Something something paper shredder…
I was actually pissed when I saw a bunch of these articles pop up on my feed.
A couple of friends sent these to me as well and it’s just enraged me even more…
Right now, in some sterile, fluorescent lit warehouse a machine is literally flaying the skin off our history. I’m not talking about scraping Reddit for your uncle’s unhinged political rants. I’m talking about physical, tactile, historical slaughter.
These tech bro ghouls are buying up rare books by the million. Not the airport paperbacks. Not the fifteenth reprint of some self help trash. I mean rare books. The kind of books that hold the heavy weight of philosophy, poetry, and time in their cracked spines. Books with maybe two or three surviving copies left on this entire dying rock. Books that have stubbornly outlasted literal world wars, library fires, and centuries of greedy human hands.
And what do these AI shitlord vampires do with them? They cut the goddamn spines off. They feed the loose pages into industrial scanners. And then they run the originals through a literal woodchipper.
A federal judge whose brain must currently resemble a smooth, frictionless marble, looked at this grotesque harvest and said, “Yeah, this is fair use.” Why? Because if you violently obliterate the physical original, only one digital copy exists at a time. It’s a legal loophole large enough to drive a bulldozer full of burning manuscripts through.
So it’s legal. Which means the slaughter is only going to accelerate.
The middlemen facilitating this butchery know exactly how evil they are. They openly brag that the headline “AI company destroys two million books” won’t exactly win them any PR awards. So they built an entire anonymous shadow pipeline to do their dirty work in the dark.
NDAs are offered as a product feature. Clients are coached on the terminology. They call it “digital preservation.” which we all know is bullshit and that’s basically like taking a double barrel shotgun to the face of your dog and then calling it canine preservation…
Look, we all know these companies scrape the web. Ripping off digital content is just the background radiation of the internet at this point. But this? This is a completely different breed of monster. You can always re-upload a broken website. You can reprint a bestseller.
But you cannot hit Ctrl+Z on an 18th century botanical manuscript once it’s been turned into confetti. You can’t un-shred a singular piece of human existence. And why are they doing it? Why are they permanently erasing the physical legacy of human knowledge?
So their algorithmic monstrosities can write slightly better direct response ad copy. So they can pump out more mediocre, soul sucking email marketing spam. (And as someone who actually bleeds onto a keyboard to write that kind of copy with his own two hands, let me tell you, the irony is absolutely suffocating at this point.)
They are burning the Library of Alexandria page by page, digesting our collective soul to feed a chatbot, and they have the absolute, unmitigated, brass balled audacity to call themselves “anthropic.”
They’re just cunts and that’s why I despise all of these shitweasel tech bro firms.
What’s even more scary is if we get to a point where there’s no actual physical books left and only digital copies…
What’s stopping someone from re-writing/editing and collectively washing out what they don’t want people to read and fill it with something with a whole different tone and context, just to push an agenda or ideology?
Think about it.
We’re already seeing this by Sony, who are now going to stop making physical copies of their video games. They’re pushing for all digital.
If books ever get to that stage. We are fucked.
Stephen Walker.
P.S. This link will enrage you as much as it has enraged me.