There’s a great Borges short story called The Library of Babel. The premise is a conceptual library in which there are infinite volumes containing infinite pages with every possible combination of letters and words in any language. Because of infinity, within this library you could find every book ever written, as well as every book that ever could be written, in any language.
I remember when I first stumbled on the story — thanks to my kid — being taken by the idea.
In recent days, I’ve built my own Library of Babel. Only it’s a porn library.
I’ve described aspects of it in recent posts, most of which live in my drafts folder, but one or two of which I might have surfaced for public eyes. The thing about it that has been most interesting to me is twofold — so maybe *things*, not *thing*.
Number one: what it reveals about the future of the internet.
Number two: what it reveals about me — my mind, my psyche, my desires, my sexuality.
It’s kind of infinitely revealing about both.
About me: I’ve written lots about how my desires reveal much about my fears, about what turns me on, and about how what turns me on protects me from what I fear most. This is not a post about that.
In this post, I think about something different: the future of the internet.
My library of porn Babel is rescuing me from all the porn websites I hate. The maddening organization of some of them. The ways they present women and themes in an almost murderous, compartmentalized way. The ways in which they seem invested in my spending more time looking for less satisfying content than I want. Why don’t they just give me what I want, front and center? Make it easy to find. And make it easy to find more, based on what I’ve already found. Why is downloading so hard? Why is discovering related content so challenging?
My website isn’t perfect. It has a long way to go. And it’s going to continue to improve for weeks, months, maybe even years. But what it’s teaching me is this: the internet is dying — if not dead already.
Websites increasingly stand between me and the information or content I crave. Once upon a time, websites *provided* me with access to content. Now, websites *obstruct* access.
Not in the short term, exactly. I can go to the New York Times, find an article, and read it. In that way, the Times website has afforded me access to something I want. But the problem is that while I value the Times’ provenance, I also want content from elsewhere. And Google, ChatGPT, Anthropic — all are trying to alienate the content provided by the Times *from* the Times, and to occupy the privileged position of provider so they can monetize access to that content.
I understand that goal from a business perspective. But it seems penny-wise and pound-foolish in the long run.
What I imagine is likely to happen — eventually — is that those who provide the highest quality content will survive. Not by putting it on their website and charging a subscription fee, but by disseminating it most effectively to the world in a way that, in some form hitherto unknown, generates revenue. I don’t know how this all works yet. But I do imagine that structured data is the future.
Just as my porn website does away with the individual porn websites from which its content is harvested — while still relying on my paying subscription fees to those sites to harvest the content — so too, somehow, will the Times make its news available to all of us via some new, disintermediated or reintermediated, highly personalized format.
My little porn library is, in its way, a prototype of that future. And I find that more interesting than almost anything I’ve encountered on the internet in years.
Header image prompt (openai): Large-format still-life photography, shot on 4×5 film with a single overhead tungsten light casting a warm amber cone against deep shadow. A wooden library card-catalog cabinet, drawer pulled halfway open, its small brass pull glinting, the interior packed not with index cards but with a dense grid of thumbnail-sized printed images, each slightly too small to read, organized with obsessive precision. One drawer in the far corner hangs open at a wrong angle, its contents spilling slightly, a single image face-down on the dark surface below. The color is wrong: everything rich walnut and amber except one vivid, uninvited rectangle of electric blue light leaking from inside the open drawer, sourceless.