Book-lovers are furious at Anthropic for scanning and shredding countless old volumes. Their ravenous Beast Machine was hungry for aged memes, so the AI company harvested old-school language from a billion yellowing pages, uploaded them to use as training data, and then destroyed the brittle remains. Anthropic outsourced their literary holocaust—dubbed “Project Panama”—to a book-mulching company called IBSNdb, which specializes in transforming physical tomes into digital text.
This outrage serves as a small, concave mirror that reflects a much larger process. AI consumes culture on an industrial scale. It’s a form of memetic vampirism. Human artwork is sucked out of our collective neck, along with the uploaded details of our lives, our communications, our affinities and aversions, and quite often, our innermost thoughts. Vampire bots rake over all this data, remix it, reinterpret it, hallucinate a few novel details, then feed it back to us as memetic slop.
These AI vampires have been invited into our schools, medical facilities, global corporations, government agencies, military command centers, and most consequentially, into a billion smartphones, producing swarms of dead-eyed, bloodthirsty zombies shambling into the streets from their virtual graveyards.
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