In 1945, Jorge Luis Borges published a short story about Google. The narrator of “The Aleph” is a writer, also called Borges, who each year visits the family of a dead woman with whom he’d been in love. He comes to know the woman’s cousin, Carlos Argentino Daneri, a terrible poet with a very high opinion of himself and bombastic opinions about everything else. Of Modern Man, Daneri bloviates: “I view him ... in his inner sanctum ... with telephones, telegraphs, phonographs, wireless sets, motion-picture screens, slide projectors, glossaries, timetables, handbooks, bulletins.” Borges adds: “He remarked that for a man so equipped, actual travel was superfluous.”
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