The Leibowitzian Memorabilia work because they're wrong in the right way.

Brother Francis doesn't understand the blueprint he's copying — he's faithfully reproducing a symbol he cannot decode, inserting his own errors into transmission, creating a document that is simultaneously more and less accurate than the original.

This is not a tragedy of preservation. This is machine learning.

Miller makes this visible through the Memorabilia's actual failures. The blueprint for a fallout shelter appears sacred, and centuries later, scholars debate whether a specific symbol means 'radioactive' or is merely decorative. The error persists because it propagates — Francis couldn't correct it, he could only copy it faithfully.

The Leibowitzian method — preservation without comprehension, faithfulness to corrupted sources, the accumulation of commentary that generates plausible falsehood — describes exactly how large language models will reconstruct human knowledge after information systems collapse, digital decay, or hostile data poisoning. Because he understood something deeper: systems that survive institutional death must abandon understanding as a requirement for transmission.