Umberto Eco Predicted TikTok Conspiracies — In 1988

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.