Towards the end of Don Quixote, the knight-errant, already famous for his misadventures, arrives in Barcelona and is invited to stay in the house of a wealthy man. Don Quixote’s host says that he has something to show him: a bronze head, “fabricated and made by one of the greatest enchanters and wizards the world has ever seen . . . which has the property and virtue of responding to any question spoken into its ear.” When the guests ask the head questions, it answers back: it tells them how many people are in the room, dispenses advice about virtue, and offers vague predictions of the future. After this first astonishment of the inanimate come to life, the secret comes out: the head is hollow, and Don Antonio Moreno’s nephew, “an astute and clever student,” is in a chamber underneath, supplying the answers the questioners would like to hear. Cervantes, while inventing the modern novel in all its encyclopedic richness, also becomes one of the first tech skeptics.
Has the internet been with us all along, waiting for technology advanced enough to deliver on its idea? Cervantes’s talking head is a parody of automata that appear in works dating back to antiquity. In particular, he draws on the “brazen head” supposedly designed in the thirteenth century by the philosopher and alchemist Roger Bacon. By answering yes-or-no questions, the head served as “a medieval Siri, if you will,” as historian of science and philosopher Justin E.H. Smith facetiously puts it in his book The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is. The bulk of current thinking about the internet is future-facing, swinging between techno-optimism and techno-pessimism: Are we on the road to the bliss of the Singularity, or to abysses as seen in The Matrix? In his peripatetic survey, Smith asks the reader to take a harder look backward. Rather than forecast, he is a genealogist looking to unearth precedents. Although he agrees the
— source thebaffler.com | David Schurman Wallace | Aug 8, 2022