Jump to content

From Babel to the Cloud

From glossaLAB

anon

Clarification activity Utopias and the information society
Author(s) Viola Fejza
Creation date Dec 2025
Status 🔵 Ready to publish
Reviews Rev.1

The Rise and Fall of Cyberutopia

Did Jorge Luis Borges, in his short story The Library of Babel[1], 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[2], 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[1] 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[1] 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[1] 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).[3][4]

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)[5] 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[1] 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)[6]. 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)[7]. 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[1]” 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[8][9]. 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”[10] and “The Perfect Social Order”[10]. 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)[5]. 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”[8] 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[11] 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 [11]– 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[12]. This starts to look very similar to the world of “Big Brother”[13] and the dystopia of surveillance[14].

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 [15].

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’ [1] 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.

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 [1]. 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[16] 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

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 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)
  2. ↑ Cyberutopia (preliminary)
  3. ↑ Díaz-Nafría, J. M. (2014). Ethics at the age of information. Systema, 2(3), 43–52.
  4. ↑ 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.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Schulze, M. (2018). From cyber-utopia to cyber-war: Normative change in cyberspace (Doctoral dissertation, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Germany). https://doi.org/10.22032/DBT.35107 revistas.pucsp.br
  6. ↑ Lévy, P. (1997). Collective intelligence: Mankind’s emerging world in cyberspace (R. Bononno, Trans.). Perseus Books.
  7. ↑ Benkler, Y. (2006). The wealth of networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom. Yale University Press.
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 Goldman, Bruce. 2021. “Addictive Potential of Social Media, Explained.” Stanford Medicine News Center (Insights), October 29, 2021. https://med.stanford.edu/news/insights/2021/10/addictive-potential-of-social-media-explained.html
  9. ↑ 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. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph14030311
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 From ancient utopias to cyberutopias
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 Jardine, Eric. 2019. “Beware Fake News.” Centre for International Governance Innovation. April 2, 2019. https://www.cigionline.org/articles/beware-fake-news/
  12. ↑ Artificial Intelligence (Cyberutopias)
  13. ↑ Orwell, George. 1949. 1984. London: Secker & Warburg.
  14. ↑ Draft:Orwell's "1984"
  15. ↑ Cyberware. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberware
  16. ↑ Doomscrolling. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomscrolling

*Use of AI: Grammar check, Quotes accuracy check, correct format of References, reminder of some plot details of Snow Crash.

Retrieved from "https://www.glossalab.org/w/index.php?title=From_Babel_to_the_Cloud&oldid=39080"
This website only uses its own cookies for technical purposes; it does not collect or transfer users' personal data without their knowledge. However, it contains links to third-party websites with third-party privacy policies, which you can accept or reject when you access them.