“In a short time, man will be able to see what is happening anywhere in the world without leaving his own house,” the gypsy chief Melquiades prophesies to the settlers of Macondo on Page 2 of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Fast-forward 415 pages, and we learn that Melquiades’s chronicle of the life and death of the Buendia clan “concentrated a century of daily episodes in such a way that they coexisted in one instant.” Rewind 399 pages, and Macondo, the future lost utopia, appears in Jose Arcadio Buendia’s dreams as “a noisy city with houses having mirror walls.”

If Marquez anticipated a reality-spanning system like the internet — a total collapse of distance, a new simultaneity of everything, and a world of noise and infinite mirrors — he also didn’t think the noblest dreams of spatial, temporal, and psychic convergence could fully overcome the broken state of human affairs. We know from the family tree at the very beginning of the novel that the Buendias will die out, that their paradise will fail, and that Arcadio will not get a second opportunity on Earth.