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Ten years ago today, the world lost a man who could explain why your uncle shares QAnon memes at Thanksgiving dinner — and do it in seven languages while quoting Thomas Aquinas. Umberto Eco died on February 19, 2016, and we've been slowly proving him right about everything ever since. The Italian semiotician, medieval scholar, and novelist didn't just write books — he built intellectual booby traps that keep detonating decades later.

Let's start with the obvious. "The Name of the Rose" (1980) is a murder mystery set in a 14th-century Benedictine monastery. Sounds like a tough sell, right? A book where monks argue about whether Jesus owned his sandals, packed with untranslated Latin passages and debates about Aristotelian poetics. It sold over 50 million copies worldwide. Fifty. Million. In an era when publishers said literary fiction was dying, Eco proved that people were starving for intelligence — they just needed it wrapped in a good whodunit. The Aristotelian text at the heart of the novel — the lost second book of Aristotle's Poetics, on comedy — is a MacGuffin so perfect that it makes every thriller writer since look lazy. Knowledge itself as the thing worth killing for. Not gold, not power, not revenge. A book about laughter.

But here's where it gets genuinely eerie. Pick up "Foucault's Pendulum" (1988) and try not to feel your skin crawl. The novel follows three bored editors at a Milan publishing house who, as a joke, invent an elaborate conspiracy theory connecting the Knights Templar, the Rosicrucians, the Freemasons, and basically every secret society ever. They feed random historical data into a computer — Eco called it "Abulafia," a nice Kabbalistic touch — and let it generate connections. The joke is that their invented conspiracy starts attracting real believers who are willing to kill for it. Sound familiar? Replace the computer with a YouTube algorithm, swap the publishing house for a subreddit, and you've got 2026 in a nutshell.

Eco essentially wrote the operating manual for the post-truth era thirty years before it arrived. He understood something fundamental: humans are pattern-seeking animals, and when you give them enough data without enough education, they'll connect anything to anything. The Plan — as the characters call their fake conspiracy — works precisely because it's flexible enough to absorb any fact. Every contradiction becomes proof of a deeper layer. Every debunking becomes evidence of a cover-up. If that doesn't describe the information landscape we're drowning in right now, I don't know what does.

What makes Eco's work so unsettling isn't his prescience — it's his diagnosis of why we fall for it. In his famous 1995 essay "Ur-Fascism," he outlined fourteen properties of fascist thinking, several of which revolve around conspiracy and the cult of tradition. He saw these patterns because he grew up in Mussolini's Italy, watched fascism collapse, and spent his entire academic career studying how signs and symbols manipulate us. He wasn't guessing. He was reading the source code of human gullibility.

And yet — and this is the part people miss — Eco was gloriously, unapologetically fun. The man collected over 50,000 books and reportedly had 1,200 volumes on the topic of false and fictitious languages alone. When asked about his massive library, he said the unread books were more important than the read ones because they represented everything he didn't know. His concept of the "antilibrary" has become a meme in self-help circles, which would have both delighted and horrified him in equal measure.

"The Name of the Rose" doesn't just hold up — it hits harder now. The blind librarian Jorge (a barely disguised nod to Borges, because Eco never met an intertextual joke he didn't love) who poisons anyone who might read the forbidden book? He's every content moderator, every algorithm, every authority deciding what you should and shouldn't access. The monastery's labyrinthine library, designed to confuse and exclude, is the internet itself — infinite knowledge arranged to maximize confusion. Eco built his novel as a semiotic funhouse where every symbol means three things at once, and he trusted his readers to keep up. Most of them did. Fifty million of them did.

Foucault's Pendulum deserves a renaissance right now. It's a harder read than "The Name of the Rose" — denser, angrier, more baroque. It demands you know something about Kabbalah, alchemy, and Brazilian Candomble rituals. It doesn't care if you're comfortable. But its central warning — that playing with conspiracy theories, even ironically, can conjure real monsters — is the most urgent idea in contemporary culture. Every podcast host who "just asks questions" about flat earth, every influencer who shares misinformation "for engagement," every politician who winks at extremists — they're all characters in Eco's novel, and they don't even know it.

Eco also gave us one of the great intellectual party tricks of the 20th century: the concept of the "open work." His 1962 book "Opera Aperta" argued that great art is inherently ambiguous, inviting multiple interpretations. This wasn't postmodern laziness — it was a rigorous theory about how meaning is co-created between text and reader. Every time you argue with someone about what a film "really means," you're working within Eco's framework. He gave us the vocabulary for how interpretation works, and then wrote novels that put the theory into practice.

Here's what I find most remarkable about his legacy: Eco never dumbed anything down, and the world met him where he was. He proved that the supposed gap between "popular" and "intellectual" is a lie told by lazy publishers and lazier critics. You can write a novel stuffed with medieval theology, Peircean semiotics, and Borges references, and it will sell fifty million copies — if you also give people a blind monk, a good labyrinth, and a fire. Intelligence is not the enemy of entertainment. It is entertainment, in the right hands.

Ten years after his death, Eco's work feels less like literature and more like prophecy. Not the mystical kind — the analytical kind. He looked at how humans process symbols, how they construct meaning from noise, how they'll believe anything if the narrative is seductive enough, and he turned those observations into novels that are simultaneously thrilling page-turners and graduate-level seminars. We don't have another one like him. We won't get another one. The best we can do is actually read the books he left us — especially the ones that make us uncomfortable — and hope we're smart enough to recognize ourselves in the fools he so lovingly, so ruthlessly, described.

Umberto Eco Predicted the Post-Truth Era — And We Didn't Listen

Ten years ago today, the world lost Umberto Eco — a man who disguised philosophy as murder mysteries and turned conspiracy theories into literature before conspiracy theories became our daily news feed. We buried the prophet and kept scrolling. Now, a decade later, his novels read less like fiction and more like user manuals for surviving the information apocalypse. If you haven't read him yet, congratulations: you're living inside his plot.

Let's start with the elephant in the scriptorium. The Name of the Rose, published in 1980, is a medieval detective novel about monks getting murdered in a monastery. Sounds like something your weird uncle might pitch at Thanksgiving. But here's the trick Eco pulled: he wrote a book about the suppression of knowledge — about powerful institutions deciding what you're allowed to laugh at, think about, and read — and he wrapped it in a whodunit so compelling that it sold over 50 million copies worldwide. Fifty. Million. For a book where characters debate Aristotle's lost treatise on comedy. The man was a sorcerer.

But The Name of the Rose wasn't just a clever puzzle box. It was a warning shot. The central conflict — a blind librarian hoarding and poisoning a book because he fears laughter will undermine authority — is basically the plot of every culture war we've had since 2016. Replace the monastery with social media platforms, replace the poisoned pages with algorithmic suppression, and you've got a disturbingly accurate portrait of how information gatekeeping works today. Eco saw it coming forty years early, wearing a tweed jacket and probably smirking.

Then there's Foucault's Pendulum, published in 1988, which is — and I say this with deep affection — the most gloriously unhinged novel of the twentieth century. Three bored editors at a vanity press decide, as a joke, to invent a grand conspiracy theory connecting the Knights Templar, the Rosicrucians, the Freemasons, and basically every secret society that ever existed. They feed random historical facts into a computer, connect the dots with pure imagination, and create "The Plan" — a fake master narrative explaining all of history. The punchline? People start believing it. People kill for it.

Sound familiar? It should. Eco wrote QAnon thirty years before QAnon existed. He wrote the playbook for how internet rabbit holes work before the internet was in most people's homes. The novel's core insight is devastatingly simple: humans are pattern-seeking animals, and if you give them enough data points, they will connect them into a story — any story — and then die on that hill. Literally. The characters in Foucault's Pendulum learn this the hard way. So has the internet.

What makes Eco's legacy so uncomfortably relevant is that he wasn't just a novelist playing with ideas. He was a semiotician — a scholar of signs and meaning. He spent his academic career studying how humans interpret symbols, how meaning gets made and manipulated, how a simple image or word can be weaponized. His 1995 essay "Ur-Fascism" laid out fourteen features of fascist thinking with such surgical precision that it gets shared on social media every few months like clockwork. The man wrote the diagnostic checklist for authoritarianism, and we keep pulling it out of the drawer like, "Huh, this seems relevant again."

Here's what kills me about Eco's reputation, though. In literary circles, he's revered. In academic circles, he's canonical. But in popular culture? He's fading. Ask someone under thirty about Umberto Eco, and you'll likely get a blank stare. This is a tragedy bordering on farce, because his work has never been more applicable. We live in an era where misinformation spreads faster than truth, where people construct elaborate conspiracies from YouTube videos and Reddit threads, where the very concept of "what is real" is up for debate. Eco spent his entire career preparing us for this moment, and we collectively said, "Nah, too many pages."

To be fair, Eco didn't make it easy. The Name of the Rose opens with a hundred pages of medieval theological debate. Foucault's Pendulum requires a working knowledge of Kabbalah, alchemy, and Brazilian spiritualism. He once said, "I felt like poisoning a monk," when asked why he wrote The Name of the Rose, which is either the most honest or most terrifying answer any author has ever given. He didn't write for casual readers. He wrote for people willing to meet him halfway up a very steep intellectual mountain — and then rewarded them with a view that changed how they saw everything below.

But here's the secret Eco embedded in all his work, the one that makes him essential reading in 2036: the antidote to conspiracy thinking isn't ignorance — it's more knowledge. William of Baskerville, the Sherlock Holmes figure in The Name of the Rose, doesn't solve the mystery by being smarter than everyone else. He solves it by being more curious, more willing to question his own assumptions, more committed to following evidence wherever it leads — even when it leads somewhere uncomfortable. In an age when people cherry-pick facts to support predetermined conclusions, Eco's detective stands as a radical figure: someone who actually wants to know the truth, consequences be damned.

The irony of Eco's death in 2016 is almost too perfect to be real. He died on February 19th, just as the world was about to plunge into the post-truth era he'd spent decades warning about. Brexit, the American election circus, the explosion of fake news — all of it happened in the months after he left. It's as if the universe waited for the referee to leave the field before descending into chaos. Eco himself would have appreciated the narrative symmetry. He probably would have written an essay about it, dense with footnotes and devastatingly witty.

So what do we do with Eco's legacy ten years on? We read him. Not because it's easy or because it makes us feel smart at dinner parties — though it absolutely does both eventually — but because his books are the intellectual equivalent of a fire extinguisher behind glass. Break in case of emergency. And brother, the building has been on fire for a while now. Foucault's Pendulum should be required reading for anyone with an internet connection. The Name of the Rose should be handed out at every library card registration. Not because Eco had all the answers, but because he asked the right questions in the most entertaining way possible — disguised as murder, conspiracy, and monks arguing about whether Jesus laughed.

Ten years without Umberto Eco. The books remain. The warnings remain. The question is whether we'll finally crack them open — or keep proving him right.