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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.

Umberto Eco Predicted Your TikTok Feed — In 1980

Ten years ago today, the world lost Umberto Eco — a man who disguised a treatise on fake news as a medieval murder mystery and turned conspiracy theories into a 600-page literary weapon. You think misinformation is a modern problem? Eco was laughing at us from his typewriter decades before anyone coined the term 'post-truth.' His novels aren't relics; they're user manuals for surviving the information apocalypse we're drowning in right now.

Let's start with the obvious. The Name of the Rose, published in 1980, is technically a detective novel set in a 14th-century Benedictine monastery. A Franciscan friar named William of Baskerville — yes, the Sherlock Holmes nod is deliberate — investigates a series of murders among monks. Sounds like a cozy period piece, right? Except what Eco actually wrote was a philosophical bomb wrapped in a monk's habit. The murders revolve around a lost book — Aristotle's second volume of Poetics, the one about comedy. Monks are literally dying to suppress laughter. If that isn't a metaphor for every culture war about what people are 'allowed' to find funny, I don't know what is.

The novel sold over 50 million copies worldwide. Fifty. Million. For a book packed with Latin passages, semiotic theory, and debates about medieval heresy. That's not a typo. Eco proved something the publishing industry still refuses to accept: readers aren't stupid. They don't need everything pre-digested. Give them a labyrinth and they'll walk through it — provided the labyrinth is built by someone who actually knows what they're doing.

But here's where Eco gets genuinely prophetic. Foucault's Pendulum, published in 1988, is the novel that should be required reading in every media literacy class on the planet. The plot follows three bored editors at a vanity press who decide, as a joke, to invent a grand conspiracy theory connecting the Knights Templar, the Freemasons, the Rosicrucians, and basically every secret society ever imagined. They feed random historical data into a computer — they literally call it 'The Plan' — and stitch together a narrative that connects everything to everything. It's absurd. It's hilarious. And then people start believing it. And then people start dying because of it.

Sound familiar? Replace 'vanity press editors' with 'anonymous forum users' and 'The Plan' with 'QAnon' and you've got a disturbingly accurate description of the last decade of internet culture. Eco wrote the playbook for how conspiracy theories metastasize — how the human brain's hunger for patterns will devour any narrative that promises to make sense of chaos. He did this thirty-seven years before a mob stormed the U.S. Capitol partly fueled by exactly this kind of thinking. That's not literary analysis; that's prophecy.

What made Eco uniquely equipped for this kind of insight was his double life. He wasn't just a novelist. He was a semiotician — a scholar of signs and meaning — at the University of Bologna. His academic work on how meaning is constructed, interpreted, and distorted gave him X-ray vision into the mechanics of bullshit. His 1976 book A Theory of Semiotics is dense enough to use as a doorstop, but the core idea is simple: meaning is never fixed. Every sign can be used to lie. Language is a tool, and like all tools, it can be weaponized. His novels are just the entertaining version of the same argument.

And Eco was entertaining. People forget this. They see the 700-page novels, the footnotes, the medieval Latin, and assume he was some kind of academic bore. The man was genuinely funny. In Foucault's Pendulum, there's a scene where a character tries to move a filing cabinet and discovers it's been placed over a trapdoor — and Eco turns this into a five-page meditation on the nature of hidden knowledge that somehow reads like a comedy sketch. His collections of essays — like How to Travel with a Salmon — prove he could write a hilarious piece about the absurdity of modern life with the same ease he could dissect Thomas Aquinas.

Eco also had a talent for being infuriatingly right about technology. In a famous 2003 lecture, he warned that the internet would give 'the right to speak to legions of idiots who previously only spoke at the bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community.' He wasn't being elitist — or rather, he was, but he was also correct. The democratization of information didn't automatically create a more informed society. It created a society where signal and noise became indistinguishable. Every Eco novel, in one way or another, is about this problem: what happens when there's too much information and not enough wisdom.

His influence on contemporary culture runs deeper than most people realize. Dan Brown's entire career is essentially a simplified, mass-market remix of Foucault's Pendulum — secret societies, hidden codes, ancient mysteries. Eco himself acknowledged this with characteristic grace, saying Brown's readers were simply the kind who could enjoy his themes without the irony. The Name of the Rose spawned a 1986 Sean Connery film that's aged surprisingly well, a 2019 TV series, and an entire subgenre of intellectual mystery fiction. Writers like Carlos Ruiz Zafón, Arturo Pérez-Reverte, and Donna Tartt owe debts to Eco's demonstration that novels could be simultaneously cerebral and compulsively readable.

But the most important part of Eco's legacy isn't literary. It's practical. We live in an era defined by information warfare, deepfakes, algorithmic manipulation, and the collapse of shared reality. Eco spent his entire career — both academic and literary — mapping exactly these fault lines. He understood that the battle for truth isn't fought with facts alone. It's fought at the level of narrative, interpretation, and meaning. His villains aren't people who have wrong information. They're people who've built airtight stories from fragments of truth — and that's what makes them dangerous.

Ten years after his death, Umberto Eco's novels don't feel like historical fiction or postmodern experiments. They feel like dispatches from the front lines of a war we're still losing. If you haven't read him, start now. Not because he's a 'classic' — that word is a literary death sentence — but because he's the most useful writer of the 20th century. He didn't just predict the chaos of the information age. He handed us the tools to survive it. Whether we're smart enough to use them is another question entirely.