Farsighted Invention – 28may24

Above: Kaspar Müller, Juan Antonio Olivares

From the introduction to Giorgio de Maria’s 1975 novel THE TWENTY DAYS OF TURIN (UK) (US):

Perhaps De Maria’s most farsighted invention is a Church-run charitable enterprise called the “Library,” created in a door-to-door appeal by a mysterious group of smiling teens. It consists of a reading room where citizens can donate their private diaries or browse the written thoughts of others.

The Library’s supposed goal is to help shy individuals find friends with similar interests and connect in “dialogues across the ether” after paying a nominal fee to learn the diarist’s identity. Read today, in a world driven by blogging and social media, much of this sounds too familiar…

Without ever mentioning computers, De Maria has predicted the Internet’s evolution better than many cyberpunk novels from the eighties and nineties. Tellingly enough, the Library’s patrons turn out to be “people with no desire at all for ‘regular human communication.’ ” The institution becomes a colossal storehouse of memoirs by perverts and maniacs, taboo fantasies and even whole diaries devoted to bullying…

“It had the variety and at the same time the wretchedness of things that can’t find harmony with Creation, but which still exist, and need someone to observe them, if only to recognize that it was another like himself who’d created them.”

Worse, rather than helping its users connect, the Library consumes their privacy in a “web of mutual espionage . . . malicious and futile.”

And though the Library’s initial form, housed in one location, is destroyed, it later reappears in a distributed network that covertly spans the whole city, as ineradicable as the Internet in real life.

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