-dystopia — The Fall of the Dream ==
''“The internet has gone “from cyber-utopia to cyber-war””'' (Schulze, 2018)<ref name=":1" />. What once looked like a space of free information and connection is now increasingly described in terms of conflict, manipulation and control.

The “social media addiction”<ref name=":2" /> that many people experience today is something that is being taken advantage of by those who hold more power. This dependence is built into the algorithms behind almost every form of content consumption. These systems are also used to influence or even manipulate people in their political views, for example in the time before elections and political campaigns. Sometimes this manipulation goes as far as spreading fake news<ref name=":3">Jardine, Eric. 2019. “Beware Fake News.” Centre for International Governance Innovation. April 2, 2019. <nowiki>https://www.cigionline.org/articles/beware-fake-news/</nowiki></ref> in order to achieve a specific goal. All of this shows a way of using the internet that is not morally good. So does this still sound so utopian in the end?

This leads us to the next main similarity with the Library of Babel: the dystopia. We are entering an era of the internet where some people have developed a kind of paranoia about the content we receive. Some no longer believe the news at all, since it could be fake news<ref name=":3" />– just like in Babel, where a book could always give you the wrong information or “knowledge”. These methods of manipulation are becoming more and more creative, especially with the development of AI<ref>[[Artificial Intelligence (Cyberutopias)]]</ref>. This starts to look very similar to the world of “Big Brother”<ref>Orwell, George. 1949. 1984. London: Secker & Warburg.</ref> and the dystopia of surveillance<ref>[[Draft:Orwell's "1984"]]</ref>.

The kind of world that is slowly emerging here is not completely new: writers, filmmakers, game designers and graphic artists have already imagined similar realities in cyberpunk universes such as those of Gibson, Stephenson, “Blade Runner”, “Ghost in the Shell” , “Cyberpunk 2077” or even comics such as w0rldtr33.

=== Cyberpunk universes ===
In these cyberpunk worlds, the dream of perfect connection has already collapsed. Most of them show societies that are far more chaotic, violent and unstable than our own, which makes them feel close to us and at the same time uncomfortable to watch. We see how people have lost the war to false hope and try different ways to compensate for it: drugs, implants, hacking or escaping into virtual realities. High technology is still very idealised, but it no longer appears as a solution; it is just the background of everyday struggle.

For example, in ''Neuromancer'' by William Gibson and ''Snow Crash'' by Neal Stephenson, the network is everywhere, but it does not lead to a better or fairer world. Instead, huge corporations and powerful AIs dominate cyberspace, while most people live in poverty or chaos. This is often summed up as “high tech, low life”: technology is extremely advanced, but everyday life is unstable and dangerous. Hacking becomes both a survival strategy and one of the biggest forms of threat.

Then we have worlds like ''Cyberpunk 2077'', ''Blade Runner'' or ''Ghost in the Shell'', where not only are people deeply connected with each other, but the whole city is full of cyberutopian technology. Holograms, neon advertisements, cameras and data streams make the urban space look like a physical version of the cloud instead of something that only exists on our screens. There is also the idea of humans having machine parts, which means the dependency on the digital world has moved from being only mental to also physical, through cybernetic implants and prosthetics <ref>Cyberware. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberware</ref>.

In most of these stories the protagonists are fragile figures of hope. They try to resist or at least survive within systems (like the corporations in power) that are much bigger than them. Their attitude often fits Borges’ <ref name=":0" /> words: <blockquote>''If honor and wisdom and happiness are not for me, let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my place be in hell.''</blockquote>All of these cyberpunk universes are reflections of the bad parts of our internet utopia. They exaggerate tendencies that we can already see: dependence on the digital world, manipulation of power through information, growing surveillance and a constant focus on conflict and destruction. In Borges’ Library of Babel there are also groups who try to control meaning by deciding which books are valuable and which should be destroyed <ref name=":0" />. In a similar way, in both cyberpunk worlds and in our own cloud-based reality, different powerful actors fight to control what information we see, trust and remember.

=== Ethical reflections ===
If we look back from the cyberpunk worlds to our own, we can recognize softer versions of the same problems. Many people feel strangely alone or empty even though they are constantly “connected”. Some are very dependent on the dopamine they get from simple online social interactions, trying to make everything look perfect for “the post”. Even without direct manipulation from outside, people sometimes build a false identity just to receive the best possible feedback and attention from their online social network. Once this identity is created, it becomes harder to find the way back to your real self. After one bad event, or when the feedback suddenly changes, their whole world can feel like it is collapsing, because they started to believe this constructed image too much.

Beside this, there are also the so-called figures of power. Throughout someone’s time on the internet, they will encounter hundreds of advertisements a day, which are most likely personalised for them from the data collected while they are surfing or doom-scrolling<ref>Doomscrolling. <nowiki>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomscrolling</nowiki></ref> online. This is already an indirect form of being under surveillance: our clicks, pauses and searches are constantly observed in order to predict what we might want next. What looks like “free content” is often a system designed to guide our attention and behaviour in subtle ways.

In a more positive sense, the more massive data collection becomes, the more people begin to notice the system’s imperfections. Mistrust grows, and some users become more cautious about what they share and how they present themselves online. This can have a good effect: it may push people to focus more on their offline lives instead of losing themselves in a carefully curated “fake” world. However, for those whose social and emotional lives already depend heavily on the internet, this shift can also create stress and mental strain—especially when their online identity starts to feel more real, or more valuable, than their offline self. At the same time, these effects are often difficult to see from the outside: friends and family in “real life” might not notice how strongly someone is being shaped by online feedback loops. This creates an ethical challenge, because the signs of manipulation and harm may only become visible within the cloud itself—through patterns of attention, behaviour, and self-presentation.

In other words, the task is to defend the possibility of a real self and a shared public truth inside digital space, so that the promise of collective intelligence does not collapse into collective manipulation.

== Conclusion ==
So, did Borges pinpoint the modern world? In a way, yes. Not because he could predict digital technology but his highly intellectual assumptions and ideas of the Total Knowledge say a lot more for us than anticipated. Not only he predicted patterns of the digital world (which he couldn't even imagine would've existed) but also human behaviour patterns.

The Cloud reflects very well on the metaphor of the Library of Babel: where we try to find meaning and trust but could end up losing ourselves in between. This is how the internet first appeared as a cyberutopia: a promise of global connection, harmony, and collective intelligence. Yet the same structure also produces the opposite—overload, mistrust, manipulation, and the risk of losing ourselves between endless information and constant performance.

Because cyber-dystopias exaggerate these tendencies, they can function as warnings rather than just entertainment. They remind us to ask why we wanted this “perfect connection” in the first place. The idea of being able to share your unique self with the world, your life work and motivations will most likely be appreciated from somebody (or even more than somebody) at some place in the world. To remember that maybe one simple like on the digital world, means more for somebody out there than we actually think.

These are just little things to think about and remember that we don't have to be as predictable and fall for the traps set into our world now. If we lose ourselves through it we should fall back to the people we trust and choose reality over the endless library.

== References ==
<references />*''Use of AI: Grammar check, Quotes accuracy check, correct format of References, reminder of some plot details of Snow Crash.''

From Babel to the Cloud

2025-12-18T21:24:13Z

Violafejza:

= The Rise and Fall of Cyberutopia =
== Introduction ==
Did Jorge Luis Borges, in his short story ''The Library of Babel''<ref name=":0">Borges, J. L. (1998). ''The Library of Babel'' (A. Hurley, Trans.). In J. L. Borges, Collected fictions (pp. 112–118).

Penguin. (Original work published 1941)</ref>, get inspired by the limits of his own society at the time which led him to idealise the future and put it in the metaphor of human behaviour, or did he somehow anticipate how humans would be in today’s digital environments? This contribution starts from the idea that our desires as humans – especially the desire for total knowledge and connection – might be more predictable than we think. Borges’ imaginary library, in which he fantasises the idea where all possible books already exist, says a great deal about our present information society and about our goals as a species.

Today we are moving deeper into what can be called the age of '''cyberutopias'''<ref>[[Cyberutopia (preliminary)]]</ref>, which means, technological dreams of a perfectly connected and informed humanity. One example that lies in front of our eyes is the evolution of the Internet aka “the cloud”: an infrastructure in which the traces of almost all human activities are stored, processed and presented back to us as “knowledge”.

This paper follows the metaphor “From Babel to the Cloud” in order to ask how the dream of universal information turns both into a utopia of perfect wisdom and into a dystopia of control, overload and inequality.

== Stage 1: Babel — The Dream of Total Connection ==
In this short story, ''the Library of Babel''<ref name=":0" /> represents a place where all information possible already exists (even though most of the books are total nonsense). As expected, characters of the story were immediately fond of the idea and some of them put their whole life's work into searching for answers (everybody has different desires which leads people to act in ways where they're ready to risk everything just for some peace of mind). Some did succeed, but only in claiming that the library does in fact hold every book possible (which means every answer possible, even the way one dies). This only made people act even more irrational and selfish, again as might be expected from many people.

So why does the idea of “knowing everything”, “having all the answers” manipulate humans so easily that they sometimes lose sense of their reality and their real self? Maybe it is because we are scared of the things we don't know, because it's something we can't control.

Another interesting side of ''the Library of Babel''<ref name=":0" /> is that, depending on which point of view, it can be both a utopia or a dystopia.

* Utopia of total Information: we can be more cautious, intellectual, rational, etc.

In theory, a place like the Library could make people wiser. If every possible answer already exists somewhere, humans could avoid repeating the same mistakes over and over again…

* Dystopia of Despair: overflow of Information, chaos of emotions.

In practice, though, the characters in the story don’t become calmer or more reasonable…

This double face of the Library of Babel – as both a dream of total knowledge and a nightmare of confusion – is important for the whole idea of this cyberutopia.

Very similar promises and dangers appear again when we look at the Internet and the modern ‘cloud’ as a kind of real-world universal library.

== Stage 2: The Cloud — Modern Cyberutopia ==
Slowly the fantasy of this story is starting to look real in our world today, and that of course has started to happen since the invention of the internet. Instead of the infinite books in the library now we have billions of websites, social media posts and all the blueprints of humanity floating around for everybody's fast access. So it all can be perceived as a version of Babel.

When we focus on how the evolution of the internet went, we can notice the similarities between Borges’ Babel and the modern world. Authors in the field of the information society argue that our time is organised more and more around information flows and digital networks (Díaz-Nafría, 2014; Capurro, 2008).[REF2][REF3]

=== The Servers ===
First we start on the physical matter: that would be our form of the Library itself. In reality the “cloud” is made of server farms, hard drives, cooling systems and cables, but in everyday life we hardly think about these buildings and machines. For us it feels like a weightless, invisible “cloud”: we don’t see the physical data centres, we just see the result on our screens, so the whole system appears like a library that is simply given to us with open access.

=== The Web ===
Political scientists like Schulze (2018)[REF1] have shown that the early discourse around the internet was strongly marked by cyber-utopian expectations. So now the web already holds most of the stuff “known to man”, which gives the feeling of total knowledge and puts it at the core of most of society today (the only main difference between this and Babel is that all of the information was created by people themselves and not from the idea of random character combinations). This is the cyberutopian moment: the belief that if almost everything is online and connected, then humanity is finally close to a kind of “perfect wisdom”. We imagine that every question has an answer on the web, that every problem could in theory be solved with enough information and connection.

Thinkers like Pierre Lévy call this the rise of “collective intelligence”: the idea that many minds connected through cyberspace can create new, shared forms of knowledge (Lévy, 1997).[REF4] Yochai Benkler talks about “commons-based peer production”, where people collaborate online on projects like free software or Wikipedia instead of just passively consuming information (Benkler, 2006).[REF5] A simple example of this dream is Wikipedia itself: an online encyclopedia that anyone can read and (almost) anyone can edit. It looks like the perfect symbol of the web as a universal library created “by everyone for everyone”.

At the same time, the web also gives individuals an unprecedented possibility to become visible. The existence of globally known celebrities, political figures, authors or scientists whose work we can follow directly online is proof that it is possible for a person, or a work of somebody, to be known worldwide. Social media accounts, personal websites, video channels or blogs amplify this feeling: the sense that, in principle, anyone could “publish a book in Babel” and find an audience.

=== Social Media ===
Social media is one of the reasons for this form of “perfect connection” in our world today. It makes it possible to be up to date with the news, “new trends”, and interesting stuff happening around the world – by “interesting” is meant what people consider worthy of being trendy. We process all this, but we don’t experience most of it in our real life; instead it happens in our online life. We just perceive it on our screens, and sometimes we forget the feeling of that being reality and it becomes just another piece of news in our feed.

Social media also makes it possible for us to interact with people we would never have met before. Usually it is because we ended up in the same community or the same “corner of the internet”. That already means more enhanced social interactions, where we skip a few “getting to know” phases that could be a little uncomfortable for some people. So, of course, as expected, social media is a crucial part of our lives and also for the social lives of people.

Socialising is a very important part in the survival of humans as a species, so slowly one can say life is starting to sound impossible if the internet were to not exist. Some researchers even talk about “social media addiction”, when people feel they cannot disconnect without stress or fear of missing out. [REF6]. This is why some authors describe the web and the cloud as central elements of the utopia of “perfect connection” and “perfect wisdom”, especially in the utopian families of “The Perfect Wisdom” and “The Perfect Social Order”. So this is another similarity to Borges’ story: fear can create dependency, and it is exactly this fear that makes us attracted to digital systems that promise to store and predict everything.

== Stage 3: Cyber-dystopia — The Fall of the Dream ==
''“The internet has gone “from cyber-utopia to cyber-war””'' (Schulze, 2018) [REF]. What once looked like a space of free information and connection is now increasingly described in terms of conflict, manipulation and control.

The “social media addiction” [REF] that many people experience today is something that is being taken advantage of by those who hold more power. This dependence is built into the algorithms behind almost every form of content consumption. These systems are also used to influence or even manipulate people in their political views, for example in the time before elections and political campaigns. Sometimes this manipulation goes as far as spreading fake news [REF] in order to achieve a specific goal. All of this shows a way of using the internet that is not morally good. So does this still sound so utopian in the end?

This leads us to the next main similarity with the Library of Babel: the dystopia. We are entering an era of the internet where some people have developed a kind of paranoia about the content we receive. Some no longer believe the news at all, since it could be fake news [REF] – just like in Babel, where a book could always give you the wrong information or “knowledge”. These methods of manipulation are becoming more and more creative, especially with the development of AI [REF]. This starts to look very similar to the world of “Big Brother” [REF] and the dystopia of surveillance [REF].

The kind of world that is slowly emerging here is not completely new: writers, filmmakers, game designers and graphic artists have already imagined similar realities in cyberpunk universes such as those of Gibson, Stephenson, “Blade Runner”, “Ghost in the Shell” , “Cyberpunk 2077” or even comics such as w0rldtr33.

=== Cyberpunk universes ===
In these cyberpunk worlds, the dream of perfect connection has already collapsed. Most of them show societies that are far more chaotic, violent and unstable than our own, which makes them feel close to us and at the same time uncomfortable to watch. We see how people have lost the war to false hope and try different ways to compensate for it: drugs, implants, hacking or escaping into virtual realities. High technology is still very idealised, but it no longer appears as a solution; it is just the background of everyday struggle.

For example, in ''Neuromancer'' by William Gibson and ''Snow Crash'' by Neal Stephenson, the network is everywhere, but it does not lead to a better or fairer world. Instead, huge corporations and powerful AIs dominate cyberspace, while most people live in poverty or chaos. This is often summed up as “high tech, low life”: technology is extremely advanced, but everyday life is unstable and dangerous. Hacking becomes both a survival strategy and one of the biggest forms of threat.

Then we have worlds like ''Cyberpunk 2077'', ''Blade Runner'' or ''Ghost in the Shell'', where not only are people deeply connected with each other, but the whole city is full of cyberutopian technology. Holograms, neon advertisements, cameras and data streams make the urban space look like a physical version of the cloud instead of something that only exists on our screens. There is also the idea of humans having machine parts, which means the dependency on the digital world has moved from being only mental to also physical, through cybernetic implants and prosthetics [REF].

In most of these stories the protagonists are fragile figures of hope. They try to resist or at least survive within systems (like the corporations in power) that are much bigger than them. Their attitude often fits Borges’ [REF] words: <blockquote>''If honor and wisdom and happiness are not for me, let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my place be in hell.''</blockquote>All of these cyberpunk universes are reflections of the bad parts of our internet utopia. They exaggerate tendencies that we can already see: dependence on the digital world, manipulation of power through information, growing surveillance and a constant focus on conflict and destruction. In Borges’ Library of Babel there are also groups who try to control meaning by deciding which books are valuable and which should be destroyed [REF]. In a similar way, in both cyberpunk worlds and in our own cloud-based reality, different powerful actors fight to control what information we see, trust and remember.

=== Ethical reflections ===
If we look back from the cyberpunk worlds to our own, we can recognize softer versions of the same problems. Many people feel strangely alone or empty even though they are constantly “connected”. Some are very dependent on the dopamine they get from simple online social interactions, trying to make everything look perfect for “the post”. Even without direct manipulation from outside, people sometimes build a false identity just to receive the best possible feedback and attention from their online social network. Once this identity is created, it becomes harder to find the way back to your real self. After one bad event, or when the feedback suddenly changes, their whole world can feel like it is collapsing, because they started to believe this constructed image too much.

Beside this, there are also the so-called figures of power. Throughout someone’s time on the internet, they will encounter hundreds of advertisements a day, which are most likely personalised for them from the data collected while they are surfing or doom-scrolling online [REF]. This is already an indirect form of being under surveillance: our clicks, pauses and searches are constantly observed in order to predict what we might want next. What looks like “free content” is often a system designed to guide our attention and behaviour in subtle ways.

In a more positive sense, the more massive data collection becomes, the more people begin to notice the system’s imperfections. Mistrust grows, and some users become more cautious about what they share and how they present themselves online. This can have a good effect: it may push people to focus more on their offline lives instead of losing themselves in a carefully curated “fake” world. However, for those whose social and emotional lives already depend heavily on the internet, this shift can also create stress and mental strain—especially when their online identity starts to feel more real, or more valuable, than their offline self. At the same time, these effects are often difficult to see from the outside: friends and family in “real life” might not notice how strongly someone is being shaped by online feedback loops. This creates an ethical challenge, because the signs of manipulation and harm may only become visible within the cloud itself—through patterns of attention, behaviour, and self-presentation.

In other words, the task is to defend the possibility of a real self and a shared public truth inside digital space, so that the promise of collective intelligence does not collapse into collective manipulation.

== Conclusion ==
So, did Borges pinpoint the modern world? In a way, yes. Not because he could predict digital technology but his highly intellectual assumptions and ideas of the Total Knowledge say a lot more for us than anticipated. Not only he predicted patterns of the digital world (which he couldn't even imagine would've existed) but also human behaviour patterns.

The Cloud reflects very well on the metaphor of the Library of Babel: where we try to find meaning and trust but could end up losing ourselves in between. This is how the internet first appeared as a cyberutopia: a promise of global connection, harmony, and collective intelligence. Yet the same structure also produces the opposite—overload, mistrust, manipulation, and the risk of losing ourselves between endless information and constant performance.

Because cyber-dystopias exaggerate these tendencies, they can function as warnings rather than just entertainment. They remind us to ask why we wanted this “perfect connection” in the first place. The idea of being able to share your unique self with the world, your life work and motivations will most likely be appreciated from somebody (or even more than somebody) at some place in the world. To remember that maybe one simple like on the digital world, means more for somebody out there than we actually think.

These are just little things to think about and remember that we don't have to be as predictable and fall for the traps set into our world now. If we lose ourselves through it we should fall back to the people we trust and choose reality over the endless library.

== References ==
<references />

From Babel to the Cloud

2025-12-18T21:14:33Z

Violafejza: /* Conclusion */

= The Rise and Fall of Cyberutopia =
== Introduction ==
Did Jorge Luis Borges, in his short story ''The Library of Babel''<ref name=":0">Borges, J. L. (1998). ''The Library of Babel'' (A. Hurley, Trans.). In J. L. Borges, Collected fictions (pp. 112–118).

Penguin. (Original work published 1941)</ref>, get inspired from the limits of his own society at the time which led him to idealise the future and put it in the metaphor of human behaviour, or did he somehow anticipate how humans would be in today’s digital environments? This contribution starts from the idea that our desires as humans – especially the desire for total knowledge and connection – might be more predictable than we think. Borges’ imaginary library, in which he fantasises the idea where all possible books already exist, says a great deal about our present information society and about our goals as a species.

Today we are moving deeper into what can be called the age of '''cyberutopias'''<ref>[[Cyberutopia (preliminary)]]</ref>, which means, technological dreams of a perfectly connected and informed humanity. One example that lies in front of our eyes is the evolution of the Internet aka “the cloud”: an infrastructure in which the traces of almost all human activities are stored, processed and presented back to us as “knowledge”.

This paper follows the metaphor “From Babel to the Cloud” in order to ask how the dream of universal information turns both into a utopia of perfect wisdom and into a dystopia of control, overload and inequality.

== Stage 1: Babel — The Dream of Total Connection ==
In this short story, ''the Library of Babel''<ref name=":0" /> represents a place where all information possible already exists (even though most of the books are total nonsense). As expected, characters of the story were immediately fond of the idea and some of them put their whole life's work into searching for answers (everybody has different desires which leads people to act in ways where they're ready to risk everything just for some peace of mind). Some did succeed, but only in claiming that the library does in fact hold every book possible (which means every answer possible, even the way one dies). This only made people act even more irrational and selfish, again as might be expected from many people.

So why does the idea of “knowing everything”, “having all the answers” manipulate humans so easily that they sometimes lose sense of their reality and their real self? Maybe it is because we are scared of the things we don't know, because it's something we can't control.

Another interesting side of ''the Library of Babel''<ref name=":0" /> is that, depending on which point of view, it can be both a utopia or a dystopia.

* Utopia of total Information: we can be more cautious, intellectual, rational, etc.

In theory, a place like the Library could make people wiser. If every possible answer already exists somewhere, humans could avoid repeating the same mistakes over and over again…

* Dystopia of Despair: overflow of Information, chaos of emotions.

In practice, though, the characters in the story don’t become calmer or more reasonable…

This double face of the Library of Babel – as both a dream of total knowledge and a nightmare of confusion – is important for the whole idea of this cyberutopia.

Very similar promises and dangers appear again when we look at the Internet and the modern ‘cloud’ as a kind of real-world universal library.

== Stage 2: The Cloud — Modern Cyberutopia ==
Slowly the fantasy of this story is starting to look real in our world today, and that of course has started to happen since the invention of the internet. Instead of the infinite books in the library now we have billions of websites, social media posts and all the blueprints of humanity floating around for everybody's fast access. So it all can be perceived as a version of Babel.

When we focus on how the evolution of the internet went, we can notice the similarities between Borges’ Babel and the modern world. Authors in the field of the information society argue that our time is organised more and more around information flows and digital networks (Díaz-Nafría, 2014; Capurro, 2008).[REF2][REF3]

=== The Servers ===
First we start on the physical matter: that would be our form of the Library itself. In reality the “cloud” is made of server farms, hard drives, cooling systems and cables, but in everyday life we hardly think about these buildings and machines. For us it feels like a weightless, invisible “cloud”: we don’t see the physical data centres, we just see the result on our screens, so the whole system appears like a library that is simply given to us with open access.

=== The Web ===
Political scientists like Schulze (2018)[REF1] have shown that the early discourse around the internet was strongly marked by cyber-utopian expectations. So now the web already holds most of the stuff “known to man”, which gives the feeling of total knowledge and puts it at the core of most of society today (the only main difference between this and Babel is that all of the information was created by people themselves and not from the idea of random character combinations). This is the cyberutopian moment: the belief that if almost everything is online and connected, then humanity is finally close to a kind of “perfect wisdom”. We imagine that every question has an answer on the web, that every problem could in theory be solved with enough information and connection.

Thinkers like Pierre Lévy call this the rise of “collective intelligence”: the idea that many minds connected through cyberspace can create new, shared forms of knowledge (Lévy, 1997).[REF4] Yochai Benkler talks about “commons-based peer production”, where people collaborate online on projects like free software or Wikipedia instead of just passively consuming information (Benkler, 2006).[REF5] A simple example of this dream is Wikipedia itself: an online encyclopedia that anyone can read and (almost) anyone can edit. It looks like the perfect symbol of the web as a universal library created “by everyone for everyone”.

At the same time, the web also gives individuals an unprecedented possibility to become visible. The existence of globally known celebrities, political figures, authors or scientists whose work we can follow directly online is proof that it is possible for a person, or a work of somebody, to be known worldwide. Social media accounts, personal websites, video channels or blogs amplify this feeling: the sense that, in principle, anyone could “publish a book in Babel” and find an audience.

=== Social Media ===
Social media is one of the reasons for this form of “perfect connection” in our world today. It makes it possible to be up to date with the news, “new trends”, and interesting stuff happening around the world – by “interesting” is meant what people consider worthy of being trendy. We process all this, but we don’t experience most of it in our real life; instead it happens in our online life. We just perceive it on our screens, and sometimes we forget the feeling of that being reality and it becomes just another piece of news in our feed.

Social media also makes it possible for us to interact with people we would never have met before. Usually it is because we ended up in the same community or the same “corner of the internet”. That already means more enhanced social interactions, where we skip a few “getting to know” phases that could be a little uncomfortable for some people. So, of course, as expected, social media is a crucial part of our lives and also for the social lives of people.

Socialising is a very important part in the survival of humans as a species, so slowly one can say life is starting to sound impossible if the internet were to not exist. Some researchers even talk about “social media addiction”, when people feel they cannot disconnect without stress or fear of missing out. [REF6]. This is why some authors describe the web and the cloud as central elements of the utopia of “perfect connection” and “perfect wisdom”, especially in the utopian families of “The Perfect Wisdom” and “The Perfect Social Order”. So this is another similarity to Borges’ story: fear can create dependency, and it is exactly this fear that makes us attracted to digital systems that promise to store and predict everything.

== Stage 3: Cyber-dystopia — The Fall of the Dream ==
''“The internet has gone “from cyber-utopia to cyber-war””'' (Schulze, 2018) [REF]. What once looked like a space of free information and connection is now increasingly described in terms of conflict, manipulation and control.

The “social media addiction” [REF] that many people experience today is something that is being taken advantage of by those who hold more power. This dependence is built into the algorithms behind almost every form of content consumption. These systems are also used to influence or even manipulate people in their political views, for example in the time before elections and political campaigns. Sometimes this manipulation goes as far as spreading fake news [REF] in order to achieve a specific goal. All of this shows a way of using the internet that is not morally good. So does this still sound so utopian in the end?

This leads us to the next main similarity with the Library of Babel: the dystopia. We are entering an era of the internet where some people have developed a kind of paranoia about the content we receive. Some no longer believe the news at all, since it could be fake news [REF] – just like in Babel, where a book could always give you the wrong information or “knowledge”. These methods of manipulation are becoming more and more creative, especially with the development of AI [REF]. This starts to look very similar to the world of “Big Brother” [REF] and the dystopia of surveillance [REF].

The kind of world that is slowly emerging here is not completely new: writers, filmmakers, game designers and graphic artists have already imagined similar realities in cyberpunk universes such as those of Gibson, Stephenson, “Blade Runner”, “Ghost in the Shell” , “Cyberpunk 2077” or even comics such as w0rldtr33.

=== Cyberpunk universes ===
In these cyberpunk worlds, the dream of perfect connection has already collapsed. Most of them show societies that are far more chaotic, violent and unstable than our own, which makes them feel close to us and at the same time uncomfortable to watch. We see how people have lost the war to false hope and try different ways to compensate for it: drugs, implants, hacking or escaping into virtual realities. High technology is still very idealised, but it no longer appears as a solution; it is just the background of everyday struggle.

For example, in ''Neuromancer'' by William Gibson and ''Snow Crash'' by Neal Stephenson, the network is everywhere, but it does not lead to a better or fairer world. Instead, huge corporations and powerful AIs dominate cyberspace, while most people live in poverty or chaos. This is often summed up as “high tech, low life”: technology is extremely advanced, but everyday life is unstable and dangerous. Hacking becomes both a survival strategy and one of the biggest forms of threat.

Then we have worlds like ''Cyberpunk 2077'', ''Blade Runner'' or ''Ghost in the Shell'', where not only are people deeply connected with each other, but the whole city is full of cyberutopian technology. Holograms, neon advertisements, cameras and data streams make the urban space look like a physical version of the cloud instead of something that only exists on our screens. There is also the idea of humans having machine parts, which means the dependency on the digital world has moved from being only mental to also physical, through cybernetic implants and prosthetics [REF].

In most of these stories the protagonists are fragile figures of hope. They try to resist or at least survive within systems (like the corporations in power) that are much bigger than them. Their attitude often fits Borges’ words: ''“If honor and wisdom and happiness are not for me, let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my place be in hell.”'' [REF]

All of these cyberpunk universes are reflections of the bad parts of our internet utopia. They exaggerate tendencies that we can already see: dependence on the digital world, manipulation of power through information, growing surveillance and a constant focus on conflict and destruction. In Borges’ Library of Babel there are also groups who try to control meaning by deciding which books are valuable and which should be destroyed [REF]. In a similar way, in both cyberpunk worlds and in our own cloud-based reality, different powerful actors fight to control what information we see, trust and remember.

=== Ethical reflections ===
If we look back from the cyberpunk worlds to our own, we can recognize softer versions of the same problems. Many people feel strangely alone or empty even though they are constantly “connected”. Some are very dependent on the dopamine they get from simple online social interactions, trying to make everything look perfect for “the post”. Even without direct manipulation from outside, people sometimes build a false identity just to receive the best possible feedback and attention from their online social network. Once this identity is created, it becomes harder to find the way back to your real self. After one bad event, or when the feedback suddenly changes, their whole world can feel like it is collapsing, because they started to believe this constructed image too much.

Beside this, there are also the so-called figures of power. Throughout someone’s time on the internet, they will encounter hundreds of advertisements a day, which are most likely personalised for them from the data collected while they are surfing or doom-scrolling online [REF]. This is already an indirect form of being under surveillance: our clicks, pauses and searches are constantly observed in order to predict what we might want next. What looks like “free content” is often a system designed to guide our attention and behaviour in subtle ways.

In a more positive sense, the more massive data collection becomes, the more people begin to notice the system’s imperfections. Mistrust grows, and some users become more cautious about what they share and how they present themselves online. This can have a good effect: it may push people to focus more on their offline lives instead of losing themselves in a carefully curated “fake” world. However, for those whose social and emotional lives already depend heavily on the internet, this shift can also create stress and mental strain—especially when their online identity starts to feel more real, or more valuable, than their offline self. At the same time, these effects are often difficult to see from the outside: friends and family in “real life” might not notice how strongly someone is being shaped by online feedback loops. This creates an ethical challenge, because the signs of manipulation and harm may only become visible within the cloud itself—through patterns of attention, behaviour, and self-presentation.

In other words, the task is to defend the possibility of a real self and a shared public truth inside digital space, so that the promise of collective intelligence does not collapse into collective manipulation.

== Conclusion ==
So, did Borges pinpoint the modern world? In a way, yes. Not because he could predict digital technology but his highly intellectual assumptions and ideas of the Total Knowledge say a lot more for us than anticipated. Not only he predicted patterns of the digital world (which he couldn't even imagine would've existed) but also human behaviour patterns.

The Cloud reflects very well on the metaphor of the Library of Babel: where we try to find meaning and trust but could end up losing ourselves in between. This is how the internet first appeared as a cyberutopia: a promise of global connection, harmony, and collective intelligence. Yet the same structure also produces the opposite—overload, mistrust, manipulation, and the risk of losing ourselves between endless information and constant performance.

Because cyber-dystopias exaggerate these tendencies, they can function as warnings rather than just entertainment. They remind us to ask why we wanted this “perfect connection” in the first place. The idea of being able to share your unique self with the world, your life work and motivations will most likely be appreciated from somebody (or even more than somebody) at some place in the world. To remember that maybe one simple like on the digital world, means more for somebody out there than we actually think.

These are just little things to think about and remember that we don't have to be as predictable and fall for the traps set into our world now. If we lose ourselves through it we should fall back to the people we trust and choose reality over the endless library.

== References ==
<references />

From Babel to the Cloud

2025-12-18T20:48:41Z

Violafejza: ethical reflections

= The Rise and Fall of Cyberutopia =
== Introduction ==
Did Jorge Luis Borges, in his short story ''The Library of Babel''<ref name=":0">Borges, J. L. (1998). ''The Library of Babel'' (A. Hurley, Trans.). In J. L. Borges, Collected fictions (pp. 112–118).

Penguin. (Original work published 1941)</ref>, get inspired from the limits of his own society at the time which led him to idealise the future and put it in the metaphor of human behaviour, or did he somehow anticipate how humans would be in today’s digital environments? This contribution starts from the idea that our desires as humans – especially the desire for total knowledge and connection – might be more predictable than we think. Borges’ imaginary library, in which he fantasises the idea where all possible books already exist, says a great deal about our present information society and about our goals as a species.

Today we are moving deeper into what can be called the age of '''cyberutopias'''<ref>[[Cyberutopia (preliminary)]]</ref>, which means, technological dreams of a perfectly connected and informed humanity. One example that lies in front of our eyes is the evolution of the Internet aka “the cloud”: an infrastructure in which the traces of almost all human activities are stored, processed and presented back to us as “knowledge”.

This paper follows the metaphor “From Babel to the Cloud” in order to ask how the dream of universal information turns both into a utopia of perfect wisdom and into a dystopia of control, overload and inequality.

== Stage 1: Babel — The Dream of Total Connection ==
In this short story, ''the Library of Babel''<ref name=":0" /> represents a place where all information possible already exists (even though most of the books are total nonsense). As expected, characters of the story were immediately fond of the idea and some of them put their whole life's work into searching for answers (everybody has different desires which leads people to act in ways where they're ready to risk everything just for some peace of mind). Some did succeed, but only in claiming that the library does in fact hold every book possible (which means every answer possible, even the way one dies). This only made people act even more irrational and selfish, again as might be expected from many people.

So why does the idea of “knowing everything”, “having all the answers” manipulate humans so easily that they sometimes lose sense of their reality and their real self? Maybe it is because we are scared of the things we don't know, because it's something we can't control.

Another interesting side of ''the Library of Babel''<ref name=":0" /> is that, depending on which point of view, it can be both a utopia or a dystopia.

* Utopia of total Information: we can be more cautious, intellectual, rational, etc.

In theory, a place like the Library could make people wiser. If every possible answer already exists somewhere, humans could avoid repeating the same mistakes over and over again…

* Dystopia of Despair: overflow of Information, chaos of emotions.

In practice, though, the characters in the story don’t become calmer or more reasonable…

This double face of the Library of Babel – as both a dream of total knowledge and a nightmare of confusion – is important for the whole idea of this cyberutopia.

Very similar promises and dangers appear again when we look at the Internet and the modern ‘cloud’ as a kind of real-world universal library.

== Stage 2: The Cloud — Modern Cyberutopia ==
Slowly the fantasy of this story is starting to look real in our world today, and that of course has started to happen since the invention of the internet. Instead of the infinite books in the library now we have billions of websites, social media posts and all the blueprints of humanity floating around for everybody's fast access. So it all can be perceived as a version of Babel.

When we focus on how the evolution of the internet went, we can notice the similarities between Borges’ Babel and the modern world. Authors in the field of the information society argue that our time is organised more and more around information flows and digital networks (Díaz-Nafría, 2014; Capurro, 2008).[REF2][REF3]

=== The Servers ===
First we start on the physical matter: that would be our form of the Library itself. In reality the “cloud” is made of server farms, hard drives, cooling systems and cables, but in everyday life we hardly think about these buildings and machines. For us it feels like a weightless, invisible “cloud”: we don’t see the physical data centres, we just see the result on our screens, so the whole system appears like a library that is simply given to us with open access.

=== The Web ===
Political scientists like Schulze (2018)[REF1] have shown that the early discourse around the internet was strongly marked by cyber-utopian expectations. So now the web already holds most of the stuff “known to man”, which gives the feeling of total knowledge and puts it at the core of most of society today (the only main difference between this and Babel is that all of the information was created by people themselves and not from the idea of random character combinations). This is the cyberutopian moment: the belief that if almost everything is online and connected, then humanity is finally close to a kind of “perfect wisdom”. We imagine that every question has an answer on the web, that every problem could in theory be solved with enough information and connection.

Thinkers like Pierre Lévy call this the rise of “collective intelligence”: the idea that many minds connected through cyberspace can create new, shared forms of knowledge (Lévy, 1997).[REF4] Yochai Benkler talks about “commons-based peer production”, where people collaborate online on projects like free software or Wikipedia instead of just passively consuming information (Benkler, 2006).[REF5] A simple example of this dream is Wikipedia itself: an online encyclopedia that anyone can read and (almost) anyone can edit. It looks like the perfect symbol of the web as a universal library created “by everyone for everyone”.

At the same time, the web also gives individuals an unprecedented possibility to become visible. The existence of globally known celebrities, political figures, authors or scientists whose work we can follow directly online is proof that it is possible for a person, or a work of somebody, to be known worldwide. Social media accounts, personal websites, video channels or blogs amplify this feeling: the sense that, in principle, anyone could “publish a book in Babel” and find an audience.

=== Social Media ===
Social media is one of the reasons for this form of “perfect connection” in our world today. It makes it possible to be up to date with the news, “new trends”, and interesting stuff happening around the world – by “interesting” is meant what people consider worthy of being trendy. We process all this, but we don’t experience most of it in our real life; instead it happens in our online life. We just perceive it on our screens, and sometimes we forget the feeling of that being reality and it becomes just another piece of news in our feed.

Social media also makes it possible for us to interact with people we would never have met before. Usually it is because we ended up in the same community or the same “corner of the internet”. That already means more enhanced social interactions, where we skip a few “getting to know” phases that could be a little uncomfortable for some people. So, of course, as expected, social media is a crucial part of our lives and also for the social lives of people.

Socialising is a very important part in the survival of humans as a species, so slowly one can say life is starting to sound impossible if the internet were to not exist. Some researchers even talk about “social media addiction”, when people feel they cannot disconnect without stress or fear of missing out. [REF6]. This is why some authors describe the web and the cloud as central elements of the utopia of “perfect connection” and “perfect wisdom”, especially in the utopian families of “The Perfect Wisdom” and “The Perfect Social Order”. So this is another similarity to Borges’ story: fear can create dependency, and it is exactly this fear that makes us attracted to digital systems that promise to store and predict everything.

== Stage 3: Cyber-dystopia — The Fall of the Dream ==
''“The internet has gone “from cyber-utopia to cyber-war””'' (Schulze, 2018) [REF]. What once looked like a space of free information and connection is now increasingly described in terms of conflict, manipulation and control.

The “social media addiction” [REF] that many people experience today is something that is being taken advantage of by those who hold more power. This dependence is built into the algorithms behind almost every form of content consumption. These systems are also used to influence or even manipulate people in their political views, for example in the time before elections and political campaigns. Sometimes this manipulation goes as far as spreading fake news [REF] in order to achieve a specific goal. All of this shows a way of using the internet that is not morally good. So does this still sound so utopian in the end?

This leads us to the next main similarity with the Library of Babel: the dystopia. We are entering an era of the internet where some people have developed a kind of paranoia about the content we receive. Some no longer believe the news at all, since it could be fake news [REF] – just like in Babel, where a book could always give you the wrong information or “knowledge”. These methods of manipulation are becoming more and more creative, especially with the development of AI [REF]. This starts to look very similar to the world of “Big Brother” [REF] and the dystopia of surveillance [REF].

The kind of world that is slowly emerging here is not completely new: writers, filmmakers, game designers and graphic artists have already imagined similar realities in cyberpunk universes such as those of Gibson, Stephenson, “Blade Runner”, “Ghost in the Shell” , “Cyberpunk 2077” or even comics such as w0rldtr33.

=== Cyberpunk universes ===
In these cyberpunk worlds, the dream of perfect connection has already collapsed. Most of them show societies that are far more chaotic, violent and unstable than our own, which makes them feel close to us and at the same time uncomfortable to watch. We see how people have lost the war to false hope and try different ways to compensate for it: drugs, implants, hacking or escaping into virtual realities. High technology is still very idealised, but it no longer appears as a solution; it is just the background of everyday struggle.

For example, in ''Neuromancer'' by William Gibson and ''Snow Crash'' by Neal Stephenson, the network is everywhere, but it does not lead to a better or fairer world. Instead, huge corporations and powerful AIs dominate cyberspace, while most people live in poverty or chaos. This is often summed up as “high tech, low life”: technology is extremely advanced, but everyday life is unstable and dangerous. Hacking becomes both a survival strategy and one of the biggest forms of threat.

Then we have worlds like ''Cyberpunk 2077'', ''Blade Runner'' or ''Ghost in the Shell'', where not only are people deeply connected with each other, but the whole city is full of cyberutopian technology. Holograms, neon advertisements, cameras and data streams make the urban space look like a physical version of the cloud instead of something that only exists on our screens. There is also the idea of humans having machine parts, which means the dependency on the digital world has moved from being only mental to also physical, through cybernetic implants and prosthetics [REF].

In most of these stories the protagonists are fragile figures of hope. They try to resist or at least survive within systems (like the corporations in power) that are much bigger than them. Their attitude often fits Borges’ words: ''“If honor and wisdom and happiness are not for me, let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my place be in hell.”'' [REF]

All of these cyberpunk universes are reflections of the bad parts of our internet utopia. They exaggerate tendencies that we can already see: dependence on the digital world, manipulation of power through information, growing surveillance and a constant focus on conflict and destruction. In Borges’ Library of Babel there are also groups who try to control meaning by deciding which books are valuable and which should be destroyed [REF]. In a similar way, in both cyberpunk worlds and in our own cloud-based reality, different powerful actors fight to control what information we see, trust and remember.

=== Ethical reflections ===
If we look back from the cyberpunk worlds to our own, we can recognize softer versions of the same problems. Many people feel strangely alone or empty even though they are constantly “connected”. Some are very dependent on the dopamine they get from simple online social interactions, trying to make everything look perfect for “the post”. Even without direct manipulation from outside, people sometimes build a false identity just to receive the best possible feedback and attention from their online social network. Once this identity is created, it becomes harder to find the way back to your real self. After one bad event, or when the feedback suddenly changes, their whole world can feel like it is collapsing, because they started to believe this constructed image too much.

Beside this, there are also the so-called figures of power. Throughout someone’s time on the internet, they will encounter hundreds of advertisements a day, which are most likely personalised for them from the data collected while they are surfing or doom-scrolling online [REF]. This is already an indirect form of being under surveillance: our clicks, pauses and searches are constantly observed in order to predict what we might want next. What looks like “free content” is often a system designed to guide our attention and behaviour in subtle ways.

In a more positive sense, the more massive data collection becomes, the more people begin to notice the system’s imperfections. Mistrust grows, and some users become more cautious about what they share and how they present themselves online. This can have a good effect: it may push people to focus more on their offline lives instead of losing themselves in a carefully curated “fake” world. However, for those whose social and emotional lives already depend heavily on the internet, this shift can also create stress and mental strain—especially when their online identity starts to feel more real, or more valuable, than their offline self. At the same time, these effects are often difficult to see from the outside: friends and family in “real life” might not notice how strongly someone is being shaped by online feedback loops. This creates an ethical challenge, because the signs of manipulation and harm may only become visible within the cloud itself—through patterns of attention, behaviour, and self-presentation.

In other words, the task is to defend the possibility of a real self and a shared public truth inside digital space, so that the promise of collective intelligence does not collapse into collective manipulation.

== Conclusion ==

== References ==
<references />

From Babel to the Cloud

2025-12-18T18:44:17Z

Violafejza:

From Babel to the Cloud

2025-12-18T16:10:59Z

Violafejza:

From Babel to the Cloud

2025-12-18T16:10:02Z

Violafejza: /* Ethical reflections */

= The Rise and Fall of Cyberutopia =
Project for the Perfect Wisdom

== Introduction ==
Did Jorge Luis Borges, in his short story ''The Library of Babel''<ref name=":0">Borges, J. L. (1998). ''The Library of Babel'' (A. Hurley, Trans.). In J. L. Borges, Collected fictions (pp. 112–118).

Penguin. (Original work published 1941)</ref>, get inspired from the limits of his own society at the time which led him to idealise the future and put it in the metaphor of human behaviour, or did he somehow anticipate how humans would be in today’s digital environments? This contribution starts from the idea that our desires as humans – especially the desire for total knowledge and connection – might be more predictable than we think. Borges’ imaginary library, in which he fantasises the idea where all possible books already exist, says a great deal about our present information society and about our goals as a species.

Today we are moving deeper into what can be called the age of '''cyberutopias'''<ref>[[Cyberutopia (preliminary)]]</ref>, which means, technological dreams of a perfectly connected and informed humanity. One example that lies in front of our eyes is the evolution of the Internet aka “the cloud”: an infrastructure in which the traces of almost all human activities are stored, processed and presented back to us as “knowledge”.

This paper follows the metaphor “From Babel to the Cloud” in order to ask how the dream of universal information turns both into a utopia of perfect wisdom and into a dystopia of control, overload and inequality.

== Stage 1: Babel — The Dream of Total Connection ==
In this short story, ''the Library of Babel''<ref name=":0" /> represents a place where all information possible already exists (even though most of the books are total nonsense). As expected, characters of the story were immediately fond of the idea and some of them put their whole life's work into searching for answers (everybody has different desires which leads people to act in ways where they're ready to risk everything just for some peace of mind). Some did succeed, but only in claiming that the library does in fact hold every book possible (which means every answer possible, even the way one dies). This only made people act even more irrational and selfish, again as might be expected from many people.

So why does the idea of “knowing everything”, “having all the answers” manipulate humans so easily that they sometimes lose sense of their reality and their real self? Maybe it is because we are scared of the things we don't know, because it's something we can't control.

Another interesting side of ''the Library of Babel''<ref name=":0" /> is that, depending on which point of view, it can be both a utopia or a dystopia.

* Utopia of total Information: we can be more cautious, intellectual, rational, etc.

In theory, a place like the Library could make people wiser. If every possible answer already exists somewhere, humans could avoid repeating the same mistakes over and over again…

* Dystopia of Despair: overflow of Information, chaos of emotions.

In practice, though, the characters in the story don’t become calmer or more reasonable…

This double face of the Library of Babel – as both a dream of total knowledge and a nightmare of confusion – is important for the whole idea of this cyberutopia.

Very similar promises and dangers appear again when we look at the Internet and the modern ‘cloud’ as a kind of real-world universal library.

== Stage 2: The Cloud — Modern Cyberutopia ==
Slowly the fantasy of this story is starting to look real in our world today, and that of course has started to happen since the invention of the internet. Instead of the infinite books in the library now we have billions of websites, social media posts and all the blueprints of humanity floating around for everybody's fast access. So it all can be perceived as a version of Babel.

When we focus on how the evolution of the internet went, we can notice the similarities between Borges’ Babel and the modern world. Authors in the field of the information society argue that our time is organised more and more around information flows and digital networks (Díaz-Nafría, 2014; Capurro, 2008).[REF2][REF3]

=== The Servers ===
First we start on the physical matter: that would be our form of the Library itself. In reality the “cloud” is made of server farms, hard drives, cooling systems and cables, but in everyday life we hardly think about these buildings and machines. For us it feels like a weightless, invisible “cloud”: we don’t see the physical data centres, we just see the result on our screens, so the whole system appears like a library that is simply given to us with open access.

=== The Web ===
Political scientists like Schulze (2018)[REF1] have shown that the early discourse around the internet was strongly marked by cyber-utopian expectations. So now the web already holds most of the stuff “known to man”, which gives the feeling of total knowledge and puts it at the core of most of society today (the only main difference between this and Babel is that all of the information was created by people themselves and not from the idea of random character combinations). This is the cyberutopian moment: the belief that if almost everything is online and connected, then humanity is finally close to a kind of “perfect wisdom”. We imagine that every question has an answer on the web, that every problem could in theory be solved with enough information and connection.

Thinkers like Pierre Lévy call this the rise of “collective intelligence”: the idea that many minds connected through cyberspace can create new, shared forms of knowledge (Lévy, 1997).[REF4] Yochai Benkler talks about “commons-based peer production”, where people collaborate online on projects like free software or Wikipedia instead of just passively consuming information (Benkler, 2006).[REF5] A simple example of this dream is Wikipedia itself: an online encyclopedia that anyone can read and (almost) anyone can edit. It looks like the perfect symbol of the web as a universal library created “by everyone for everyone”.

At the same time, the web also gives individuals an unprecedented possibility to become visible. The existence of globally known celebrities, political figures, authors or scientists whose work we can follow directly online is proof that it is possible for a person, or a work of somebody, to be known worldwide. Social media accounts, personal websites, video channels or blogs amplify this feeling: the sense that, in principle, anyone could “publish a book in Babel” and find an audience.

=== Social Media ===
Social media is one of the reasons for this form of “perfect connection” in our world today. It makes it possible to be up to date with the news, “new trends”, and interesting stuff happening around the world – by “interesting” is meant what people consider worthy of being trendy. We process all this, but we don’t experience most of it in our real life; instead it happens in our online life. We just perceive it on our screens, and sometimes we forget the feeling of that being reality and it becomes just another piece of news in our feed.

Social media also makes it possible for us to interact with people we would never have met before. Usually it is because we ended up in the same community or the same “corner of the internet”. That already means more enhanced social interactions, where we skip a few “getting to know” phases that could be a little uncomfortable for some people. So, of course, as expected, social media is a crucial part of our lives and also for the social lives of people.

Socialising is a very important part in the survival of humans as a species, so slowly one can say life is starting to sound impossible if the internet were to not exist. Some researchers even talk about “social media addiction”, when people feel they cannot disconnect without stress or fear of missing out. [REF6]. This is why some authors describe the web and the cloud as central elements of the utopia of “perfect connection” and “perfect wisdom”, especially in the utopian families of “The Perfect Wisdom” and “The Perfect Social Order”. So this is another similarity to Borges’ story: fear can create dependency, and it is exactly this fear that makes us attracted to digital systems that promise to store and predict everything.

== Stage 3: Cyber-dystopia — The Fall of the Dream ==
''“The internet has gone “from cyber-utopia to cyber-war””'' (Schulze, 2018) [REF]. What once looked like a space of free information and connection is now increasingly described in terms of conflict, manipulation and control.

The “social media addiction” [REF] that many people experience today is something that is being taken advantage of by those who hold more power. This dependence is built into the algorithms behind almost every form of content consumption. These systems are also used to influence or even manipulate people in their political views, for example in the time before elections and political campaigns. Sometimes this manipulation goes as far as spreading fake news [REF] in order to achieve a specific goal. All of this shows a way of using the internet that is not morally good. So does this still sound so utopian in the end?

This leads us to the next main similarity with the Library of Babel: the dystopia. We are entering an era of the internet where some people have developed a kind of paranoia about the content we receive. Some no longer believe the news at all, since it could be fake news [REF] – just like in Babel, where a book could always give you the wrong information or “knowledge”. These methods of manipulation are becoming more and more creative, especially with the development of AI [REF]. This starts to look very similar to the world of “Big Brother” [REF] and the dystopia of surveillance [REF].

The kind of world that is slowly emerging here is not completely new: writers, filmmakers, game designers and graphic artists have already imagined similar realities in cyberpunk universes such as those of Gibson, Stephenson, “Blade Runner”, “Ghost in the Shell” or “Cyberpunk 2077”.

=== Cyberpunk universes ===
In these cyberpunk worlds, the dream of perfect connection has already collapsed. Most of them show societies that are far more chaotic, violent and unstable than our own, which makes them feel close to us and at the same time uncomfortable to watch. We see how people have lost the war to false hope and try different ways to compensate for it: drugs, implants, hacking or escaping into virtual realities. High technology is still very idealised, but it no longer appears as a solution; it is just the background of everyday struggle.

For example, in ''Neuromancer'' by William Gibson and ''Snow Crash'' by Neal Stephenson, the network is everywhere, but it does not lead to a better or fairer world. Instead, huge corporations and powerful AIs dominate cyberspace, while most people live in poverty or chaos. This is often summed up as “high tech, low life”: technology is extremely advanced, but everyday life is unstable and dangerous. Hacking becomes both a survival strategy and one of the biggest forms of threat.

Then we have worlds like ''Cyberpunk 2077'', ''Blade Runner'' or ''Ghost in the Shell'', where not only are people deeply connected with each other, but the whole city is full of cyberutopian technology. Holograms, neon advertisements, cameras and data streams make the urban space look like a physical version of the cloud instead of something that only exists on our screens. There is also the idea of humans having machine parts, which means the dependency on the digital world has moved from being only mental to also physical, through cybernetic implants and prosthetics [REF].

In most of these stories the protagonists are fragile figures of hope. They try to resist or at least survive within systems (like the corporations in power) that are much bigger than them. Their attitude often fits Borges’ words: ''“If honor and wisdom and happiness are not for me, let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my place be in hell.”'' [REF]

All of these cyberpunk universes are reflections of the bad parts of our internet utopia. They exaggerate tendencies that we can already see: dependence on the digital world, manipulation of power through information, growing surveillance and a constant focus on conflict and destruction. In Borges’ Library of Babel there are also groups who try to control meaning by deciding which books are valuable and which should be destroyed [REF]. In a similar way, in both cyberpunk worlds and in our own cloud-based reality, different powerful actors fight to control what information we see, trust and remember.

=== Ethical reflections ===
...

== Conclusion ==

== References ==
<references />

From Babel to the Cloud

2025-12-18T16:09:06Z

Violafejza: /* Stage 3: Cyber-dystopia — The Fall of the Dream */

From Babel to the Cloud

2025-12-18T14:52:13Z

Violafejza: /* In literature */

= The Rise and Fall of Cyberutopia =
Project for the Perfect Wisdom

== Introduction ==
Did Jorge Luis Borges, in his short story ''The Library of Babel''<ref name=":0">Borges, J. L. (1998). ''The Library of Babel'' (A. Hurley, Trans.). In J. L. Borges, Collected fictions (pp. 112–118).

Penguin. (Original work published 1941)</ref>, get inspired from the limits of his own society at the time which led him to idealise the future and put it in the metaphor of human behaviour, or did he somehow anticipate how humans would be in today’s digital environments? This contribution starts from the idea that our desires as humans – especially the desire for total knowledge and connection – might be more predictable than we think. Borges’ imaginary library, in which he fantasises the idea where all possible books already exist, says a great deal about our present information society and about our goals as a species.

Today we are moving deeper into what can be called the age of '''cyberutopias'''<ref>[[Cyberutopia (preliminary)]]</ref>, which means, technological dreams of a perfectly connected and informed humanity. One example that lies in front of our eyes is the evolution of the Internet aka “the cloud”: an infrastructure in which the traces of almost all human activities are stored, processed and presented back to us as “knowledge”.

This paper follows the metaphor “From Babel to the Cloud” in order to ask how the dream of universal information turns both into a utopia of perfect wisdom and into a dystopia of control, overload and inequality.

== Stage 1: Babel — The Dream of Total Connection ==
In this short story, ''the Library of Babel''<ref name=":0" /> represents a place where all information possible already exists (even though most of the books are total nonsense). As expected, characters of the story were immediately fond of the idea and some of them put their whole life's work into searching for answers (everybody has different desires which leads people to act in ways where they're ready to risk everything just for some peace of mind). Some did succeed, but only in claiming that the library does in fact hold every book possible (which means every answer possible, even the way one dies). This only made people act even more irrational and selfish, again as might be expected from many people.

So why does the idea of “knowing everything”, “having all the answers” manipulate humans so easily that they sometimes lose sense of their reality and their real self? Maybe it is because we are scared of the things we don't know, because it's something we can't control.

Another interesting side of ''the Library of Babel''<ref name=":0" /> is that, depending on which point of view, it can be both a utopia or a dystopia.

* Utopia of total Information: we can be more cautious, intellectual, rational, etc.

In theory, a place like the Library could make people wiser. If every possible answer already exists somewhere, humans could avoid repeating the same mistakes over and over again…

* Dystopia of Despair: overflow of Information, chaos of emotions.

In practice, though, the characters in the story don’t become calmer or more reasonable…

This double face of the Library of Babel – as both a dream of total knowledge and a nightmare of confusion – is important for the whole idea of this cyberutopia.

Very similar promises and dangers appear again when we look at the Internet and the modern ‘cloud’ as a kind of real-world universal library.

== Stage 2: The Cloud — Modern Cyberutopia ==
Slowly the fantasy of this story is starting to look real in our world today, and that of course has started to happen since the invention of the internet. Instead of the infinite books in the library now we have billions of websites, social media posts and all the blueprints of humanity floating around for everybody's fast access. So it all can be perceived as a version of Babel.

When we focus on how the evolution of the internet went, we can notice the similarities between Borges’ Babel and the modern world. Authors in the field of the information society argue that our time is organised more and more around information flows and digital networks (Díaz-Nafría, 2014; Capurro, 2008).[REF2][REF3]

'''The Servers'''

First we start on the physical matter: that would be our form of the Library itself. In reality the “cloud” is made of server farms, hard drives, cooling systems and cables, but in everyday life we hardly think about these buildings and machines. For us it feels like a weightless, invisible “cloud”: we don’t see the physical data centres, we just see the result on our screens, so the whole system appears like a library that is simply given to us with open access.

'''The Web'''

Political scientists like Schulze (2018)[REF1] have shown that the early discourse around the internet was strongly marked by cyber-utopian expectations. So now the web already holds most of the stuff “known to man”, which gives the feeling of total knowledge and puts it at the core of most of society today (the only main difference between this and Babel is that all of the information was created by people themselves and not from the idea of random character combinations). This is the cyberutopian moment: the belief that if almost everything is online and connected, then humanity is finally close to a kind of “perfect wisdom”. We imagine that every question has an answer on the web, that every problem could in theory be solved with enough information and connection.

Thinkers like Pierre Lévy call this the rise of “collective intelligence”: the idea that many minds connected through cyberspace can create new, shared forms of knowledge (Lévy, 1997).[REF4] Yochai Benkler talks about “commons-based peer production”, where people collaborate online on projects like free software or Wikipedia instead of just passively consuming information (Benkler, 2006).[REF5] A simple example of this dream is Wikipedia itself: an online encyclopedia that anyone can read and (almost) anyone can edit. It looks like the perfect symbol of the web as a universal library created “by everyone for everyone”.

At the same time, the web also gives individuals an unprecedented possibility to become visible. The existence of globally known celebrities, political figures, authors or scientists whose work we can follow directly online is proof that it is possible for a person, or a work of somebody, to be known worldwide. Social media accounts, personal websites, video channels or blogs amplify this feeling: the sense that, in principle, anyone could “publish a book in Babel” and find an audience.

'''Social Media'''

Social media is one of the reasons for this form of “perfect connection” in our world today. It makes it possible to be up to date with the news, “new trends”, and interesting stuff happening around the world – by “interesting” is meant what people consider worthy of being trendy. We process all this, but we don’t experience most of it in our real life; instead it happens in our online life. We just perceive it on our screens, and sometimes we forget the feeling of that being reality and it becomes just another piece of news in our feed.

Social media also makes it possible for us to interact with people we would never have met before. Usually it is because we ended up in the same community or the same “corner of the internet”. That already means more enhanced social interactions, where we skip a few “getting to know” phases that could be a little uncomfortable for some people. So, of course, as expected, social media is a crucial part of our lives and also for the social lives of people.

Socialising is a very important part in the survival of humans as a species, so slowly one can say life is starting to sound impossible if the internet were to not exist. Some researchers even talk about “social media addiction”, when people feel they cannot disconnect without stress or fear of missing out. [REF6]. This is why some authors describe the web and the cloud as central elements of the utopia of “perfect connection” and “perfect wisdom”, especially in the utopian families of “The Perfect Wisdom” and “The Perfect Social Order”. So this is another similarity to Borges’ story: fear can create dependency, and it is exactly this fear that makes us attracted to digital systems that promise to store and predict everything.

== Stage 3: Cyber-dystopia — The Fall of the Dream ==
''“The internet has gone “from cyber-utopia to cyber-war””'' (Schulze, 2018) [REF]. What once looked like a space of free information and connection is now increasingly described in terms of conflict, manipulation and control.

The “social media addiction” [REF] that many people experience today is something that is being taken advantage of by those who hold more power. This dependence is built into the algorithms behind almost every form of content consumption. These systems are also used to influence or even manipulate people in their political views, for example in the time before elections and political campaigns. Sometimes this manipulation goes as far as spreading fake news [REF] in order to achieve a specific goal. All of this shows a way of using the internet that is not morally good. So does this still sound so utopian in the end?

This leads us to the next main similarity with the Library of Babel: the dystopia. We are entering an era of the internet where some people have developed a kind of paranoia about the content we receive. Some no longer believe the news at all, since it could be fake news [REF] – just like in Babel, where a book could always give you the wrong information or “knowledge”. These methods of manipulation are becoming more and more creative, especially with the development of AI [REF]. This starts to look very similar to the world of “Big Brother” [REF] and the dystopia of surveillance [REF].

The kind of world that is slowly emerging here is not completely new: writers, filmmakers, game designers and graphic artists have already imagined similar realities in cyberpunk universes such as those of Gibson, Stephenson, “Blade Runner”, “Ghost in the Shell” or “Cyberpunk 2077”.

=== Cyberpunk universes ===

== References ==
<references />

User:Violafejza

2025-12-18T14:30:43Z

Violafejza:

{{Person
|Given name=Viola
|Family name=Fejza
|Institution=Hochschule München (HM) – University of Applied Sciences
|Professional category=Elementary occupations / Unskilled workers
|Academic degree=High School Diploma (secondary)
|Current academic institution=Hochschule München (HM) – University of Applied Sciences
|Current academic level=Bachelor’s Degree
|Current academic degree=Electrical Engineering
|input language=EN (English)
}}
= About me =

=== Short Bio ===
When i started my highschool years i deicided that i want to presue my studies in Electrical Engineering and also started to learn the German language. Now im one year in Munich and im very motivated to study further and be part of this field in the future.

I enrolled myself to the class ''"From Ancient Utopias to Cyberutopias. Introduction to Political Philosophy" of '''Prof. Dr. José María Díaz Nafría''''' because of my interest of the changes to our world, specifically in signs that we see in our present that could also lead to future Utopias.

=== Interests ===
Tech/Robotics

Sci-fi : Films/Books, etc

Music : E-Gutiar

[[Category:Person]]

From Babel to the Cloud

2025-12-18T14:28:10Z

Violafejza:

= The Rise and Fall of Cyberutopia =
Project for the Perfect Wisdom

== Introduction ==
Did Jorge Luis Borges, in his short story ''The Library of Babel''<ref name=":0">Borges, J. L. (1998). ''The Library of Babel'' (A. Hurley, Trans.). In J. L. Borges, Collected fictions (pp. 112–118).

Penguin. (Original work published 1941)</ref>, get inspired from the limits of his own society at the time which led him to idealise the future and put it in the metaphor of human behaviour, or did he somehow anticipate how humans would be in today’s digital environments? This contribution starts from the idea that our desires as humans – especially the desire for total knowledge and connection – might be more predictable than we think. Borges’ imaginary library, in which he fantasises the idea where all possible books already exist, says a great deal about our present information society and about our goals as a species.

Today we are moving deeper into what can be called the age of '''cyberutopias'''<ref>[[Cyberutopia (preliminary)]]</ref>, which means, technological dreams of a perfectly connected and informed humanity. One example that lies in front of our eyes is the evolution of the Internet aka “the cloud”: an infrastructure in which the traces of almost all human activities are stored, processed and presented back to us as “knowledge”.

This paper follows the metaphor “From Babel to the Cloud” in order to ask how the dream of universal information turns both into a utopia of perfect wisdom and into a dystopia of control, overload and inequality.

== Stage 1: Babel — The Dream of Total Connection ==
In this short story, ''the Library of Babel''<ref name=":0" /> represents a place where all information possible already exists (even though most of the books are total nonsense). As expected, characters of the story were immediately fond of the idea and some of them put their whole life's work into searching for answers (everybody has different desires which leads people to act in ways where they're ready to risk everything just for some peace of mind). Some did succeed, but only in claiming that the library does in fact hold every book possible (which means every answer possible, even the way one dies). This only made people act even more irrational and selfish, again as might be expected from many people.

So why does the idea of “knowing everything”, “having all the answers” manipulate humans so easily that they sometimes lose sense of their reality and their real self? Maybe it is because we are scared of the things we don't know, because it's something we can't control.

Another interesting side of ''the Library of Babel''<ref name=":0" /> is that, depending on which point of view, it can be both a utopia or a dystopia.

* Utopia of total Information: we can be more cautious, intellectual, rational, etc.

In theory, a place like the Library could make people wiser. If every possible answer already exists somewhere, humans could avoid repeating the same mistakes over and over again…

* Dystopia of Despair: overflow of Information, chaos of emotions.

In practice, though, the characters in the story don’t become calmer or more reasonable…

This double face of the Library of Babel – as both a dream of total knowledge and a nightmare of confusion – is important for the whole idea of this cyberutopia.

Very similar promises and dangers appear again when we look at the Internet and the modern ‘cloud’ as a kind of real-world universal library.

== Stage 2: The Cloud — Modern Cyberutopia ==
Slowly the fantasy of this story is starting to look real in our world today, and that of course has started to happen since the invention of the internet. Instead of the infinite books in the library now we have billions of websites, social media posts and all the blueprints of humanity floating around for everybody's fast access. So it all can be perceived as a version of Babel.

When we focus on how the evolution of the internet went, we can notice the similarities between Borges’ Babel and the modern world. Authors in the field of the information society argue that our time is organised more and more around information flows and digital networks (Díaz-Nafría, 2014; Capurro, 2008).[REF2][REF3]

'''The Servers'''

First we start on the physical matter: that would be our form of the Library itself. In reality the “cloud” is made of server farms, hard drives, cooling systems and cables, but in everyday life we hardly think about these buildings and machines. For us it feels like a weightless, invisible “cloud”: we don’t see the physical data centres, we just see the result on our screens, so the whole system appears like a library that is simply given to us with open access.

'''The Web'''

Political scientists like Schulze (2018)[REF1] have shown that the early discourse around the internet was strongly marked by cyber-utopian expectations. So now the web already holds most of the stuff “known to man”, which gives the feeling of total knowledge and puts it at the core of most of society today (the only main difference between this and Babel is that all of the information was created by people themselves and not from the idea of random character combinations). This is the cyberutopian moment: the belief that if almost everything is online and connected, then humanity is finally close to a kind of “perfect wisdom”. We imagine that every question has an answer on the web, that every problem could in theory be solved with enough information and connection.

Thinkers like Pierre Lévy call this the rise of “collective intelligence”: the idea that many minds connected through cyberspace can create new, shared forms of knowledge (Lévy, 1997).[REF4] Yochai Benkler talks about “commons-based peer production”, where people collaborate online on projects like free software or Wikipedia instead of just passively consuming information (Benkler, 2006).[REF5] A simple example of this dream is Wikipedia itself: an online encyclopedia that anyone can read and (almost) anyone can edit. It looks like the perfect symbol of the web as a universal library created “by everyone for everyone”.

At the same time, the web also gives individuals an unprecedented possibility to become visible. The existence of globally known celebrities, political figures, authors or scientists whose work we can follow directly online is proof that it is possible for a person, or a work of somebody, to be known worldwide. Social media accounts, personal websites, video channels or blogs amplify this feeling: the sense that, in principle, anyone could “publish a book in Babel” and find an audience.

'''Social Media'''

Social media is one of the reasons for this form of “perfect connection” in our world today. It makes it possible to be up to date with the news, “new trends”, and interesting stuff happening around the world – by “interesting” is meant what people consider worthy of being trendy. We process all this, but we don’t experience most of it in our real life; instead it happens in our online life. We just perceive it on our screens, and sometimes we forget the feeling of that being reality and it becomes just another piece of news in our feed.

Social media also makes it possible for us to interact with people we would never have met before. Usually it is because we ended up in the same community or the same “corner of the internet”. That already means more enhanced social interactions, where we skip a few “getting to know” phases that could be a little uncomfortable for some people. So, of course, as expected, social media is a crucial part of our lives and also for the social lives of people.

Socialising is a very important part in the survival of humans as a species, so slowly one can say life is starting to sound impossible if the internet were to not exist. Some researchers even talk about “social media addiction”, when people feel they cannot disconnect without stress or fear of missing out. [REF6]. This is why some authors describe the web and the cloud as central elements of the utopia of “perfect connection” and “perfect wisdom”, especially in the utopian families of “The Perfect Wisdom” and “The Perfect Social Order”. So this is another similarity to Borges’ story: fear can create dependency, and it is exactly this fear that makes us attracted to digital systems that promise to store and predict everything.

== Stage 3: Cyber-dystopia — The Fall of the Dream ==
''“The internet has gone “from cyber-utopia to cyber-war””'' (Schulze, 2018) [REF]. What once looked like a space of free information and connection is now increasingly described in terms of conflict, manipulation and control.

The “social media addiction” [REF] that many people experience today is something that is being taken advantage of by those who hold more power. This dependence is built into the algorithms behind almost every form of content consumption. These systems are also used to influence or even manipulate people in their political views, for example in the time before elections and political campaigns. Sometimes this manipulation goes as far as spreading fake news [REF] in order to achieve a specific goal. All of this shows a way of using the internet that is not morally good. So does this still sound so utopian in the end?

This leads us to the next main similarity with the Library of Babel: the dystopia. We are entering an era of the internet where some people have developed a kind of paranoia about the content we receive. Some no longer believe the news at all, since it could be fake news [REF] – just like in Babel, where a book could always give you the wrong information or “knowledge”. These methods of manipulation are becoming more and more creative, especially with the development of AI [REF]. This starts to look very similar to the world of “Big Brother” [REF] and the dystopia of surveillance [REF].

The kind of world that is slowly emerging here is not completely new: writers, filmmakers, game designers and graphic artists have already imagined similar realities in cyberpunk universes such as those of Gibson, Stephenson, “Blade Runner”, “Ghost in the Shell” or “Cyberpunk 2077”.

=== Cyberpunk universes ===

==== In literature ====

== References ==
<references />

From Babel to the Cloud

2025-12-18T13:08:11Z

Violafejza: stage 2 again

From Babel to the Cloud

2025-12-17T18:49:15Z

Violafejza:

From Babel to the Cloud

2025-12-17T18:48:28Z

Violafejza:

The Rise and Fall of Cyberutopia

Project for the Perfect Wisdom

== Introduction ==
Did Jorge Luis Borges, in his short story ''The Library of Babel''<ref name=":0">Borges, J. L. (1998). ''The Library of Babel'' (A. Hurley, Trans.). In J. L. Borges, Collected fictions (pp. 112–118).

Penguin. (Original work published 1941)</ref>, get inspired from the limits of his own society at the time which led him to idealise the future and put it in the metaphor of human behaviour, or did he somehow anticipate how humans would be in today’s digital environments? This contribution starts from the idea that our desires as humans – especially the desire for total knowledge and connection – might be more predictable than we think. Borges’ imaginary library, in which he fantasises the idea where all possible books already exist, says a great deal about our present information society and about our goals as a species.

Today we are moving deeper into what can be called the age of '''cyberutopias'''<ref>[[Cyberutopia (preliminary)]]</ref>, which means, technological dreams of a perfectly connected and informed humanity. One example that lies in front of our eyes is the evolution of the Internet aka “the cloud”: an infrastructure in which the traces of almost all human activities are stored, processed and presented back to us as “knowledge”.

This paper follows the metaphor “From Babel to the Cloud” in order to ask how the dream of universal information turns both into a utopia of perfect wisdom and into a dystopia of control, overload and inequality.

== Stage 1: Babel — The Dream of Total Connection ==
In this short story, ''the Library of Babel''<ref name=":0" /> represents a place where all information possible already exists (even though most of the books are total nonsense). As expected, characters of the story were immediately fond of the idea and some of them put their whole life's work into searching for answers (everybody has different desires which leads people to act in ways where they're ready to risk everything just for some peace of mind). Some did succeed, but only in claiming that the library does in fact hold every book possible (which means every answer possible, even the way one dies). This only made people act even more irrational and selfish, again as might be expected from many people.

So why does the idea of “knowing everything”, “having all the answers” manipulate humans so easily that they sometimes lose sense of their reality and their real self? Maybe it is because we are scared of the things we don't know, because it's something we can't control.

Another interesting side of ''the Library of Babel''<ref name=":0" /> is that, depending on which point of view, it can be both a utopia or a dystopia.

* Utopia of total Information: we can be more cautious, intellectual, rational, etc.

In theory, a place like the Library could make people wiser. If every possible answer already exists somewhere, humans could avoid repeating the same mistakes over and over again…

* Dystopia of Despair: overflow of Information, chaos of emotions.

In practice, though, the characters in the story don’t become calmer or more reasonable…

This double face of the Library of Babel – as both a dream of total knowledge and a nightmare of confusion – is important for the whole idea of this cyberutopia.

Very similar promises and dangers appear again when we look at the Internet and the modern ‘cloud’ as a kind of real-world universal library.

== Stage 2: The Cloud — Modern Cyberutopia ==
Slowly the fantasy of this story is starting to look real in our world today, and that of course has started to happen since the invention of the internet. Instead of the infinite books in the library now we have billions of websites, social media posts and all the blueprints of humanity floating around for everybody's fast access. So it all can be perceived as a version of Babel. For us, the cloud is just ‘there’ like the Library is just ‘there’ for the librarians.

'''The Servers'''

First we start on the physical matter, that would be our form of the Library itself, which is just as fictional since we're also talking about imaginable space. It feels like a weightless, invisible ‘cloud’ - the data of the internet we don't experience in the material world; it is only something that exists within the internet itself - we never think about the buildings and the cables, so it almost feels exactly the same as a library just given to you with open access.

'''The Web'''

Political scientists like Schulze (2018) [REF] have shown that the early discourse around the internet was strongly marked by cyber-utopian expectations. So now the web already holds most of the stuff “known to man”, which gives the feeling of total knowledge and holds the core of most of the society today (The only main difference between this and Babel is that all of the information was created by people themselves and not from the idea of random character combinations). This is the cyberutopian moment: the belief that if almost everything is online and connected, then humanity is finally close to a kind of “perfect wisdom”. We imagine that every question has an answer on the web, that every problem could in theory be solved with enough information and connection. But a perfect connection is already reality - one example is the existence of celebrities, political figures, authors, scientists and their work - are proof that it's possible for a person/a work of somebody to be known world wide.

'''Social Media'''

This is one of the reasons for the form of perfect connection in our world today. Social Media makes it possible to be up to date with the news, “New trends”, interesting stuff happening around the world - by interesting is meant what the people think as something worthy of "being trendy” - such stuff we process but don't experience in our real life, instead our life online, we just perceive in our screens which sometimes we forget the feeling of that being reality and it's just another news on our screens. (like a form of object permanence [REF])

Social Media makes it possible for us to interact with people we would never have met before, also it's usually because you ended up on the same community or aka “corner of the internet”. That already means more enhanced social interactions, where we skip a few get to know phases that could be a little uncomfortable for some people.So of course as expected Social Media is a crucial part of our lives and also for the social lives of people.

Socializing is a very important part in the survival of humans as species, so slowly one can say, life is starting to sound impossible if the internet were to not exist. So has it also become a form of addiction [REF] to humans? - Since we can't live without it. We’re very dependent on having information accessible as fast as possible. So this is another similarity from Borges story, the fear people can create dependency, and it is exactly this fear that makes us attracted to digital systems that promise to store and predict everything.

We can also notice how this character trait has been taken advantage of, by people who hold more power. In the build in algorithms of now almost every form of content consummation. It even is used to manipulate people for their political stands, for example before political campaigns. Sometimes it goes to even showing fake news [REF] in order to achieve this goal. Which are all methods of not good moral usage of the internet. Now it has all become just a marketing and economy strategy of control and influence of people, usually without them even noticing. So does this all sound so nice at the end?

This leads us to exactly the next main similarity of the Library of Babel mentioned, the dystopia. We're entering this era of the internet where some people have formed a level of paranoia from the content we are receiving. Some of them don't believe the news anymore (since they could be false news [REF] - just how it's possible that a book on Babel could show you the wrong information/knowlage). So these methods of manipulation are getting more and more creative - even with the creation of AI [REF]. This also is similar of the world of Big Brother [REF] and it being the dystopia of surveillance [REF].

== References ==
<references />

From Babel to the Cloud

2025-12-17T18:19:57Z

Violafejza: stage 2 added not edited

= From Babel to the Cloud: The Rise and Fall of Cyberutopia =
Project for the Perfect Wisdom

== Introduction ==
Did Jorge Luis Borges, in his short story ''The Library of Babel''<ref name=":0">Borges, J. L. (1998). ''The Library of Babel'' (A. Hurley, Trans.). In J. L. Borges, Collected fictions (pp. 112–118).

Penguin. (Original work published 1941)</ref>, get inspired from the limits of his own society at the time which led him to idealise the future and put it in the metaphor of human behaviour, or did he somehow anticipate how humans would be in today’s digital environments? This contribution starts from the idea that our desires as humans – especially the desire for total knowledge and connection – might be more predictable than we think. Borges’ imaginary library, in which he fantasises the idea where all possible books already exist, says a great deal about our present information society and about our goals as a species.

Today we are moving deeper into what can be called the age of '''cyberutopias'''<ref>[[Cyberutopia (preliminary)]]</ref>, which means, technological dreams of a perfectly connected and informed humanity. One example that lies in front of our eyes is the evolution of the Internet aka “the cloud”: an infrastructure in which the traces of almost all human activities are stored, processed and presented back to us as “knowledge”.

This paper follows the metaphor “From Babel to the Cloud” in order to ask how the dream of universal information turns both into a utopia of perfect wisdom and into a dystopia of control, overload and inequality.

== Stage 1: Babel — The Dream of Total Connection ==
In this short story, ''the Library of Babel''<ref name=":0" /> represents a place where all information possible already exists (even though most of the books are total nonsense). As expected, characters of the story were immediately fond of the idea and some of them put their whole life's work into searching for answers (everybody has different desires which leads people to act in ways where they're ready to risk everything just for some peace of mind). Some did succeed, but only in claiming that the library does in fact hold every book possible (which means every answer possible, even the way one dies). This only made people act even more irrational and selfish, again as might be expected from many people.

So why does the idea of “knowing everything”, “having all the answers” manipulate humans so easily that they sometimes lose sense of their reality and their real self? Maybe it is because we are scared of the things we don't know, because it's something we can't control.

Another interesting side of ''the Library of Babel''<ref name=":0" /> is that, depending on which point of view, it can be both a utopia or a dystopia.

* Utopia of total Information: we can be more cautious, intellectual, rational, etc.

In theory, a place like the Library could make people wiser. If every possible answer already exists somewhere, humans could avoid repeating the same mistakes over and over again…

* Dystopia of Despair: overflow of Information, chaos of emotions.

In practice, though, the characters in the story don’t become calmer or more reasonable…

This double face of the Library of Babel – as both a dream of total knowledge and a nightmare of confusion – is important for the whole idea of this cyberutopia.

Very similar promises and dangers appear again when we look at the Internet and the modern ‘cloud’ as a kind of real-world universal library.

== Stage 2: The Cloud — Modern Cyberutopia ==
Slowly the fantasy of this story is starting to look real in our world today, and that of course has started to happen since the invention of the internet. Instead of the infinite books in the library now we have billions of websites, social media posts and all the blueprints of humanity floating around for everybody's fast access. So it all can be perceived as a version of Babel. For us, the cloud is just ‘there’ like the Library is just ‘there’ for the librarians.

'''The Servers'''

First we start on the physical matter, that would be our form of the Library itself, which is just as fictional since we're also talking about imaginable space. It feels like a weightless, invisible ‘cloud’ - the data of the internet we don't experience in the material world; it is only something that exists within the internet itself - we never think about the buildings and the cables, so it almost feels exactly the same as a library just given to you with open access.

'''The Web'''

Political scientists like Schulze (2018) [REF] have shown that the early discourse around the internet was strongly marked by cyber-utopian expectations. So now the web already holds most of the stuff “known to man”, which gives the feeling of total knowledge and holds the core of most of the society today (The only main difference between this and Babel is that all of the information was created by people themselves and not from the idea of random character combinations). This is the cyberutopian moment: the belief that if almost everything is online and connected, then humanity is finally close to a kind of “perfect wisdom”. We imagine that every question has an answer on the web, that every problem could in theory be solved with enough information and connection. But a perfect connection is already reality - one example is the existence of celebrities, political figures, authors, scientists and their work - are proof that it's possible for a person/a work of somebody to be known world wide.

'''Social Media'''

This is one of the reasons for the form of perfect connection in our world today. Social Media makes it possible to be up to date with the news, “New trends”, interesting stuff happening around the world - by interesting is meant what the people think as something worthy of "being trendy” - such stuff we process but don't experience in our real life, instead our life online, we just perceive in our screens which sometimes we forget the feeling of that being reality and it's just another news on our screens. (like a form of object permanence [REF])

Social Media makes it possible for us to interact with people we would never have met before, also it's usually because you ended up on the same community or aka “corner of the internet”. That already means more enhanced social interactions, where we skip a few get to know phases that could be a little uncomfortable for some people.So of course as expected Social Media is a crucial part of our lives and also for the social lives of people.

Socializing is a very important part in the survival of humans as species, so slowly one can say, life is starting to sound impossible if the internet were to not exist. So has it also become a form of addiction [REF] to humans? - Since we can't live without it. We’re very dependent on having information accessible as fast as possible. So this is another similarity from Borges story, the fear people can create dependency, and it is exactly this fear that makes us attracted to digital systems that promise to store and predict everything.

We can also notice how this character trait has been taken advantage of, by people who hold more power. In the build in algorithms of now almost every form of content consummation. It even is used to manipulate people for their political stands, for example before political campaigns. Sometimes it goes to even showing fake news [REF] in order to achieve this goal. Which are all methods of not good moral usage of the internet. Now it has all become just a marketing and economy strategy of control and influence of people, usually without them even noticing. So does this all sound so nice at the end?

This leads us to exactly the next main similarity of the Library of Babel mentioned, the dystopia. We're entering this era of the internet where some people have formed a level of paranoia from the content we are receiving. Some of them don't believe the news anymore (since they could be false news [REF] - just how it's possible that a book on Babel could show you the wrong information/knowlage). So these methods of manipulation are getting more and more creative - even with the creation of AI [REF]. This also is similar of the world of Big Brother [REF] and it being the dystopia of surveillance [REF].

== References ==
<references />

From Babel to the Cloud

2025-12-17T17:07:35Z

Violafejza:

From Babel to the Cloud

2025-12-17T17:06:50Z

Violafejza:

= From Babel to the Cloud: The Rise and Fall of Cyberutopia =
Project in Perfect Wisdom

== Introduction ==
Did Jorge Luis Borges, in his short story ''The Library of Babel''<ref name=":0">Borges, J. L. (1998). ''The Library of Babel'' (A. Hurley, Trans.). In J. L. Borges, Collected fictions (pp. 112–118).

Penguin. (Original work published 1941)</ref>, get inspired from the limits of his own society at the time which led him to idealise the future and put it in the metaphor of human behaviour, or did he somehow anticipate how humans would be in today’s digital environments? This contribution starts from the idea that our desires as humans – especially the desire for total knowledge and connection – might be more predictable than we think. Borges’ imaginary library, in which he fantasises the idea where all possible books already exist, says a great deal about our present information society and about our goals as a species.

Today we are moving deeper into what can be called the age of '''cyberutopias'''<ref>[[Cyberutopia (preliminary)]]</ref>, which means, technological dreams of a perfectly connected and informed humanity. One example that lies in front of our eyes is the evolution of the Internet aka “the cloud”: an infrastructure in which the traces of almost all human activities are stored, processed and presented back to us as “knowledge”.

This paper follows the metaphor “From Babel to the Cloud” in order to ask how the dream of universal information turns both into a utopia of perfect wisdom and into a dystopia of control, overload and inequality.

== Stage 1: Babel — The Dream of Total Connection ==
In this short story, ''the Library of Babel''<ref name=":0" /> represents a place where all information possible already exists (even though most of the books are total nonsense). As expected, characters of the story were immediately fond of the idea and some of them put their whole life's work into searching for answers (everybody has different desires which leads people to act in ways where they're ready to risk everything just for some peace of mind). Some did succeed, but only in claiming that the library does in fact hold every book possible (which means every answer possible, even the way one dies). This only made people act even more irrational and selfish, again as might be expected from many people.

So why does the idea of “knowing everything”, “having all the answers” manipulate humans so easily that they sometimes lose sense of their reality and their real self? Maybe it is because we are scared of the things we don't know, because it's something we can't control.

Another interesting side of ''the Library of Babel''<ref name=":0" /> is that, depending on which point of view, it can be both a utopia or a dystopia.

* Utopia of total Information: we can be more cautious, intellectual, rational, etc.

In theory, a place like the Library could make people wiser. If every possible answer already exists somewhere, humans could avoid repeating the same mistakes over and over again…

* Dystopia of Despair: overflow of Information, chaos of emotions.

In practice, though, the characters in the story don’t become calmer or more reasonable…

This double face of the Library of Babel – as both a dream of total knowledge and a nightmare of confusion – is important for the whole idea of this cyberutopia.

Very similar promises and dangers appear again when we look at the Internet and the modern ‘cloud’ as a kind of real-world universal library.

== Stage 2: The Cloud — Modern Cyberutopia ==
...

== References ==
<references />

From Babel to the Cloud

2025-12-15T22:36:41Z

Violafejza: stage 1 added

== Introduction ==
Did Jorge Luis Borges, in his short story ''The Library of Babel''<ref name=":0">Borges, J. L. (1998). ''The Library of Babel'' (A. Hurley, Trans.). In J. L. Borges, Collected fictions (pp. 112–118).

Penguin. (Original work published 1941)</ref>, get inspired from the limits of his own society at the time which led him to idealise the future and put it in the metaphor of human behaviour, or did he somehow anticipate how humans would be in today’s digital environments? This contribution starts from the idea that our desires as humans – especially the desire for total knowledge and connection – might be more predictable than we think. Borges’ imaginary library, in which he fantasises the idea where all possible books already exist, says a great deal about our present information society and about our goals as a species.

Today we are moving deeper into what can be called the age of '''cyberutopias'''<ref>[[Cyberutopia (preliminary)]]</ref>, which means, technological dreams of a perfectly connected and informed humanity. One example that lies in front of our eyes is the evolution of the Internet aka “the cloud”: an infrastructure in which the traces of almost all human activities are stored, processed and presented back to us as “knowledge”.

This paper follows the metaphor “From Babel to the Cloud” in order to ask how the dream of universal information turns both into a utopia of perfect wisdom and into a dystopia of control, overload and inequality.

== Stage 1: Babel — The Dream of Total Connection ==
In this short story, ''the Library of Babel''<ref name=":0" /> represents a place where all information possible already exists (even though most of the books are total nonsense). As expected, characters of the story were immediately fond of the idea and some of them put their whole life's work into searching for answers (everybody has different desires which leads people to act in ways where they're ready to risk everything just for some peace of mind). Some did succeed, but only in claiming that the library does in fact hold every book possible (which means every answer possible, even the way one dies). This only made people act even more irrational and selfish, again as might be expected from many people.

So why does the idea of “knowing everything”, “having all the answers” manipulate humans so easily that they sometimes lose sense of their reality and their real self? Maybe it is because we are scared of the things we don't know, because it's something we can't control.

Another interesting side of ''the Library of Babel''<ref name=":0" /> is that, depending on which point of view, it can be both a utopia or a dystopia.

* Utopia of total Information: we can be more cautious, intellectual, rational, etc.

In theory, a place like the Library could make people wiser. If every possible answer already exists somewhere, humans could avoid repeating the same mistakes over and over again…

* Dystopia of Despair: overflow of Information, chaos of emotions.

In practice, though, the characters in the story don’t become calmer or more reasonable…

This double face of the Library of Babel – as both a dream of total knowledge and a nightmare of confusion – is important for the whole idea of this cyberutopia.

Very similar promises and dangers appear again when we look at the Internet and the modern ‘cloud’ as a kind of real-world universal library.

== Stage 2: The Cloud — Modern Cyberutopia ==
...

== References ==
<references />

From Babel to the Cloud

2025-12-09T16:29:16Z

Violafejza:

== Introduction ==
Did Jorge Luis Borges, in his short story ''The Library of Babel''<ref>Borges, J. L. (1998). ''The Library of Babel'' (A. Hurley, Trans.). In J. L. Borges, Collected fictions (pp. 112–118).

Penguin. (Original work published 1941)</ref>, get inspired from the limits of his own society at the time which led him to idealise the future and put it in the metaphor of human behaviour, or did he somehow anticipate how humans would be in today’s digital environments? This contribution starts from the idea that our desires as humans – especially the desire for total knowledge and connection – might be more predictable than we think. Borges’ imaginary library, in which he fantasises the idea where all possible books already exist, says a great deal about our present information society and about our goals as a species.

Today we are moving deeper into what can be called the age of '''cyberutopias'''<ref>[[Cyberutopia (preliminary)]]</ref>, which means, technological dreams of a perfectly connected and informed humanity. One example that lies in front of our eyes is the evolution of the Internet aka “the cloud”: an infrastructure in which the traces of almost all human activities are stored, processed and presented back to us as “knowledge”.

This paper follows the metaphor “From Babel to the Cloud” in order to ask how the dream of universal information turns both into a utopia of perfect wisdom and into a dystopia of control, overload and inequality.

== References ==
<references />

From Babel to the Cloud

2025-12-09T16:16:20Z

Violafejza: introduction

== Introduction ==
Did Jorge Luis Borges, in his short story ''The Library of Babel''<ref>Jorge Luis Borges, ''The Library of Babel''</ref>, get inspired from the limits of his own society at the time which led him to idealise the future and put it in the metaphor of human behaviour, or did he somehow anticipate how humans would be in today’s digital environments? This contribution starts from the idea that our desires as humans – especially the desire for total knowledge and connection – might be more predictable than we think. Borges’ imaginary library, in which he fantasises the idea where all possible books already exist, says a great deal about our present information society and about our goals as a species.

Today we are moving deeper into what can be called the age of '''cyberutopias'''<ref>[[Cyberutopia (preliminary)]]</ref>, which means, technological dreams of a perfectly connected and informed humanity. One example that lies in front of our eyes is the evolution of the Internet aka “the cloud”: an infrastructure in which the traces of almost all human activities are stored, processed and presented back to us as “knowledge”.

This paper follows the metaphor “From Babel to the Cloud” in order to ask how the dream of universal information turns both into a utopia of perfect wisdom and into a dystopia of control, overload and inequality.

== References ==
<references />

From Babel to the Cloud

2025-12-08T17:57:27Z

Violafejza: Created page with "The Perfect Wisdom Project"

The Perfect Wisdom Project

Draft:Cybersubsidiarity

2025-12-08T17:32:18Z

Violafejza: Blanked the page

Draft:Cybersubsidiarity

2025-12-08T16:45:53Z

Violafejza: created the page

Project on the works...

- Viola

User:Violafejza

2025-11-07T12:53:38Z

Violafejza:

{{Person
|Given name=Viola
|Family name=Fejza
|Image filename=I23124 0844.JPG
|Sex=Female
|Country=North Macedonia
|Institution=Hochschule München (HM) – University of Applied Sciences
|Professional category=Elementary occupations / Unskilled workers
|Academic degree=High School Diploma (secondary)
|Current academic institution=Hochschule München (HM) – University of Applied Sciences
|Current academic level=Bachelor’s Degree
|Current academic degree=Electrical Engineering
|input language=EN (English)
}}
= About me =

=== Short Bio ===
I was born and raised in North Macedonia, with albanian heritage. When i started my highschool years i deicided that i want to presue my studies in Electrical Engineering and also started to learn the German language. Now im one year in Munich and im very motivated to study further and be part of this field in the future.

I enrolled myself to the class ''"From Ancient Utopias to Cyberutopias. Introduction to Political Philosophy" of '''Prof. Dr. José María Díaz Nafría''''' because of my interest of the changes to our world, specifically in signs that we see in our present that could also lead to future Utopias.

=== Interests ===
Tech/Robotics

Sci-fi : Films/Books, etc

Music : E-Gutiar

*

[[Category:Person]]

Draft talk:Information

2025-11-06T16:38:17Z

Violafejza:

I think information mustn't be new.
Information for GlossaLAB Workshop 2025

'''"Novelty''' represents a crucial aspect of information within Shannon's theory"

User:Violafejza

2025-11-06T16:22:18Z

Violafejza:

User:Violafejza

2025-10-27T16:19:45Z

Violafejza:

{{Person
|Given name=Viola
|Family name=Fejza
|Image filename=I23124 0844.JPG
|Sex=Female
|Country=North Macedonia
|Institution=Hochschule München (HM) – University of Applied Sciences
|Academic degree=High School Diploma (secondary)
|Current academic institution=Hochschule München (HM) – University of Applied Sciences
|Current academic level=Bachelor’s Degree
|Current academic degree=Electrical Engineering
|input language=EN (English)
}}
= About me =

*

[[Category:Person]]

User:Violafejza

2025-10-18T15:08:11Z

Violafejza: /* Short Bio */

{{Person
|Given name=Viola
|Family name=Fejza
|Image filename=I23124 0844.JPG
|Sex=Female
|Country=North Macedonia
|Institution=Hochschule München (HM) – University of Applied Sciences
|Academic degree=High School Diploma (secondary)
|Current academic institution=Hochschule München (HM) – University of Applied Sciences
|Current academic level=Bachelor’s Degree
|Current academic degree=Electrical Engineering
|input language=EN (English)
}}
= About me =

=== Short Bio ===
I was born and raised in North Macedonia, with albanian heritage. When i started my highschool years i deicided that i want to presue my studies in Electrical Engineering and also started to learn the German language. Now im one year in Munich and im very motivated to study further and be part of this field in the future.

I enrolled myself to the class "From Ancient Utopias to Cyberutopias. Introduction to Political Philosophy" of Prof. Dr. José María Díaz Nafría because of my interest of the changes to our world, specifically in signs that we see in our present that could also lead to future Utopias.

=== Interests ===

* Sci-fi : Films/Books
* Tech/Robotics : (Reason of studying Electrical Engineering)
* Music : E-Gutiar

[[Category:Person]]

User:Violafejza

2025-10-18T15:02:21Z

Violafejza:

{{Person
|Given name=Viola
|Family name=Fejza
|Image filename=I23124 0844.JPG
|Sex=Female
|Country=North Macedonia
|Institution=Hochschule München (HM) – University of Applied Sciences
|Academic degree=High School Diploma (secondary)
|Current academic institution=Hochschule München (HM) – University of Applied Sciences
|Current academic level=Bachelor’s Degree
|Current academic degree=Electrical Engineering
|input language=EN (English)
}}
= About me =

=== Short Bio ===
I was born and raised in North Macedonia, with albanian heritage. When i started my highschool years i deicided that i want to presue my studies in Electrical Engineering and also started to learn the German language. Now im one year in Munich and im very motivated to study further and be part of this field in the future.

=== Interests ===

* Sci-fi : Films/Books
* Tech/Robotics : (Reason of studying Electrical Engineering)
* Music : Gutiar

[[Category:Person]]

User:Violafejza

2025-10-18T14:46:08Z

Violafejza:

{{Person
|Given name=Viola
|Family name=Fejza
|Image filename=I23124 0844.JPG
|Sex=Female
|Country=North Macedonia
|Institution=Hochschule München (HM) – University of Applied Sciences
|Academic degree=High School Diploma (secondary)
|Current academic institution=Hochschule München (HM) – University of Applied Sciences
|Current academic level=Bachelor’s Degree
|Current academic degree=Electrical Engineering
|input language=EN (English)
}}
= About me =
[[Category:Person]]

User:Violafejza

2025-10-18T14:40:36Z

Violafejza:

{{Person
|Given name=Viola
|Family name=Fejza
|Image filename=I23124 0844.JPG
|Sex=Female
|Country=North Macedonia
|Institution=Hochschule München (HM) – University of Applied Sciences
|Academic degree=High School Diploma (secondary)
|Current academic institution=Hochschule München (HM) – University of Applied Sciences
|Current academic level=Bachelor’s Degree
|Current academic degree=Electrical Engineering
|input language=EN (English)
}}
[[Category:Person]]

File:I23124 0844.JPG

2025-10-18T14:40:32Z

Violafejza:

User:Violafejza

2025-10-18T14:21:08Z

Violafejza: create user page

{{Person}}[[Category:Person]]