The Permanent Library of the Now

F uturists thrive on narratives of convulsive change. Their futures unfurl under banner headlines like “the end of an era,” “this changes everything,” and “nothingwill be the same.” Their moments of disruption pit the unprecedented against forces of resistance associated with habit and tradition. For them human history is a skyscraper with a potentially unlimited number of stories. But it’s an edifice haunted by a ghost: the inevitability that fast-paced anthropocentric dreams of perpetual innovation will eventually fall prey to history’s millennial plate-tectonic movements. Within the setting of these convulsive narratives, libraries began to appear on extinction time lines in the early 2000s in the company of newspapers and printed books. Prudent futurists predicted that the last physical library would shut its doors in the late twenty-first century. Bullish brethren, like the scenario thinkers Richard Watson and Ross Dawson, pointed instead to 2019 as themoment of libraries’ passage to “insignificance,” citing the recent surge in sales of e-books and the first experiments with bookless libraries.