The popular imagination gives us the Library of Alexandria in flames — Caesar’s troops, or perhaps Bishop Theophilus’s mob, torching the ancient world’s greatest repository of knowledge in a single catastrophic night. It’s a powerful image, the kind of origin myth that civilizations tell about the fragility of everything they value. But the historians tell a different story. Roger Bagnall and others have argued persuasively that the Library died not in conflagration but in slow institutional decay: reduced funding, the departure of scholars who no longer felt welcome, the quiet failure to copy deteriorating scrolls, and the gradual political indifference of successive rulers who found other uses for the buildings and the budgets. The dramatic fire makes better cinema. The slow hollowing out is both more accurate and more terrifying, because it describes a process that is difficult to perceive while it is happening.

I have been thinking about Alexandria this week because three pieces of writing crossed my desk on the same morning, each describing what appears to be a different crisis, and each tracing the same underlying pattern: the slow erosion of an accumulated inheritance that was most powerful precisely when it was invisible.

The Cultural Library

Seva Gunitsky’s essay “Yankee Go Home,” published in Persuasion, makes a distinction that most commentary on American decline fails to draw. He is not writing about soft power in the policy sense — the deliberate deployment of cultural exchanges and diplomatic initiatives. He is writing about something deeper: the organic cultural gravity that made American leadership feel less like domination and more like the natural order of things. Growing up in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, Gunitsky recalls, no one had to be persuaded of America’s appeal. Its culture was the opposite of propaganda — the natural overflow of a society so confident in its own desirability that it never had to make a case for itself.

That confidence rested on an accumulated archive of cultural production — film, music, higher education, consumer brands, and the norms and aspirations embedded within them. Hollywood normalized American values worldwide. American universities trained foreign elites who returned home carrying American assumptions about how institutions should work. Silicon Valley’s platforms became the infrastructure of global public life. This was invisible infrastructure, and it was America’s most formidable strategic asset precisely because it had no budget line in the federal government.

Gunitsky documents the erosion with precision. Hollywood’s share of the global box office has declined from roughly 92 percent to about 66 percent over two decades. In China, local productions now account for nearly 90 percent of ticket sales. In music, English-language content has fallen from 67 percent of the top 10,000 globally streamed songs in 2021 to 55 percent by 2024. The number of American universities in the top 500 of the Times Higher Education world rankings has dropped from 125 to 102, the lowest on record. International student enrollment at U.S. colleges declined by 17 percent last academic year. None of this happened overnight. The scrolls are simply not being copied anymore.

I have some personal proximity to this erosion. I live in Oregon, close enough to Portland’s creative production community — including studios like Laika that represent the best of independent American filmmaking — to have watched the instability of media consolidation ripple through working artists and craftspeople in real time. The people who build sets, design creatures, paint backgrounds — they carry embodied knowledge that no algorithm replicates. When their communities of practice fragment, what is lost is not just employment but accumulated craft wisdom about how to realize creative vision in physical form.

The Institutional Library

Cory Doctorow’s latest Pluralistic dispatch, published the same morning, strips the veneer off the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger with characteristic ferocity. Beneath the invective lies a serious argument about institutional architecture. The Clayton Act — which bars anticompetitive mergers — was designed with redundant enforcement mechanisms. Federal agencies can act. State attorneys general can act independently. Private parties can sue. This layered design reflects accumulated wisdom about how power operates: any single point of enforcement can be captured, so the builders created multiple points of access.

Doctorow’s celebration of California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s preparation to block the merger is really a celebration of this institutional redundancy — the private right of action, the state-level enforcement power, the recognition that democratic accountability requires distributed infrastructure. These mechanisms are themselves a kind of library: legal knowledge, procedural precedent, institutional memory about how to hold concentrated power accountable. They are invisible when functioning properly, noticed only in their absence.

The media consolidation Doctorow describes — Ellison acquiring Paramount, Bezos neutering the Washington Post, Musk transforming Twitter, Trump maneuvering to hand TikTok to political allies — represents an attempt to replace this distributed institutional library with centralized editorial control. It is, in its way, a kind of rewriting: substituting engineered narratives for the organic, contentious, imperfect but self-correcting discourse that independent media and enforceable law once sustained. The question is whether the replacement carries the accumulated wisdom of what it displaces, and the answer is almost certainly no.

The Biological Library

The third piece arrived from Nature, where Kate Adamala reviews Adrian Woolfson’s new book On the Future of Species. Woolfson frames biodiversity in terms that would be instantly recognizable to any librarian: ecosystems and species are vast archives of evolutionary knowledge, each organism carrying its own refined solutions to the challenges of thermodynamics, metabolism, reproduction, and ecological relationship. Every species is a volume in a library that has been under continuous composition for nearly four billion years.

Woolfson’s central concern is that the emerging field of generative biology — using AI to design proteins, genes, and even whole synthetic organisms — is advancing faster than our ability to understand the existing library it proposes to supplement. Adamala highlights his most compelling warning: small genome edits today could lock in irreversible biological futures, closing evolutionary pathways before we understand what options they contained. The E. coli long-term evolution experiment he cites is instructive — after decades of identical conditions, one bacterial culture surprised researchers by evolving to metabolize citrate, a shift that depended on mutations accumulated much earlier. Some evolutionary choices, once made, eliminate other options forever.

But here is what troubles me most, and what my own work forces me to confront daily. Woolfson’s argument assumes a library that has at least been catalogued, where we know what volumes exist even if we haven’t read them all. The reality is far worse. Through my work with YEA.earth — a platform that integrates global biodiversity databases, conservation assessments, and environmental monitoring to create comprehensive ecological portraits of places around the world — I am confronted constantly with the sheer magnitude of what we have not inventoried. The taxonomic gaps are staggering. Entire regions remain unsampled. Species described from a single specimen a century ago have never been observed again. The databases we do have — GBIF, the IUCN Red List, eBird, iNaturalist — are extraordinary achievements, but they also function as maps of our ignorance. Every lacuna represents a scroll we never copied.

This is the dimension that generative biology’s optimism cannot address. We are not losing well-catalogued volumes from a well-organized library. We are losing books we never opened, in languages we never learned, from shelves we never inventoried. Synthetic biology proposes to write new organisms while we have not read most of the existing ones. The confidence that we can author what we have not yet learned to read is the defining hubris of this moment.

The Mouseion

Alexandria was not just a library. It was a mouseion — a research institution, a community of scholars, a place where knowledge was not merely stored but actively interpreted, connected, and extended across disciplines. The loss was not just the scrolls. It was the dissolution of the community of practice that understood the relationships between them, that could generate new knowledge from the archive, that maintained the institutional conditions under which sustained attention to difficult questions was possible.

I spent thirty-six years directing biological field stations for the University of California — places designed to function as ecological mouseions, where researchers could maintain the kind of sustained, place-based attention that reveals processes invisible to the casual observer. The James Reserve in the San Jacinto Mountains, Blue Oak Ranch in the Diablo Range — these were not just facilities but communities of practice where accumulated observational knowledge passed between generations of researchers. A station closing does not just lose data. It loses the tacit knowledge of people who knew where to look and what to look for — what E.O. Wilson once called the naturalist’s trance, the deep pattern recognition that comes only from years of sustained attention to a particular place.

What I see now, through the lens of YEA.earth, is the planetary scale of that same challenge. Every ecological address on Earth tells a story of incomplete knowledge, of conservation gaps where irreplaceable evolutionary heritage is vanishing without documentation, of the vast distance between what we know and what we are losing. The huge gaps in global conservation mean irreplaceable loss of a biological library that synthetic biology cannot even begin to replace — not because the technology is insufficient, but because you cannot reconstruct what you never observed.

Reading Before Writing

The three crises I have described this morning — cultural, institutional, biological — share a structure that the Alexandria story illuminates. In each case, an accumulated inheritance that functioned as invisible infrastructure is eroding through slow institutional decay rather than dramatic destruction. In each case, new tools propose to generate replacements: AI-produced content for organic cultural production, engineered media platforms for independent journalism, synthetic organisms for evolved biodiversity. And in each case, the replacements are being deployed before the originals have been adequately understood.

The popular mythology of Alexandria gives us a dramatic fire because drama is easier to process than slow decay. We are wired to respond to conflagration, not to the quiet withdrawal of funding, the incremental departure of skilled practitioners, the gradual failure to maintain what previous generations built. The burning library is visible. The uncopied scroll is not.

What we need, I believe, are not more tools of synthesis but better instruments of observation — ways of making the invisible visible before it is gone. This has been the work of my life in ecology, and it is the work I continue through https://YEA.earth: building frameworks that reveal what exists, document what is disappearing, and insist on the priority of reading over writing. The greatest loss is not what we know we have lost. It is what we will never know we had. The cultural Tower of Babel that Gunitsky describes crumbling, the institutional safeguards that Doctorow celebrates in their state-level redundancy, the biological archives that Woolfson urges us to protect — these are all, in the end, the same library. And it is not burning. It is slowly, silently, going unread.

Explore a library of biological and ecological diversity that happens to be your own planet 🌎

https://yea.earth