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.
10 responses to “Scan and Destroy”
I never thought this could happen. Didn’t we learn anything from the book burning by Hitler and the movie Fahrenheit 451. Scanning books, ancient texts and others, puts this knowledge into the hands and minds of the whole world in their own language. However, we know “their” agenda is more heinous than imagined.
Enough with the “Hitler burned books” refrain. What he burned first – and the ‘infamous’ picture shows – was the library of Magnus Hirschfeld, jewish homosexual and pioneer of tranniedom. So find a better ‘example’ for your notsee paranoia.
Another chicken dinner for you, too.
So as long as he burned what YOU dislike “first” makes it okay. I’m sure the burning didn’t stop there and other books of questionable topics were then added to the heap. Books about freedom of thought and what the American leaders of the revolution believed. I don’t believe in censorship of any kind but I do think certain books should be kept from children until they are adults.
Western civilization survived the fall of Rome and the barbarians by Monks protecting libraries.
The Dark Ages turning into the Age of Enlightenment was largely driven by the same Monks teaching the saved classics.
The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.
George Orwell
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
― George Orwell, 1984
Got libraries and trusted friends?
Winner winner chicken dinner!!! Commies always destroy the past, it is a necessary part of recolution.
I have purchased a few Castalia Library books for my kids. They’re pricey, but make great gifts if you are able to. Worthy cause to support, too.
Destroying the original physical copies means they can edit and alter the digital versions as they wish to further their agendas. We MUST keep and safeguard physical manifestations of knowledge to prevent AI and evil people from polluting it.
Part of my childhood was riding my bike to the library, and spending countless hours there reading. I’m still a voracious reader 50 some years later.
I’ve always been in the habit of asking people I meet if they have a library in their town. I notice them in my travels. Weird maybe?
Paperbacks are my favorite, although I’ve come to appreciate my kindle or whatever they’re called. Being Able to carry around 100’s of books is convenient. I’m not even sure if people read much anymore?
History repeating. They did it to the library at Alexandria. The ancient classical volumes didn’t fit the narrative of the new religion so they burned it. Same was done with Gnostic texts (Ooops – Nag Hammadi). This time it’s still about religion; just a secular one.
Unfortunately, the winners write (and rewrite) the history. Violence or the threat of violence always wins. Those willing to inflict the most immoral violence succeed while those attempting to respond righteously usually fail. Regardless of what we saw on TV growing up, that means the bad guys usually win. Usually …
When the good guys don’t want to win then the bad guys don’t even have to try… Hardly anyone on our side wants to Win they just want to survive long enough to die in peace no matter how much they lie to themselves about it…