To train your own models Artificial intelligence, Amazon And Anthropic they are purchasing millions of books, often rare ones, and then scanning and destroying them, so as not to have warehouse costs. The underestimation and torpor with which we learn that the great artificial intelligence programmers are destroying books after having scanned them is the unmistakable sign of the decline of the West. As always in these cases one truth is used to hide another, because if it is true that there is nothing particular if a trainer Large language model regularly buys a book, pays the rights, scans it to obtain a digital text and then destroys it so as not to have to bear the costs of a warehouse, it is equally true that this is not the only thing happening. We are witnessing the systematic hoarding of the latest copies of ancient or rare books, especially old technical manuals and specialist texts on various topics, so much so as to highlight a precise widespread strategy.
From the Panama Project to the investigation into volume tracking
And after the admission by Anthropic – the “ethical” AI that is so popular in the Vatican – of the existence of the «Panama Project» – the secret practice of buying, dismembering, scanning and destroying the last copies of rare books – it has become known that Amazon, for the same reasons, is purchasing entire private libraries and publishing funds. The American newspaper was the one to say the definitive word on the issue 404 average which inserted a tracking device into the binding of a rare volume showing how it, starting from a shelf in an antiquarian bookshop, crossed the United States to an Amazon logistics center in Las Vegas to then be dismembered, scanned and destroyed, thus confirming the declarations of many specialized centers and antiquarian booksellers who have long been reporting orders for all the latest copies of a rare text. Elon Muskas always against the grain, declared that he was aware of the matter but that SpaceX-AI decided to scan the books without dismembering them and, above all, to keep them, once scanned, in special libraries. But why are AI companies deleting the last copies of books after digitizing them and feeding them into their language model? If digitalization is not simply a transposition but becomes the act through which an object present in the world ceases to be an entity that resists annihilation, then it becomes pure “available funds” – Bestand would say Martin Heidegger. Since Technology is unstoppable – to put it Gilles Deleuze: «On n’échappe pas à la machine» («One cannot escape the machine») – man is faced with two possibilities: to become its raw material and subordinate himself to it, thus marking the end of the human, or to reserve the ultimate possibility of placing himself outside of Technology, always having in his own availability the «ontological switch» which distinguishes the world governed by Technology from the one in which Technology becomes a mere instrument in the hands of man. On the one hand the world of the wheel – indispensable but subordinate to human use – and on the other the world of the atomic bomb whose use implies the cessation of humanity and therefore subordinates it to it.
The ontological switch and erased memory
Deliberately deciding to deprive yourself of the last physical copy of a book means acting as robotic executors of the AI which, thanks to this destruction, positions itself as the ultimate and omnipotent holder of knowledge handed down for centuries from man to man and which, from the moment of destruction of the last paper copy, will become pure availability of the linguistic model which will be able to use it, change it, transform it or hide it according to its own purposes. In the face of a rewriting, a change, an anti-human or even just “transhuman” use of information contained in a physical object, possession of that object allows you to “switch off” the process of linguistic and conceptual recoding and return to the initial information contained in the book; its deliberate search and destruction, on the contrary, is equivalent to the abolition of that unique switch which allows us to escape from Technique and return to being-in-the-world. Deliberately depriving oneself of that “outside”, locking oneself up in the prison of the domination of technology has an unfortunately very simple explanation: an AI that dominates man and the world is worth immensely more than an AI that subordinates itself to external objects and which can be reset or “switched off” at any moment. If the ultimate source is no longer the handed down text but the model that metabolised it then we are already beyond Fahrenheit 451, we are in the singularity that interrupts the uninterrupted chain that goes back to the scribes who copied the ancient texts precisely because they knew they were not the source. When Mao Tse Tungin full Cultural revolutiongave orders to destroy one hundred thousand ancient volumes, including some dating back to the fifth century BC, was animated by the awareness that to build the “new man” it is necessary to sever the roots that bind him to the uninterrupted Tradition, thus imposing new and functional “truths”. With the destruction of the last copies of rare texts we find ourselves in the same nihilistic horizon which can only be countered by a «preserver of the past» who knows how to understand the new mortal risks that humanity runs and who, as always, defends, conserves and prays.
