The internet is no omniscient library, but the parallels between Borges’ story are apparent. The web is a boundless compendium of information and data scattered across billions of pages—content, as we’ve loathed to call it. In this virtual information library, Google may be the closest thing we have to a librarian.

Third, the universal networked library of all books will cultivate a new sense of authority. If you can truly incorporate all texts—past and present in all languages—on a particular subject, then you can have a clearer sense of what we as a civilization, a species, do and don’t know. The empty white spaces of our collective ignorance are highlighte