E. (Eerie)Tori

she/her/they - - just in case - I Love Trans People / Share the future with the future / diasporist🔯

[E. (Eerie)Tori @ETori]

In the restroom of my parent's synagogue

[T. Bernadetti @MrsRoyKeaneo]

WATCH THIS! Engineers storm the stage in protest against Amazon's use of AI in the ongoing 🇵🇸 genocide

"When Amazon employees say something against project Nimbus you fire them!"

Watch how his face drops! He's there to promote AI yet goes into screensaver mode when confronted

[Yanis Varoufakis @yanisvaroufakis]

Whenever the apt analogy is drawn between South African Apartheid and Israeli Apartheid, cynics and doubters ask: If so, where is the Palestinian Nelson Mandela?

The answer is: Languishing in prison, tortured and menaced around the clock by prison guards for 24 endless years. His name? Marwan Barghouti.

The man who can unite Palestinians. A shining bright hope for both Palestinians and Israelis who want an end to genocide, to apartheid, to ethnic cleansing, to violence. That’s why Marwan Barghouti keeps languishing in a dismal, inhuman Israeli prison.

Will you join me in joining TEAM FREE MARWAN?

[Omid Memarian @Omid_M]

“One can hate the Iranian regime and love the Iranian people, because these were mostly children.” @jaketapper's powerful report marks five months since the Trump administration's attack on a school in Minab killed 168 children and 14 adults. Five months later, there are still no answers, no acknowledgment, and no accountability. See their faces. Hear their names. Remember their lives. #Minab

[Charlie D. Becker @charliedbecker]

I'm a second-generation bookseller. My family runs Houston's largest used & rare bookstore and I'm building an AI tool for used bookstores. We got hit by exactly these orders, including a single order for 70 obscure books that made us pause online sales entirely. So I dug in. I don't think this connects the way people want it to.

Every ingredient of the viral story is true. ISBNdb really does advertise sourcing books for AI companies. Anthropic really did destructively scan millions of books though they were mostly acquired through things like library deaccessions, not bookstore inventory. And booksellers really are getting bizarre bulk orders. But "rare" here isn't what you're picturing. It's The Insider's Guide to Metro Denver (1995) and how-to-use-WordPerfect 1991 manuals. Obscure, but often not precious.

When we combed through our orders, nearly every book bought from us was either unavailable on Amazon or listed there at 5, 10, 20x our price on the platform they were purchased on. And the shipments are going to FBA prep companies: which is what you do with a book you're about to resell, not one you're about to cut apart. There is more than circumstantial evidence that this is a well-funded company running algorithmic arbitrage, buying underpriced or out-of-stock books to relist on Amazon at markup. This evidence includes an official denial that they are selling to train AI but I don't want to mention them for several reasons. You can Google it.

That's more mundane than the shredder story. The actual risk is worse, though, because it's quieter: books that don't sell via FBA eventually get liquidated. If we really hold the last copies of some of these (and comparing platforms, it looks like we might) we're feeding them into a portal they may not come back from. No AI company required.

Everyone assumes the internet preserved everything. It didn't. Many of these books have almost no metadata anywhere, just a scattered listings across proprietary databases then nothing. That's what my project is for: building better bibliographic records for these books than exist anywhere else, so we at least have a map of what we stand to lose. So the Library of Alexandria is still burning, just more slowly, and kore from “who cares” than from some cinematic villain.

(I am open to being corrected.)

Full writeup: https://t.co/tHXMH0L3us

[E. (Eerie)Tori @ETori]

@arash_tehran @roiacephale Most principled Jewish anti-Zionists do feel a connection to Israel. And that's what breaks their hearts and makes them risk their livelihoods and relationships to protest genocide and imperialism. It's a very Jewish reaction to a nation state. At the heart of our practice.

[Ole Lehmann @itsolelehmann]

btw anthropic's internal document on this literally said "we don't want it to be known that we are working on this.”

it was called project panama.

here's exactly what happened:

1: anthropic concluded that books were the cheapest way to build a world-class model because they gave claude curated facts, structured arguments, compelling stories, and writing “an editor would approve of.”

2: once anthropic decided it needed books at enormous scale, its first solution was piracy.

it downloaded 7m+ books from online libraries including libgen. the judge later wrote that although anthropic had legal ways to buy them, it chose piracy to avoid what dario amodei called the “legal/practice/business slog.”

3: that piracy created a massive legal risk.

so in february 2024, anthropic hired tom turvey, the former head of partnerships for google books, to find a legally safer way of obtaining “all the books in the world.”

4: turvey first contacted major publishers about licensing their catalogs.

those attempts didn’t produce agreements, so anthropic chose a route that required no publisher permission: buying millions of physical books through distributors and used-book retailers.

5: within about a year, anthropic spent tens of millions acquiring and scanning millions of books, including many rare and 1/1 titles. one vendor proposal targeted 500,000 to 2 million books in six months.

6: to scan that many books within months, the vendors physically dismantled them.

a hydraulic cutter removed each spine. the pages were trimmed to size, fed as loose sheets through high-speed industrial scanners, and converted into searchable PDFs. the paper remains were then sent for recycling.

7: these PDFs were fed into claude as training data.

the complete collection became a private, searchable anthropic library that the company planned to “store forever.” the scans aren’t available to the public and were never open-sourced.

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

🦔AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them through high-speed machines that cut the spines off, and shredding the originals. A service called ISBNdb facilitates orders of up to a million books and keeps buyers anonymous. Pre-2022 books are premium because they're free of AI-generated text. A federal judge ruled the practice is fair use because eliminating the original means only one copy exists at a time. Anthropic hired the former head of Google Books partnerships to obtain "all the books in the world."

My Take
This got to me. A bookseller told 404 Media that rare books with almost no surviving copies are being fed into this pipeline. Books that survived wars, fires, and centuries of handling are being shredded so an AI can learn to write a better marketing email.
ISBNdb's website literally says "'AI company destroys two million books' is not a headline that generates sympathy," and they still built an entire business around making it happen quietly. They offer NDAs as a feature. They coach clients to call it "digital preservation."

I've covered AI companies scraping the internet, torrenting libraries, and stealing music. This is worse because it's irreversible. You can re-upload a website. You can reprint a bestseller. You can't replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it's legal. So it's going to accelerate.
"We shred rare books and offer NDAs so nobody finds out" is a legitimate business model in 2026. What a timeline.

Hedgie🤗

[Omid Memarian @Omid_M]

The ceasefire didn’t fail because it was vague. It failed because Washington sought to roll back the leverage Iran gained during the war, while Tehran sees control of the Strait of Hormuz as essential to future negotiations. That’s why the conflict is escalating again. @vali_nasr https://t.co/uByCGIdZUT

[Arash Azizi آرش عزیزی @arash_tehran]

Gift link: https://t.co/j8gChnP5kz

[E. (Eerie)Tori @ETori]

@QueenMab87 That's how I read - i feel like I am every author's dream reader - i believe the story, i hear voices in my head, whole worlds are created while i am reading. It's such a pleasure to read this way

[E. (Eerie)Tori @ETori]

@websterkaroon what a horror show

[E. (Eerie)Tori @ETori]

@QueenMab87 I can't even begin to express how horrific star slash martini's take is...

[The Provost / سيدة الفتنة @MsEntropy]

Like I keep saying, Stephen Miller and his acolytes on the far right have spent a long, long time using the “priming” language of “illegal invaders” declaring “war on America” and framing anyone left of MAGA as akin to treasonous 5th column accomplices undeserving of constitutional protections for US citizens.

Hence, NSPM-7, the pre-scripted “domestic terrorist” narratives, and Pam Bondi / Kash Patel DOJ & FBI “extremism” indicators.

It’s a fascist war on dissent, and a particularly rabid and bloodthirsty jingoistic base of bigots salivates for this messaging like it’s raw, red meat.

[E. (Eerie)Tori @ETori]

@RexKwonDo92 @MsEntropy I miss Telemundo so much...

[The Provost / سيدة الفتنة @MsEntropy]

Told y’all, so! I hope more media keeps talking about the parallel resistance histories that unite Algeria and Lawrence, Kansas.

[Rituparna Chatterjee @MasalaBai]

I saw a reel where a woman said "where are the trad wives who are 40, 50 years old? Why aren't they making these barefoot in the kitchen videos? Why is it always a 20 something year old?" Every woman knows the answer.

[Borzou Daragahi 🖊🗒 @borzou]

For years neocon operatives have alleged that Iran and Hezbollah have sleeper cells all over the United States ready to wreak havoc.

On February 28, the US launched and all out war on Iran dropping 13,000 bombs on the country over 39 days hitting schools and hospitals and killing hundreds of civilians. Yet not one of these “sleeper cells“ did anything in the United States. There were no terror attacks. There were no acts of sabotage.

Now, somehow, with the peace talks going on some dirtball foreign infiltrator embedded in the US government is telling Murdoch TV that Iranian football team is using the cover of the World Cup to sneak terrorists into the country. I call bullshit. It’s just pure lies.

[Knowledge & History @xKnowledgeBANK]

A very ridiculous Billionaire's maths!

[The Provost / سيدة الفتنة @MsEntropy]

Americans, here’s why learning other languages is fun: “كأس العالم” is Arabic for “The World Cup.”

But if you change only one letter, it means “The World’s Vagina.”

And I’m not going to tell you which one.

[Sina Toossi @SinaToossi]

BBC found a handful of monarchist cultists at the Iran–New Zealand match, turned them into "Iranian Americans," and made it a front page story.

That's not journalism.

Many thousands went to support the Iranian team in LA. The headline erases them & elevates a fringe faction.