#books

Ikusi etiketatutako egoeran Paperjale.eus komunitate lokalean

In 1969, Kurt Vonnegut offered this sharp and still remarkably timely critique of American attitudes toward poverty through the voice of Howard W. Campbell Jr. in Slaughterhouse-Five.

The belief that anyone can become wealthy encourages people experiencing poverty to blame themselves rather than question the economic and social structures that shape their circumstances.

"America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, 'It ain't no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.' It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: 'if you're so smart, why ain't you rich?' There will also be an American flag no larger than a child's hand - glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register. Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say Napoleonic times. Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves." - Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

Anthropic spent billions of dollars to slice the spines off millions of books, including very rare ones.

AI companies are purchasing large quantities of used and rare books and scanning their contents to train LLMs. They then turn the originals to pulp.

The sum of human thought, digitized and shredded. Every book that gets scanned disappears from the physical world permanently.

Books that survived wars, fires, and centuries of handling are being shredded so an AI can learn to write a better marketing email.

CU of an industrial-size blade slicing through the spine of one old book after another.