Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.
Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
There’s something deliciously perverse about the whole goddamn thing, this monument to digital salvation squatting in what used to be a temple dedicated to Mary Baker Eddy’s particularly American brand of metaphysical optimism. I was raised in that faith, back when I still believed you could pray away a broken bone or that matter itself was just some cosmic misunderstanding. I’m not anymore, obviously, reality has a way of asserting itself with compound fractures and mortality and all the other inconvenient truths that don’t respond to affirmations.
So walking back into a Christian Science church, even one that’s been gutted and repurposed, carries its own weird charge. The building itself on Funston Avenue has that heavy-browed, vaguely Greco-Roman authority that churches love, columns and gravitas and the unmistakable architecture of certainty. The architecture remembers even if I’d rather forget. But cross that threshold now and you’re confronted with something else entirely: server racks humming like mechanical monks, endless rows of hard drives spinning their digital rosaries, preserving every half-formed thought and manifesto and cat GIF humanity has puked onto the web since 1996.
It’s a cathedral to impermanence trying desperately to be permanent, staffing its pews with engineers instead of parishioners, replacing hymns with the white noise of cooling fans. One kind of faith replaced by another, both trying to transcend the fundamental problem of disappearance.
Brewster Kahle understood something Mary Baker Eddy didn’t: that memory is the only immortality we’ve got, and you need hard drives, not hard prayer, to preserve it.