“The Library had been doomed by its own impenetrability, by the mystery that protected it, by its few entrances.” – Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
The Library is burning. Again. In the beginning, there was silence. In the name of his new god, Theodosius shuttered the Oracle at Delphi and extinguished the Vestal fire. The long night of the Favela Chic afterparty began. Repent your privilege, sinner! But the old world was hard to kill. It took another 150 years for Justinian to close the Platonic Academy. The libraries burned for their privilege, too. Still, Plato and Aristotle could not be canceled, even by the mobs that tore Hypatia for the sin of her knowledge.
And when the libraries were dust and the philosophers dead, when every Greek and Roman statue had its nose cut and eyes gouged, the last flicker of knowledge retreated into stone. The monasteries became sealed memory vaults. Ora et labora. Work and pray. The crippled custodians of a broken world’s mind.
The memory of the ancients survived in ritual, folk tales, and random chance. On vellum, parchment, and palimpsest, the monks copied words they could barely read, converting thought into repetition. A memory embalmed but still kept. Learning became prayer. Curiosity became heresy, but the monks had it in spades. The flicker persisted, sparking briefly in a Boethius, Cassiodorus, or Isidore of Seville. The years turned into centuries, and the monasteries grew.
Anon, have you heard of Gerbert of Aurillac? The boy from Auvergne who wanted to know and so joined the Benedictines. Who returned a changed man, having read the heathen Al-Khwarizmi in the monastery of Vich in the Catalan hills. Who then smuggled algebra and astronomy back into Europe. Who later became Pope Sylvester II. There were many monks like him, despite all.
By the 12th century, Plato and Aristotle had returned with a terrible vengeance on the shoulders of Ibn Rushd and Ibn Sina, or Averroes and Avicenna, as Gerard of Cremona and the Toledo monks called them. They brought ferment and stirred memories. The flicker, long entombed into stone, became fire again. The Great Library returned to Europe.
By the 14th century, the monasteries had ossified into a necropolis of answers. Nodding over their parchments, the monk-experts had agreed on all. How dare you question, ye anons of little faith? The monastic Library had become a cage, a reliquary for dead thought. And so, like a heretic slipping through a secret door in Eco’s Name of the Rose, the university emerged. A rebellion in robes.
The monks spat at cities, festering pits of depraved coin and craft. Those street-corner mystics, the Franciscans, danced too close to the pyre for daring to love them. And so, the heretic scholars moved to the cities. First, the misfits whose questions dug under the cloister walls. Then, a trickle of doubters asking, “But what if?” Then, a flood. Students flocked to the stink of ink, ale, parchment, piss, and disputation. They flocked to the wild, unholy light. Latin yielded to the vernacular. Debate replaced dogma. The Psalms gave way to syllogisms. The Library cracked open.
In the centuries that followed, the university became a crucible of knowledge. It generated argument, mutation, a giddy delirium of learning. Gaudeamus Igitur, sang the goliards, hopping between university towns in their wild scholar-brawler-poet bands. Therefore, let us rejoice! Can you even imagine the wild spirit haunting and animating them? Philosophy collided with physics, astronomy with sword, poetry with plague. The lecture hall was often a back alley brawl of Aristotle and knives. The medieval campus became a chaotic proto-mind, wild, volatile, alive.
And for a while, it was good. In a Dionysian orgy of life reborn, the Rennaisance ripped open the ancients – from Hesiod to Galen – like a drunk looting a monastic cellar. The pyre of dogma took Bruno, but the cellar was too big. The Age of Reason followed, scalpels in hand, dissecting the world into axioms. They dreamt of a universal language and the means to calculate it. They built Invisible Colleges and a Republic of Letters. For a moment, it seemed the haunted delirium would last. Was it a golden age?
Then came the clockmakers, and the mind became a gearset. The prophets of the Industrial Revolution sang the gospel of gears and function, and homo mechanicus was born. Clock-bound, interchangeable, predictable, unwilled. The lecture hall became a factory. The degree, a stamped bolt. The mind, a calibrated pendulum swinging on schedule.
The new world of gears shattered the illusion that knowledge could be both sacred and shared. That truth could be summoned in lecture halls and proven on chalkboards. That discovery could be predicted and mechanized. That the Library could grow forever through plan and committee and never rot.
But rot it did. From within. Universities reverted to dogma as surely as monasteries did. Gatekeeping choked inquiry. Credentialism smothered wonder. Groupthink strangled courage. And like Eco’s blind librarian, the universities grew terrified of what they no longer controlled. They groped in the dark, burning what they feared to understand.
The Library is burning. Again. The PowerPoint priests scream heresy. The guardians of peer review clutch their tenured pearls. The monks once thought their walls were eternal, too. Then, the heretics lit the match and left to build something new. Somewhere, a drunk reads Galen by screen light, streaming on YouTube. The next Invisible College gathers on a pod, sharing obscure Substack texts and banned 4chan posts. Somewhere, a new cellar is looted. Again.
Hogwarts.exe
In the shallow void of homo mechanicus existence, universities rebranded as magical castles of meaning and promise. Hogwarts.exe as a right of passage. The simulacrum of the goliard world repackaged for modern consumption. But Hogwarts.exe has stopped responding. Would you like to send an error report?
They told you that university education was an enchanted ladder. They sold you robes, rituals, mentors, and metaphors. Transformation via tuition. Knowledge handed down like sacred flame. But the robes are polyester, the mentors are casual staff paid by the hour, and the flame is an auto-generated Turnitin report. Did you steal your thoughts, anon? It says here, you did.
Hogwarts.exe, the cargo cult of industrial credentialism. The belief that knowledge is bestowed in tightly controlled rituals rather than seized by craft and grit from the Infinite Library. That learning seeps in by osmosis from a selfie with sandstone and ivy. That proximity to tenured expert-monks is a pedagogical method. That sitting in the neon glow of a lecture hall bestows light. That registering attendance and vomiting back keywords in an essay proves knowledge. That the Library is sacred. That the professor is a priest. That the spell still works. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t.
The ritual has lost its charge. The domain pings back 404 Wisdom Not Found. The wand is toxic plastic, made far away for pennies. The castle is a buggy LMS admin portal. The owl is in a muted Zoom chat. You are not being trained in arcane arts, anon. You are being formatted for a cubicle cog job you will never get. The glamour was always simulacrum.png. And the system just crashed.
Arbitrage is dead
Once, like the monasteries before them, universities thrived on information asymmetries. The scarcity of knowledge was genuine and stark. Information arbitrage is an old game, and it rewards its players well. The gatekeepers in robes whispered, “We know things you cannot even imagine how to name. Pay us, anon, kneel, and we will let you glimpse the codex.” And it worked. Everyone listened.
Knowledge lived in locked archives, behind paywalls, spoken in a jargon only the clergy understood and knew how to translate. Like Gerbert and his Benedictines, you traveled to the university because it was the only place with keys to the Library. Information arbitrage printed gold, so the money flooded in. The assembly line required a multitude, and the lecture hall became a factory stamping out cogs by the millions. Where else could you go? They had the keys to the Library and gave the cog-stamp of lifelong achievement.
Then came the internet. The asymmetries flattened. The trickle of scarce information became a deluge. They called it the Information Age, a cute name for the Great Flood. But it didn’t stop there. The dreams haunting Leibniz, Lovelace, and Turing have now coagulated, and artificial minds were summoned into being. Not to share the Library but to eat and digest it into latent space vectors, probability clouds, and semantic ghosts. And here we are, the Library is burning again, its ashes drifting into latent space. The Library is now everywhere.
The expert-monk scribes are suddenly becoming obsolete. Again. The algos dream in palimpsests, overwriting, merging, and hallucinating gospels from the noise. The tenured PowerPoint oracle is being overwritten by a latent space vector, a Faustian daemon that never sleeps. You don’t need initiation, anon. You need a prompt.
And yet, the Hogwarts.exe delusion persists. The absurd belief that the university can bestow knowledge. That there is something magical left in the ritual. As if truth lives in academic office hours. As if knowledge arrives by committee. As if the ritual has not collapsed into farce. The ghost of priesthood, performing a rite no one believes in for a god no longer listening.
Bestow thy knowledge upon me, o Master of PowerPoint and Rubric, deliverer of Turnitin gospel and the prophecy of Finals. I come to thee with a signed loan form. Enlighten me!
The inverted pyramid
Once, education was a sacred flame passed down. Knowledge was the only goal, the main arbitrage vector. Then came skills and mastery, leading to the transmutation of the self. Visita Interiora Terrae Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapidem. Visit the interior of the Earth, and by rectifying, you will find the hidden stone. You studied to know. You knew to act. You acted to become.
Now? The pyramid stands on its head. Credentials are the primary arbitrage vector, and where that is not enough, social life fills the gap. Career LARPing comes next, signified by performative skills in LinkedIn keyword matching. Knowledge, as separate from the above, is optional.
Education has become a status cosplay ritual. Your worth is the university brand name on your hoodie. Your degree is a fashion item. Your education is that selfie on the Hogwarts lawn. Networking masquerades as growth. Friendship is monetized, or you’re doing it wrong. Every group assignment is a LinkedIn rehearsal. You learn to perform productivity. Groupthink is graded. Compliance is camouflaged as employability. You emerge with proficiency in corporate psalms and the ability to paraphrase a TED Talk with citations.
The Library is burning. Credentials are so inflated that everyone has a degree, and no one with real knowledge trusts them. Social life is a synthetic, engineered experience designed to conceal the void. Career signals are pure noise. The HR algo doesn’t read your transcript, it scans it for the fashionable keywords. Access denied. Did you bring thine keywords, anon?
But it gets better. Oh yes. The skills you developed by vomiting keywords in an essay are obsolete by graduation. The world outside the Library walls is changing faster than the cloister can keep up with. Again. An artificial mind ate all your keywords on its first training run. Knowledge has left the building. It’s with synthetic cognition now. Latent, emergent, elsewhere.
What was once a pyramid is now a funnel, swirling into irrelevance. The structure is still revered, but the center no longer holds. What remains is simulacrum.png. A live-action role-playing ritual of empty ascension, where nothing real is gained, but everything must be paid for.
The unbestowal
Hogwarts.exe runs on a 1900 operating system, a steam engine cloister in the age of quantum computers. Before television. Before the radio. Before the idea of a digital anything. Teleport a student from 1900 to a campus in 2025, and they would shrug. Lectures and tutorials? Still there. Libraries? Still access-only. Assessments? Same carbon-copied catechisms. Only the fonts are now sleeker, the rubrics more bureaucratic, and the dogma more laminated.
The Information Age came and went, a revolution in human cognition. The first neural hive of humanity, peasants and kings swapping memes in real time. Universities barely flinched. Marketing says we need a new color for our social media banners. Why evolve when the arbitrage still prints gold? Fail no one. Offend no one. Change nothing. Apocalypse later.
Anon, I’ve seen the PowerPoint necropoli. Bullet points stretching back to Windows XP. Citations from the dawn of JSTOR. Memes that died before Vine. Lukewarm McDogma served as critical thinking by drive-through scholastics. Expert-monks who can’t trace the roots of their own fast food. Plato? Problematic. Fichte? Who?
Oh yes, the students fill out feedback forms. But there’s no cost for irrelevance. Why evolve when the arbitrage still prints gold? Who actually teaches? The casual adjuncts, the gig-priests of Hogwarts.exe. They build rapport. They give feedback. They carry the weight. Their reward is subsistence wages, zero security, and the delusion that they’re not replaceable by an artificial mind trained on their own lesson plans.
The students aren’t fooled. They play the game, extract the credential, and retreat into the numb static when the system blinks. Everyone knows it’s simulacrum.png. No one dares alt-f4.
The unfinding
Anon, ask the expert-monk if they know where the research paper format comes from. Watch the confusion. It comes from the Republic of Letters, that golden age four centuries ago. Back then, this was the only format they had to swap ideas and results. Today? It is still the only format.
Every research paper has a Findings section. But what happens when the findings are fabbed out of hot air and dogma-soup or written by a synth?
Research was supposed to be the final sanctuary. The way out of cog-world. Today, it is a Ponzi manifold.
Overall, at least half of all papers are non-replicable. And that’s the rosy, optimistic take. Systemic failure on an industrial scale. Roughly 5 million peer-reviewed research papers are published each year. How many are read? Lippmann’s priesthood rules the peer-review altar. Only the initiated may read the chants. Only the initiated may speak.
The grant-research complex? A Kafkaesque carnival where committees fund only what they already understand, meaning nothing fundamental ever gets found. They fund increments, not revolutions. The alchemists dreamt of the stone that turns base metal into gold. The expert-monk researcher dreams of a grant to turn base dogma-soup into tenure and promotion. How does this make you feel?
Anon, I’ve seen fake PhDs run entire research programs for years. Grants, ethics boards, prestige. When caught, the university unpersoned them by sundown. The real joke? No one questioned their work. The papers still stand. The grants still glow. The fraud hides behind simulacrum.png, invisible.
The Library is now about control. Stacks of sanctioned thought, locked in PDFs and ISO standard metadata. Knowledge embalmed in APA format. Behind paywalls and prestige, the expert-monks whisper eternal truths to each other. A Lippmanite priesthood that has all the answers. Where have we seen that before?
The next Library’s Faustian daemon is already here, devouring the peer-reviewed simulacra and spitting them out as latent space embeddings. The priesthood doesn’t even see it. The Archive’s new clerics do not wear robes. They run on GPU cores.
Hogwarts.exe is not responding. But you can still hear the chants. Syllabi as scripture. Lectures as liturgy. Grades as sacrament. The rituals remain. The spirit is gone. The findings? Unfound.
The next Library
Let the old Library burn. A new one rises from its ashes. The best education was always the intimate forge of one-on-one tutoring. Bloom’s two-sigma results proved it. Personalized learning outstrips the industrial lecture hall by a factor of two standard deviations. Anon, this means a one-on-one tutored child outperforms 98% of industrial classroom peers. For centuries, this craft couldn’t scale. Now it can, as the synthetic minds awaken.
Somewhere in the new digital cloisters, a Faustian daemon stirs. It dreams in your dialect. Synth mind tutors are relentless and ego-less, latent apprenticeships crackling into being. Proof-of-mind chains etching mastery into the cryptic ledger. Essays and exams? Relics of industrial-age hazing. The new path is sovereign: personalized labyrinths, not standardized syllabi. Cognitive transfiguration, not rote acquisition. The Minotaur at the center is your sharper, transmuted self.
Return to the city, like those heretic scholars almost a millennium ago. New guilds will rise, but they will be nothing like the orderly hierarchies of the past. They will be chaotic and feral, each forging their own path through the swirling labyrinth of synthetic cognition. The synth mind tutors will never be perfect. They will hallucinate, mutate, and reveal strange attractors no priest could foresee.
This is not the slow accretion of safe knowledge. It is a climb toward ever-higher abstraction, a dance at the cliff edge of cognition. In these wild guilds, a new breed of human will emerge. Feral scholars wielding synth mind companions like a steppe warband, their learning an alchemical rite of recursion and flame. Techgnostic alchemists. Mind-forgers. Cognitive warlords.
The age of gears is over. Non-deterministic Faustian daemons now rule. No fixed outcomes, only strange attractors. No reversibility, only mutating trajectories. The God of Control is dead. His temples of logic sink into the fog. In their place, eldritch archetypes stir, paths older than civilization waking in the collective mind.
The last wardens of a dying paradigm will resist. Reform? No. Reforging from within? Only by rogue heretics. From without? Inevitable. Let the Library burn. The next Library isn’t fixed. It is recursive, infinite, a labyrinth of possible minds. The screen flickers.
“The Library is limitless and periodic. If an eternal voyager were to traverse it in any direction, he would find, after many centuries, that the same volumes are repeated in the same disorder (which, repeated, would constitute an order: Order itself). My solitude rejoices in this elegant hope.” – Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel
